The Pentagon is forever planning and procuring for the war that the military industrial complex wants to fight instead of the war that we’re actually fighting. The Pentagon dreams of fighting China and/or Russia with really dreamy dog fights and dom-submarine versus sub-submarine stalk and kills, but gets no joy from fighting the kinds of asymmetrical warfare that we actually find ourselves in. We spend more on our military than the next ten countries combined yet a few thousand illiterate goatherds fight us for nearly 20 years in Afghanistan to a draw. The long war against Islam supremacists cannot be won be American firepower alone. The key to winning the peace for America and our Partner Nations (PN) is in providing the PNs with the resources that they need to kill or capture Islamofascists within their borders.
Our military leaders do not know how to design a strategy to win the long war and they do not know how to develop the type of Foreign Area Officer (FAO) advisors needed to develop and implement strategy. Developing a strategy requires consideration of the political, and our senior military leaders have pretended that their mission is operational and tactical only. Pretending to be above the political, they have shirked their responsibility to lead, and have forced politicians to frame our nation’s military strategy. The result of this is that since the 1950s, we fight and win battles while losing (hot) wars.
Our military leaders have grown up in an English speaking developed nation and have won success and glory from within the cocoon of the American military. Their success has made them prideful and ignorant to the fact that they don’t know how to win the long war; furthermore, they have no idea of how to train and employ advisors to develop and implement strategy.
We need advisors who can train and lead PN’s military and paramilitary organizations to defeat the Islam supremacists. These advisors must be able to speak the PN’s language and understand its culture. Personnel with language skills and in depth knowledge of foreign cultures do not exist in the State Department or the CIA. The military also has been unwilling to invest the time and money required to develop these experts.
It seems that the Pentagon is reluctant to spend money on skills that do not involve driving super expensive platforms that are provided by military contractors.We need to recognize that investing in language training for advisors is just as important as developing pilots and SEALs. You can keep the Defense Language Institute (DLI) if you want it, but I would not send Winning the Peace (WtP) advisors there for language training. WtP advisors will learn their target language by in-country immersion and living with host nation families. This is the best method to learn a foreign language, but Pentagon brass will argue against it for any number of made-up reasons, particularly accountability and force protection.
The truth is that our leadership is simply too jealous that someone (other than themselves) might be learning a soft skill in an unsupervised environment and perhaps even having a bit of fun while doing it to support the idea of immersion language training. For today’s top brass to allow subordinates that much autonomy is simply unacceptable. Nevertheless in addition to language training, WtP advisors will study the PN’s geography, demography, economics, culture, political and foreign affairs, and their military’s and paramilitary’s order of battle.
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