Security

Pentagon Adviser: Dump Big War Training, Learn New Languages Instead

Army generals have been complaining, loudly, that their soldiers are getting worse and worse at fighting old-school wars. According to one influential military analyst and Pentagon adviser, that’s not such a bad thing. Troops should be learning new languages and cultures, instead of training for conventional conflicts, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments president Andrew […]

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Army generals have been complaining, loudly, that their soldiers are getting worse and worse at fighting old-school wars. According to one influential military analyst and Pentagon adviser, that's not such a bad thing. Troops should be learning new languages and cultures, instead of training for conventional conflicts, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments president Andrew Krepinevich is set to tell Congress this afternoon.

In prepared testimony before the United States House Armed Services Commitee's oversight and investigations panel, obtained by DANGER ROOM, Krepinevich says the wars we're likely to see in the decades ahead are small, dirty, irregular conflicts. The big wars between two nation-states that we've seen in the past are, for the time being, over. Everyone from Defense Secretary Gates to ousted Air Force chief Gen. "Buzz" Moseley agrees.

Yet the Army and Marines are expected to increase their number by 92,000 troops in the coming years. And it looks like those troops "will be trained and equipped primarily for conventional, high-intensity ground combat operations," Krepinevich notes. "Is this the best use of these additional forces?" Given recent operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Somalia, and Haiti, to Krepinevich, this seems like a case of the military brass wanting to "prepare for the kinds of challenges we would prefer to confront, rather than those we will most likely encounter."

"If the experience of the last seventeen years tells us anything, it is that we are likely to continue to find our armed forces deployed... in operations among the indigenous populations, rather than around them," he argues. "This in turn suggests that the military must be prepared to operate 'among the people' much more than in the past. Language training and cultural awareness will therefore be critical enabling capabilities." In a stand-off war, you might be able to afford to understanding the enemy you're bombing from on high. But when that enemy is mixed in with the people you're trying to secure, you can't afford to be monolingual and culturally deaf.

Therefore, Krepinvech suggests, we should reduce "the military’s continuing relatively high emphasis on conventional operations... in order to support language and cultural training, as well as other 'soft' skills that are particularly useful in irregular warfare."

*To be sure, our ground forces must remain dominant in conventional... operations. However, it does not follow that the Army and Marine Corps must be principally, or even primarily, devoted to this task. Consider that, thanks to the gains in effectiveness realized by our armed forces, improvements in their ability to fight as a joint force, and the U.S. military’s enormous advantages in advanced capabilities (e.g., precision munitions; C4ISR), only one heavy Army division was needed to defeat the Iraqi army in the Second Gulf War.
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*Simply stated, while the Army and Marine Corps have clearly placed an increased emphasis on irregular warfare capabilities, to include language and cultural training, they nevertheless remain predominantly focused on conventional combat operations. Should it be necessary to make tradeoffs in order to support enhanced cultural awareness, language training, or other skills that are particularly crucial to winning an irregular warfare campaign, drawing resources away from conventional capabilities is an option that should be seriously considered.
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