Even more on the future of a training and advisory role as part of our Security Force Assistance efforts. From Westhawk:
Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (ret) is an experienced veteran of COIN-in-the field; his views are worthy of serious attention. Writing at the Small Wars Journal Blog, Col. Killebrew dismissed LTC Nagl's proposal for a permanent Advisory Corps. Col. Killebrew strongly supports the advisor mission, but wants the whole Army, not a specialized few, contributing to it...
The best argument for the Nagl Advisory Corps plan is how it offers the prospect of preventing large-scale U.S. COIN missions from becoming necessary in the future. By making it a regular practice for small U.S. advisor teams to work in all four corners of the globe, assisting allies with peacetime foreign internal defense preparation (so-called "Phase Zero operations"), the U.S. can prevent crises from happening in the first place. LTC Nagl's Advisory Corps and its associated schoolhouse would ensure that these Phase Zero advisory efforts would be performed by well-trained and highly-prepared teams, employing best-practices tactics, techniques, and procedures.
After five years and over $500 billion, the U.S. military has gotten better at the advisory missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A long-term commitment to Latin America, and a large presence of the Spanish language and Latin culture inside the U.S., has boosted the U.S. foreign internal defense missions in Latin America...
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Comments
Good plan.
If we do that, I think it should be a joint Army and Marine effort. That Advisory Corps as orignally proposed <url=http://www.newamericansecurity.org/publications/Nagl_AdvisoryCorp_June0…; <u>(LINK)</u></url>will eat up about 12 Brigades worth of senior Officers and NCOs. That without going into the difficulty of language training on that scale -- or what languages need emphasis for the three years down the pike it'll take the system to train and field them.
Thus it seems to me that the Army could give up three Brigades and the Marines three Regiments and both services can reassign all those excess privates to enlarge the size of existing squads.