#POTUS has authorized #SecDef Hagel to deploy up to 1,500 additional U.S. personnel over the coming months, in a non-combat role to #Iraq.
— U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) November 7, 2014
Haven’t we been training the Iraqi military for 10 years now, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars? They’ve got to be the most trained motherfuckers in the world by now.
Trollhattan
Guessing they’ve read about ISIS making a mil/day on oil sales and want the Iraq war to finally “pay for itself.”
Which would only take a milennium or two at a mil/day.
Suffern ACE
I want their country back. Who do I vote for who’ll give me their country back?
max
Haven’t we been training the Iraqi military for 10 years now, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars? They’ve got to be the most trained motherfuckers in the world by now.
The Iraqi army (as opposed to the Shia or Kurdish or Sunni militias which are relatively much better) continues to live down to its reputation. There was a reason Saddam Hussein had a million men in his army and it wasn’t because he was going to take over Saudi Arabia, it was because if the army was any smaller the entire army would tend to implode when they came into contact with the enemy. A smaller army would’ve suicide.
I suppose DoD figures that at this point they make the Iraqi army good, they merely have to arrange things so the Iraqis don’t actually run away every time they come into contact with ISIS.
max
[‘Me, I think they’re going to have to just admit the Shia militias are the army of Iraq and regularize them.’]
Hunter Gathers
The Iraqi Army is the military equivalent of perpetual grad students with a bottomless trust fund.
The Dangerman
Who gives a shit how well they are trained? Oh, and thank you for the billions of dollars.
/Halliburton and the rest of the MIC
Mnemosyne
I’m guessing it’s pretty hard to find people willing to join the Iraqi Army out of patriotism when they’ve gone from a dictatorship to sectarian civil war. What are they supposed to be fighting for, again?
Trollhattan
O/T Kentucky, the gift that keeps giving.
That will be all, Kentucky.
the Conster
OMG I hate this fucking week. Time to drink.
burnspbesq
@the Conster:
DEFINITELY picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Trollhattan
@the Conster:
Cheer up, it’s the quarter-century anniversary of
George HW BushRonald Reagan karate-chopped down the Berlin Wall. Schnapps und Bier, bitte.Laertes
Non-combat my ass. You can decide if they’re going or not, but the decision about whether they get shot at or not isn’t entirely yours to make.
SamR
Well, the Afghanis have to be even more trained, right?
Laertes
@Mnemosyne:
I’m guessing it’s pretty hard to find people willing to join the Iraqi Army
For God’s sake, I can’t imagine why it isn’t hard to find people willing to join the American army. You will spend half your life in Iraq, killing and dying for no purpose that anyone can fathom, and no matter who controls the White House it will never end.
d58826
I hear the residents of Pitcairn Island are looking for people who want to settle there. :-)
Omnes Omnibus
This may or may not be a good decision, but I rather doubt that it marks the beginning of a re-invasion of Iraq.
Mike E
@Trollhattan: It’s their nine-eleven, being how they mark dates over there.
jo6pac
Amerikas jobs program at work
Omnes Omnibus
@Trollhattan: It will also be the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
gian
So is the mission to stand behind the Iraqi army and shoot deserters fleeing combat?
I advise you not to run?
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Aw come on, freak out will ya???
burnspbesq
I don’t think the Iraqi army needs any more training in how to abandon your equipment in place and run away at the first sign of the enemy.
Mandalay
@Suffern ACE:
Ideally that would be President McCain, but there will still be a possibility with President Clinton.
Elie
I don’t want the US there at all. If those folks don’t want ISIS all over, then it is up to them. I don’t mind a few advisors or spotters, but that is it.
I think that is also how O sees it but is getting enormous pressure from even the so called Dems like Hillary and Pancetta.. There was even a “leaked” memo from Hagel to the administration right before the election, criticizing the administration’s Syria policy to not take out Assad.
No reason to assume that the pressure will abate.
Mnemosyne
@Laertes:
Actually, during the Bush years, it was really hard for them to find people willing to join the US Army, so they lowered the standards pretty drastically. They had to drop standards for the Navy and Air Force as well. The Marines claimed they had no trouble recruiting, but IIRC they recruit fewer people and can afford to be more picky.
Citizen_X
I assume that this time they’re going to include the “don’t run away when the enemy shoots back” part of their training.
Waldo
Haven’t we been training the Iraqi military for 10 years now, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars?
Not training — enabling. But the $$ part sounds about right.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: Probably not, but it certainly exposes another 1,500 troops to danger, in addition to the 1,400 sent over a couple of months back for the same purpose. If, FSM forbid, ISIS overran a position and started posting videos of US soldiers’ heads on pikes, I’d say the chances of a re-invasion would increase exponentially. The less we have to do with that benighted litter box, the better, IMO.
El Caganer
@Betty Cracker: Hey, a thousand here, a thousand there…pretty soon, you’re talking about a real expeditionary force.
danielx
They can train those sumbitches all they want, but without that…something….spirit, unit cohesion, belief in themselves and their cause*, whatever you like to call it, spending more billions on training is roughly like trying to stiffen a pitcher of spit with a handful of buckshot. Never happen, as they used to say back in the Veet-nam War days. I mean, the US Army says it takes fifteen years to develop a good battalion commander, starting at the junior grade officer level. The Iraqi Army had a lot of battalion commanders with experience, in a lot of cases with two decades of experience between fighting us and Iran, and it’s a pity they didn’t stick around. Oh wait…
*Something that those ISIS savages appear to have in spades. They may be looneytunes medieval shitheads, but they believe, which is why they’ve been running over everybody except the Kurds like a lawnmower on a golf course. Plus they do have training, no lack of trained soldiers running around the Middle East. It’s getting them to stand and fight that’s the problem. There’s a reason the Israelis have gone through half a dozen Middle Eastern armies like shit through a goose in four wars. Fighting asymmetric warfare, not so much….
Heliopause
What they haven’t been trained in is a willingness to die for the desired set of abstractions. That’s not something you can easily to teach to an adult, it requires cradle to grave propaganda such as what we’re subjected to here in the USA.
Mike in NC
Time to update an old joke: “The Iraqi Army has tanks that operate in three speeds — all in reverse”.
raven
@Mnemosyne: Fuck that article and fuck the asshole that wrote it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: The other side of that is that 1500 helping out now could do enough that there will be no substantial call for re-invasion. Like I said, I don’t know if it is a good or bad idea at this point.
Will
@Heliopause: @Heliopause: Well, I think the willing to die part of it is quite overrated. Our quality is superior in large part due to investment, training, and decent-to-good leadership from NCO’s and officers. Morale is higher and our troops can expect a steady paycheck.
d58826
@danielx: We can also upate the question from Vietnam – ‘Why do their Iraqi’s fight better than our Iraqi’?’
Laertes
@raven:
Fuck that article and fuck the asshole that wrote it.
Can you develop those ideas a bit? Where in particular did you think that Kaplan’s analysis went off the rails?
pluege
I guess we really suck as trainers – booyah!!!!
your tax dollars at work babee!
Mnemosyne
@raven:
Don’t get mad at me. It’s not my fault that Bush lowered the standards so far that he almost created another Project 100,000.
Morzer
Needs another Friedman unit for special training on how to handle being welcomed with flowers.
mdblanche
@Omnes Omnibus: And the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the Beer Hall Putsch, and pretty much every event in German history.
NotMax
Ostrich Team Six performed to training expectations.
The Other Chuck
@Elie:
He’s waiting to hear from Secretary Prosciutto.
Mnemosyne
@The Other Chuck:
Hey, we’re all thinking about dinner at this point.
Trollhattan
@The Other Chuck:
That’s a rather dry comment….
The Other Chuck
@Trollhattan: Yeah, I do tend to ham it up.
jc
“Haven’t we been training the Iraqi military for 10 years now …”
Why is it just a few hippie bloggers who are asking this question?
raven
@Mnemosyne: Did I say fuck you? If the dude is going to write about the GED isn’t not too much to ask to actually know what the fuck it stands for. And, by the way the idea that what happened under Bush resembled Project 100,00, is total bullshit. None of that was anywhere near Project 100,000.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
The money being requested was 45 days budget for the Iraq war. The troops being deployed there is 2% of the troops that were there during the war.
Everybody settle down.
Yosemite Semite
Today in a Pentagon briefing, when a news reporter mentioned that Iraqi troops dropped their weapons and ran when ISIS attacked Mosul, Rear Adm. John Kirby said, and I quote verbatim, “Well, they didn’t all run away.” A ringing endorsement for the level of training and readiness if I ever heard one.
jonas
From what I’ve been reading, what apparently happened is that after the US poured billions into training and equipping a halfway competent army, Al-Maliki took over and purged the military of anyone who wasn’t a staunch Shiite partisan — including a number of experienced, American-trained, officers — and then proceeded to use the army as his own private militia, terrorizing Sunni communities and engaging in basically a bunch of graft, corruption and extortion on behalf of his own political machine. If you were in the Iraqi army, you weren’t in it as a soldier for the Iraqi nation, you were in it as a thug enforcer for Maliki on the government payroll. When faced with a real fighting force like ISIS, of course they just said ‘screw this’ and fled. It’s not what they had signed up for. To be fair, a lot of them did exactly the same thing when we invaded in both 91 and 03. A tradition of service and sacrifice in the armed forces is not something the Iraqis hold in high regard.
A lot of conservative pundits are now grousing that had we kept part of our occupation force there, we might have blunted some of Maliki’s worst tendencies, but they haven’t yet explained how this could have happened absent a status of forces agreement. You can’t call Iraq a free and sovereign country and then just tell them to go fuck themselves, we’re keeping our military there as long as we please.
Bearsense
One of the greatest elements of any military training I was subjected to was running. We certainly succeeded in that part of their training, eh ?
sidhra
How many empires have risen and fallen since Sumer? And we think we’re going to sort out Mesopotamia?