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Army
Ft. Polk Brigade to Produce 6,000 Advisors Per Year to Train Iraqi and Afghan Forces
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By Sandra i. Erwin and Austin Wright
In the coming months, the Army will be augmenting its brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan with hundreds of additional officers who will take on the duties of advising and training those nations’ forces.
“We are adding 48 field-grade officers into each brigade,” says Lt. Gen. Joseph F. Peterson, deputy commander of Army Forces Command. These officers will include majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels.
Peterson was in charge of training the Iraqi police two years ago and helped found the Iraqi Police Academy. He says it’s important that U.S advisors be senior officers in order to be taken seriously. “Foreign forces understand rank, so it’s important to have the right rank structure” in U.S. advisory units, Peterson says in an interview.
The responsibility for training U.S. advisors earlier this year was assigned to the 162nd Infantry Brigade, based at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La. The 825-soldier brigade is expected to train up to 6,000 advisors a year.
“The vast majority of these people [in the 162nd] have experience as advisors in theater,” says William David, vice president of Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based company that received recently a $40 million contract extension to train U.S. advisors at Fort Polk; Fort Benning and Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Fort Drum, N.Y.
Cubic offers 60-day programs involving both classroom instruction and simulations of actual operations. Trainees learn how to instruct their Afghan and Iraqi counterparts to plan and conduct military operations, and how to manage personnel, logistics and payroll. The company also provides role players to portray Iraqi civilians and members of the international media who are on the battlefield.
The company hired 22 full-time Iraqi and Afghan military officers. They served as battalion or brigade commanders in their nations’ armies.
U.S advisors include a mix of senior noncommissioned and field-grade officers
Advisor trainees upon arriving at Fort Polk are split up into teams of 11 to 15 members, and together undergo a 60-day program. Each team trains and deploys together. After a 12- to 15-month rotation, the advisors return to Fort Polk for briefings and then are reassigned to other combat brigades.
David is eager to mention that all training events are conducted with native Iraqis or Afghans. “We speak no English in any of these training vignettes,” he says. U.S. advisors receive basic language training so they can converse and understand simple phrases.
Cubic has been training U.S. troops since November 2003. “Strangely enough if you come to Fort Polk, you’ve got people who were born here and lived here all their lives, and they know more Iraqi and Pashtu than 99.9 percent of the American population,” David says.
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