Building the Iraqi Army: Teaching a Nation to Fish

Abstract : Why did the United States fail to efficiently establish Iraqi security capability in post-Saddam Iraq, and what lessons can be learned from this failure? The U.S. administration in Iraq was admonished for the planning and execution of the reconstruction portion of Phase IV (post conflict) because it did not establish indigenous forces that could effectively secure Iraq so that the nation could be rebuilt. Initially, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army fell to an ad hoc organization consisting of General Eaton, four other soldiers, and a contractor. The effort to rebuild the police and other security forces fell under the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT). Neither organization was given any time for planning prior to March 2003, nor were they manned to accomplish the task. Policy mistakes that adversely affected the building of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) included disbanding the Iraqi Army, using contractors to train the new Iraq Army, a lack of unity of effort, and insufficient funds for the Coalition Military Assistance Team (CMATT). The building of the ISF evolved through several task adjustments, including increasing the resources allocated to CMATT to allow the training of 1,500 officers in Jordan, the deployment of Army Reserve Institutional Training Divisions (DIV(IT)), and the use of military Advisor Support Teams (AST). In June 2004, CMATT and CPATT were combined under the Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I). Coalition units are now integrating Iraqi forces within their brigades. The author concludes that the DoD should never use ad hoc organizations for missions as important as the building of a nation's security structure. JFCOM Standing Joint Forces Headquarters and DIV(IT)s are resources that should be used. The security effort should be allocated sufficient planning time, weighted appropriately, and have unity of effort. The paper also reviews efforts by Britain to build indigenous forces in Iraq after WWI.