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Friend Asks Why It Takes So Long To Train Iraqis

J.J. Jackson* | May 27, 2008 

A friend of mine yesterday (on Memorial Day) asked me a question that was important in her mind. She asked me, “Why are we still in Iraq after all this time? I support our troops and their mission, you know that, but it seems like we have been there a long time to train the Iraqis to stand up for themselves. I don’t think it should be taking this long? Do you?”

My response, which is actually based on information that has been given me from friends in Iraq is as follows:

Here is the way I understand it. Now please realize that I am not in Iraq so I cannot verify first hand any of this information except to say that I have asked several people who I know and that are currently in theater this same question and gotten similar responses. Everything that is in quotes has been told to me by those soldiers.

The issue appears to be that the Iraqis are very smart but lack a lot of modern and tactical knowledge of how to fight. “The problem is the same problem you see in many military dictatorships,” I have been told, “that any real knowledge and training are reserved for a select few high up in the food chain and they don’t often even know very much. The common soldiers, even those that were thought to be ‘elite’, are not often taught a lot of real tactics because of a fear that they could use this knowledge to overthrow the paranoid government leaders.” Another soldier wrote me, “Their tactical knowledge is good, or rather would be good, if we were in the 1950s fighting in trenches.”

Several of those that I know and speak with on a regular basis have discussed how the Iraqi soldiers are very eager to learn how it was that they were so quickly routed by coalition forces in the First Gulf War. One wrote, “While some of the reason for this was our superior and modern equipment, a big portion of the reason was also superior tactics against long since abandoned military strategies employed by the Iraqis at that time.”

The process of educating the Iraqi soldiers takes some time because, “we are trying to impart 50 and sometimes 70 years of military know how to people that need it. Whereas we have learned this gradually over time, we are giving them a crash course on [many tactics].”

Something else that was recently conveyed to me was that, “The Iraqis are smart. We teach them about [a certain tactic] and we think that it is time to move on to the next topic or drill. But they immediately see how [a certain tactic] can be applied to a slightly different situation and we begin to discuss variations of it - how to adapt. What was supposed to be a couple days talking about [a certain tactic] turns into weeks of intense discussion and learning that even makes me have to think about what to do and respond. It amazes me, but not too much. These guys are eager to learn and that eagerness often puts us behind schedule.”

Then of course there is the learning curve. “Sure, we teach them. Then we go out and try to apply it in the field. There is one thing to say, “do it”. But it is something else entirely to go out and actually do it from scratch with little base to work from. We then will come back from a patrol and discuss and those discussions get really intense. Sometimes we don’t even finish during the course of a debriefing and pick it up again later.”

So basically I would say to answer your question that the reason we are still there is because the Iraqis are smarter than most people give them credit for. We take a lot of things for granted here in the United States. You can just go to a book store like Barnes and Noble or Borders and buy a book on military tactics, read it and learn about them. In Iraq, as one soldier succinctly put it, “you just couldn’t do that under Saddam. There is a huge deficit of knowledge. And it takes time to get up to speed. But we are nearly up to speed.”

Contributor's website: http://www.libertyreborn.com




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