How US Army trains for a different kind of war

Counterinsurgency tactics put a big premium on winning hearts and minds. For soldiers undergoing training at Fort Polk, La., it seems to be sticking.

from the June 20, 2007 edition

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That kind of training will help US forces influence a village or a city block, says Bolger, an author and expert on counterinsurgencies, and will tamp down the violence and turn around the country. The main thing soldiers here learn, he says, is that it's not all black and white.

"That is a hard thing for us, because the easy thing for us in America is to say, 'good guy, bad guy,' draw the line, and shoot all the guys on this side of the line, and don't touch anybody here," says the commander, waving his hands in the air to make the point during a recent interview in Fort Polk's pretend newspaper office.

In dealing with an insurgency, however, the environment is "much more porous" and requires soldiers who can adapt quickly to the circumstances in which they are working, he says.

Bolger acknowledges that American service members can struggle with these concepts. Referring to the British academic Sir Michael Howard, who noted in the last century that while most armies get their initial war-fighting doctrine wrong, it's a question of how long it takes to retrain their soldiers to get it right. Bolger doesn't believe the US military had the wrong doctrine when it went to war in Iraq, but had structured its training for the big wars it knew – not for the small ones it would fight.

"We are now fighting a different war than the one we prepared for," he says.

The evolving mind-set of the American military comes as a result of at least three factors: multiple deployments of units to Iraq, improved training, and putting the right people in the right places – such as putting Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, says T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and writer on the subject of irregular warfare. The evolution is ongoing, he says, but now it has reached a new "competence" that has the potential to get the upper hand over the insurgency in Iraq.

That mind-set is now being tested under the Army's General Petraeus, who wrote the book on counterinsurgency operations and is now the top commander in Iraq.

"Unfortunately, it took four years instead of one or two," says Mr. Hammes.

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'We've started to get it right. It's starting to bear fruit now.' – Army Brig. Gen. Daniel Bolger, commander at Fort Polk and its Joint Readiness Training Center Mario Villafuerte/Special to the Christian Science Monitor