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Why US military can’t succeed in training foreign armies
It was big news last month when 7,000 US-trained and -equipped Afghan security troops failed to defend the northern city of Kunduz against a far smaller Taliban force. Yet the setback is just the latest indication of American-trained foreign troops’ continuing inability to fight effectively on their own.
It should not have been surprising. Washington experienced this last year in Iraq. The United States spent $25 billion training and equipping a large Iraqi force, which then threw down its weapons and abandoned two key cities, Mosul and Ramadi, to Islamic State militants. Between 800 and 1,000 Islamic State fighters defeated 30,000 Iraqi troops.
This also happened in Vietnam in 1975. There, the US-trained and -equipped South Vietnamese military crumbled in the face of a North Vietnamese attack. The South Vietnamese forces turned that country over to the communists in Hanoi.
We now see it in Syria as well. The US-trained Syrian forces are not only not fighting Islamic State, they are instead joining with groups like Al Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot.
These defeats should raise two questions for US policymakers: Why does this happen? Why do we keep doing it and expect a different result?
Some argue, as did former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, that the US military is both unable and unwilling to do effective training.
But this is not true. US non-commissioned officers train young American men and women all the time — and regularly turn them into effective fighters in 12 weeks.
The reason that US-trained foreign forces usually do not prevail is not because they are poorly trained and ill-equipped. In fact, they often have better equipment and far more extensive training than their opposition.
Yet they repeatedly fail largely because they are not as motivated. Military success on the battlefield is more dependent on whether men and women are willing to fight and die for a government they believe in. Rather than how well trained they are, troops have to believe their government is acting in the best interests of all its citizens.
The Iraqi and South Vietnamese troops did not believe this. Nor do the troops today in Afghanistan. The soldiers view these governments as inefficient, corrupt and sectarian. In other words, the troops do not see their regimes as worth sacrificing their lives for.
Knowing this motivational problem, why does the United States keep training foreign forces? The answer is simple: Washington does it so that it can evade conflicts it should never have gotten involved in in the first place, and then can pretend the United States has achieved its objectives.
In Vietnam, for example, it was clear after the 1968 Tet Offensive that the United States could not achieve its aim of creating a viable, independent South Vietnam — despite having 500,000 troops on the ground and 1.3 million personnel in the theater. Washington, therefore, began withdrawing its forces and turning the battle over to the South Vietnam forces that it had trained, a policy called Vietnamization.
The Nixon administration signed the Paris Peace Accords five years later, officially withdrawing all US troops and turning the fight completely over to the South Vietnamese forces, designated as strong and capable enough to defend their own country. On paper, they were.
But the Nixon administration had trained the South Vietnamese military largely as a way to rationalize the US withdrawal and justify the sacrifices of the 60,000 American men and women who died in that conflict and the 500,000 who were wounded. In fact, as President Richard M. Nixon signed the Paris Accords in 1973, he claimed it was “peace with honor.”
When the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on March 19, 1975, however, the South Vietnamese military collapsed more quickly than the Americans and even the North Vietnamese had anticipated. This was due to poor leadership of some of the units and to the fact that many South Vietnamese soldiers could not approach the North Vietnamese communists’ passion to win. Many in the South Vietnamese military also strongly believed that the United States would again come to their rescue.
Similarly in Iraq, when the invasion did not turn out to be the cakewalk that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had promised — and the United States had foolishly disbanded the Iraqi army — Washington had to begin training a new Iraqi force within months of the invasion. If not, the United States would likely have had to commit to a decade-long, large-scale occupation of a Muslim country. The US policy became “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” President George W. Bush explained.
Unfortunately, because of the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into Islamic State, the United States could not begin withdrawing its forces for another five years. But when it did, it left behind a supposedly well-trained Iraqi security force of 500,000 soldiers.
Afghanistan presents a similar situation. After the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces, the United States had no choice but to invade the country and remove the Taliban from power. But after accomplishing that, Washington decided to try to create an independent, stable government in a country historically regarded as the “graveyard of empires.”
As part of this, the American military knew it had to begin training a military force to provide long-term national security and to confront the Taliban, which had begun regrouping in Pakistan. But after increasing the US presence in his first year in office, President Barack Obama set a deadline for US withdrawal and accelerated the training of the Afghan security forces, now more than 300,000.
Yet this well-equipped force also cannot hold territory against the Taliban. Though Afghans have had a reputation of being fierce fighters for centuries, they still cannot win because the US-trained Afghan security forces suffer from high rates of desertion. In addition, many officers are more loyal to their tribes or sects than to the central government, which they perceive as corrupt and ineffective.
One person strongly skeptical of the US ability to successfully train foreign militaries is Obama, who has resisted many calls to leave tens of thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely. Creating and arming a Syrian rebel force, Obama has insisted, is a fantasy.
Lawrence Korb served as assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
But even after adding a few icebreakers, Washington will still be far behind Moscow in this category of Arctic weaponry. The Russian government owns 22 icebreakers; Russian industry possesses another 19 of the specialized vessels. Moscow has another 11 icebreakers under construction or in planning.
To be fair, Russia’s Arctic coastline is many hundreds of miles longer than that of the United States. In theory, Russia’s icebreakers are spread out over a wider area during routine, peacetime operations. In wartime, however, the Kremlin could quickly concentrate its icebreakers, which could carve channels for Russian warships far more quickly than the Pentagon could do for its own ships.
But the United States’ Arctic strategy depends less on surface ships than Russia’s strategy does. Instead, the US military is betting on submarines to exert its influence in the far north.
“The submarine is the best platform to operate in the Arctic,” Commander Jeff Bierley, skipper of the US Navy submarine Seawolf, told Reuters, ”because it can spend the majority of its time under the ice.”
The US fleet operates 41 nuclear-powered attack subs with equipment for sailing under — and punching through — Arctic ice. Russia’s ice-capable attack-submarine force numbers just 25 vessels.
These US subs likely deploy more regularly than Russia’s do. Amid economic volatility, the Kremlin has struggled to consistently fund naval deployments. Meanwhile, every two years the US Navy sends a pair of attack subs into the Arctic Circle on a training and scientific mission. In the years between these ice experiments, Seawolf-class subs based in Washington state sail through the Bering Strait and under the ice cap, crossing over the top of the world and traveling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and then back.
The Navy designed Seawolf and her two sister ships specifically for Arctic operations. The vessels have ice-scanning sonar and equipment to help the subs force their way through the ice cap to reach the surface during emergencies.
On the ice, the two countries are at near-parity. The US Army oversees three combat brigades in Alaska, each composed of roughly 3,000 soldiers. One brigade features paratroopers, another is in Stryker armored vehicles and a third is made up of reconnaissance troops.
The paratroopers regularly practice parachuting onto the Arctic ice. During one February 2015 training exercise, called Spartan Pegasus, two C-17 and two C-130 transport planes based in Alaska dropped 180 paratroopers plus two vehicles and supplies onto a training range north of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures hover around 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
“The purpose of Spartan Pegasus,” the Army stated on its website, “was to validate soldier mobility across frozen terrain, a key fundamental of US Army Alaska’s capacity as the Army’s northernmost command.”
The Strykers are less mobile. A C-17 — the US Air Force keeps eight of the four-engine cargo planes in Alaska — can carry several Strykers, which weigh roughly 25 tons each, but the Air Force doesn’t often practice landings on Arctic runways. The Canadian air force does, however. It staged its own C-17s landings and take-offs from Arctic villages in temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
So in theory the US Air Force could move the Army’s Alaska-based Stryker brigade to Arctic battlegrounds. A C-17 can also drop Strykers via parachute, though the Air Force has only done this in tests.
The Russian army’s Arctic command is smaller. It controls just two brigades with armored vehicles. But combat units from outside the command regularly head north for training, in particular, paratroopers and the transport planes that ferry them. One Arctic exercise in March reportedly involved 80,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen plus more than 200 aircraft. An official photo from the war game depicts an An-72 transport plane and white-clad infantry on an airfield carved in the snow.
Russia has proved it can patrol the airspace over the Arctic. The US Air Force, however, holds the northern advantage. In addition to C-17 and C-130 transports, the American air arm maintains E-3 radar planes and three fighter squadrons in Alaska — two with 20 high-tech F-22 stealth fighters each and one with 18 older F-16s.
In coming years, up to two squadrons of new F-35 stealth fighters will join the F-16s at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, which will increase the Alaskan fighter fleet by at least a third. In February, the Air Force wrapped up cold-weather testing of the F-35 that proved the new radar-evading warplane can function in the Arctic climate.
“We’re pushing the F-35 to its environmental limits,” said Billie Flynn, an F-35 test pilot, “ranging from 120 degrees Fahrenheit to negative 40 degrees, and every possible weather condition in between.”
In a kind of literal Cold War, Russian forces will continue to dominate the surface of the Arctic Ocean while the American military preserves its edge below and above the ice. Meanwhile, both countries are training thousands of ground troops for Arctic ops — just in case the Cold War turns hot in the thawing polar region.
David Axe is the editor of War Is Boring and a regular contributor to the Daily Beast. He has written for Danger Room, “Wired” and “Popular Science.” His most recent graphic novel is “Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Central Africa.”
Why US military can’t succeed in training foreign armies
- By Lawrence Korb
- October 12, 2015
It was big news last month when 7,000 US-trained and -equipped Afghan security troops failed to defend the northern city of Kunduz against a far smaller Taliban force. Yet the setback is just the latest indication of American-trained foreign troops’ continuing inability to fight effectively on their own.
It should not have been surprising. Washington experienced this last year in Iraq. The United States spent $25 billion training and equipping a large Iraqi force, which then threw down its weapons and abandoned two key cities, Mosul and Ramadi, to Islamic State militants. Between 800 and 1,000 Islamic State fighters defeated 30,000 Iraqi troops.
This also happened in Vietnam in 1975. There, the US-trained and -equipped South Vietnamese military crumbled in the face of a North Vietnamese attack. The South Vietnamese forces turned that country over to the communists in Hanoi.
We now see it in Syria as well. The US-trained Syrian forces are not only not fighting Islamic State, they are instead joining with groups like Al Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot.
These defeats should raise two questions for US policymakers: Why does this happen? Why do we keep doing it and expect a different result?
Some argue, as did former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, that the US military is both unable and unwilling to do effective training.
But this is not true. US non-commissioned officers train young American men and women all the time — and regularly turn them into effective fighters in 12 weeks.
The reason that US-trained foreign forces usually do not prevail is not because they are poorly trained and ill-equipped. In fact, they often have better equipment and far more extensive training than their opposition.
Yet they repeatedly fail largely because they are not as motivated. Military success on the battlefield is more dependent on whether men and women are willing to fight and die for a government they believe in. Rather than how well trained they are, troops have to believe their government is acting in the best interests of all its citizens.
The Iraqi and South Vietnamese troops did not believe this. Nor do the troops today in Afghanistan. The soldiers view these governments as inefficient, corrupt and sectarian. In other words, the troops do not see their regimes as worth sacrificing their lives for.
Knowing this motivational problem, why does the United States keep training foreign forces? The answer is simple: Washington does it so that it can evade conflicts it should never have gotten involved in in the first place, and then can pretend the United States has achieved its objectives.
In Vietnam, for example, it was clear after the 1968 Tet Offensive that the United States could not achieve its aim of creating a viable, independent South Vietnam — despite having 500,000 troops on the ground and 1.3 million personnel in the theater. Washington, therefore, began withdrawing its forces and turning the battle over to the South Vietnam forces that it had trained, a policy called Vietnamization.
The Nixon administration signed the Paris Peace Accords five years later, officially withdrawing all US troops and turning the fight completely over to the South Vietnamese forces, designated as strong and capable enough to defend their own country. On paper, they were.
But the Nixon administration had trained the South Vietnamese military largely as a way to rationalize the US withdrawal and justify the sacrifices of the 60,000 American men and women who died in that conflict and the 500,000 who were wounded. In fact, as President Richard M. Nixon signed the Paris Accords in 1973, he claimed it was “peace with honor.”
When the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on March 19, 1975, however, the South Vietnamese military collapsed more quickly than the Americans and even the North Vietnamese had anticipated. This was due to poor leadership of some of the units and to the fact that many South Vietnamese soldiers could not approach the North Vietnamese communists’ passion to win. Many in the South Vietnamese military also strongly believed that the United States would again come to their rescue.
Similarly in Iraq, when the invasion did not turn out to be the cakewalk that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had promised — and the United States had foolishly disbanded the Iraqi army — Washington had to begin training a new Iraqi force within months of the invasion. If not, the United States would likely have had to commit to a decade-long, large-scale occupation of a Muslim country. The US policy became “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” President George W. Bush explained.
Unfortunately, because of the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into Islamic State, the United States could not begin withdrawing its forces for another five years. But when it did, it left behind a supposedly well-trained Iraqi security force of 500,000 soldiers.
Afghanistan presents a similar situation. After the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces, the United States had no choice but to invade the country and remove the Taliban from power. But after accomplishing that, Washington decided to try to create an independent, stable government in a country historically regarded as the “graveyard of empires.”
As part of this, the American military knew it had to begin training a military force to provide long-term national security and to confront the Taliban, which had begun regrouping in Pakistan. But after increasing the US presence in his first year in office, President Barack Obama set a deadline for US withdrawal and accelerated the training of the Afghan security forces, now more than 300,000.
Yet this well-equipped force also cannot hold territory against the Taliban. Though Afghans have had a reputation of being fierce fighters for centuries, they still cannot win because the US-trained Afghan security forces suffer from high rates of desertion. In addition, many officers are more loyal to their tribes or sects than to the central government, which they perceive as corrupt and ineffective.
One person strongly skeptical of the US ability to successfully train foreign militaries is Obama, who has resisted many calls to leave tens of thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely. Creating and arming a Syrian rebel force, Obama has insisted, is a fantasy.
Lawrence Korb served as assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
But even after adding a few icebreakers, Washington will still be far behind Moscow in this category of Arctic weaponry. The Russian government owns 22 icebreakers; Russian industry possesses another 19 of the specialized vessels. Moscow has another 11 icebreakers under construction or in planning.
To be fair, Russia’s Arctic coastline is many hundreds of miles longer than that of the United States. In theory, Russia’s icebreakers are spread out over a wider area during routine, peacetime operations. In wartime, however, the Kremlin could quickly concentrate its icebreakers, which could carve channels for Russian warships far more quickly than the Pentagon could do for its own ships.
But the United States’ Arctic strategy depends less on surface ships than Russia’s strategy does. Instead, the US military is betting on submarines to exert its influence in the far north.
“The submarine is the best platform to operate in the Arctic,” Commander Jeff Bierley, skipper of the US Navy submarine Seawolf, told Reuters, ”because it can spend the majority of its time under the ice.”
The US fleet operates 41 nuclear-powered attack subs with equipment for sailing under — and punching through — Arctic ice. Russia’s ice-capable attack-submarine force numbers just 25 vessels.
These US subs likely deploy more regularly than Russia’s do. Amid economic volatility, the Kremlin has struggled to consistently fund naval deployments. Meanwhile, every two years the US Navy sends a pair of attack subs into the Arctic Circle on a training and scientific mission. In the years between these ice experiments, Seawolf-class subs based in Washington state sail through the Bering Strait and under the ice cap, crossing over the top of the world and traveling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and then back.
The Navy designed Seawolf and her two sister ships specifically for Arctic operations. The vessels have ice-scanning sonar and equipment to help the subs force their way through the ice cap to reach the surface during emergencies.
On the ice, the two countries are at near-parity. The US Army oversees three combat brigades in Alaska, each composed of roughly 3,000 soldiers. One brigade features paratroopers, another is in Stryker armored vehicles and a third is made up of reconnaissance troops.
The paratroopers regularly practice parachuting onto the Arctic ice. During one February 2015 training exercise, called Spartan Pegasus, two C-17 and two C-130 transport planes based in Alaska dropped 180 paratroopers plus two vehicles and supplies onto a training range north of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures hover around 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
“The purpose of Spartan Pegasus,” the Army stated on its website, “was to validate soldier mobility across frozen terrain, a key fundamental of US Army Alaska’s capacity as the Army’s northernmost command.”
The Strykers are less mobile. A C-17 — the US Air Force keeps eight of the four-engine cargo planes in Alaska — can carry several Strykers, which weigh roughly 25 tons each, but the Air Force doesn’t often practice landings on Arctic runways. The Canadian air force does, however. It staged its own C-17s landings and take-offs from Arctic villages in temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
So in theory the US Air Force could move the Army’s Alaska-based Stryker brigade to Arctic battlegrounds. A C-17 can also drop Strykers via parachute, though the Air Force has only done this in tests.
The Russian army’s Arctic command is smaller. It controls just two brigades with armored vehicles. But combat units from outside the command regularly head north for training, in particular, paratroopers and the transport planes that ferry them. One Arctic exercise in March reportedly involved 80,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen plus more than 200 aircraft. An official photo from the war game depicts an An-72 transport plane and white-clad infantry on an airfield carved in the snow.
Russia has proved it can patrol the airspace over the Arctic. The US Air Force, however, holds the northern advantage. In addition to C-17 and C-130 transports, the American air arm maintains E-3 radar planes and three fighter squadrons in Alaska — two with 20 high-tech F-22 stealth fighters each and one with 18 older F-16s.
In coming years, up to two squadrons of new F-35 stealth fighters will join the F-16s at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, which will increase the Alaskan fighter fleet by at least a third. In February, the Air Force wrapped up cold-weather testing of the F-35 that proved the new radar-evading warplane can function in the Arctic climate.
“We’re pushing the F-35 to its environmental limits,” said Billie Flynn, an F-35 test pilot, “ranging from 120 degrees Fahrenheit to negative 40 degrees, and every possible weather condition in between.”
In a kind of literal Cold War, Russian forces will continue to dominate the surface of the Arctic Ocean while the American military preserves its edge below and above the ice. Meanwhile, both countries are training thousands of ground troops for Arctic ops — just in case the Cold War turns hot in the thawing polar region.
David Axe is the editor of War Is Boring and a regular contributor to the Daily Beast. He has written for Danger Room, “Wired” and “Popular Science.” His most recent graphic novel is “Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Central Africa.”
Why US military can’t succeed in training foreign armies
