A reader of Riverside's Press Enterprise wrote the following letter to the editors, printed in today's edition:
I was drafted in the late 1940s and spent three months in basic training learning to fight the enemy.
What I don't understand is why it is taking so long for the Iraquis to learn to fight and kill their enemies. We are losing way too many troops today; our brave men and women are sacrificing their lives in vain.
Bring our troops home.
I have heard this argument often. If armies were solely comprised of brilliant, dedicated riflemen, capable of individual military action, perhaps it would have some applicability to understanding how armies function; but armies are not. An army is build on the structure of its officer corps. It takes the United States up to seven years (that's "7 years") to train an officer. In Iraq, the US decided to remove Baath party members from the government and military--a decision based on our experience with Germany; as a result, the Iraqi military officer corps is being built from scratch. We (and they) have not had nearly enough time to do this successfully.
The combat effectiveness of rifle companies is a separate question. Though the ordinary draftee was once trained in 12 weeks, the ordinary combat soldier so produced was not a brilliant soldier. Studies have shown that a significant percentage of foot soldiers never fired their weapons in combat, severely limiting the fighting power of their units. Training has been dramatically changed to ensure that all US riflemen are ready to engage the enemy. As a result, in today's warfare, few US soldiers are trained in only 12 weeks. Armor, aircraft, artillery, communications, medicine--all require additional training. Learning complicated rules of engagement requires additional training. Learning foreign languages, even a few rudimentary expressions to talk to local populations, requires additional training. Add training for chemical and biological war and urban warfare, training periods increase more.
Even with all this training, American Marine and Army officers have testified that for untested soldiers, as in the Fallujah assaults, for example, unit cohesion was difficult to maintain in initial combat. When we think of the extra difficulties involved in training ordinary Iraqi men, we can appreciate that 12 weeks of boot camp is not sufficient to turn them into fighting units.
We must have patience with our building the Iraq army (and police). Our patience is not helped by uninformed reminiscences and false comparisons.
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