This post is in response to a request from Cliff to dig up some more information about the Military Transition Teams in Iraq and how they operate. As we all know, the true state of training of national security forces, Iraqi Army (IA) and Iraqi Police (IP), is a subject that has been largely hidden behind Bush administration propaganda and political slogans. “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down” sounds so good, especially the standing down part. The exact status of Iraqi security forces is now classified, which makes it hard for an outsider to assess. The very fact that this information is classified probably means things still aren’t going well.

On average, the Military Transition Teams are comprised of 10-15 servicemembers, varying in rank from Staff Sergeant to Colonel. They are typically assigned to an Iraqi battalion and stay with the same unit all the time. They are equipped to provide their own security. Police Transition Teams operate out of American forward operating bases and visit police stations for short periods of time. Transition Team (TT) members go through a 60-day course at Fort Riley, Kansas that includes cultural and language training and counterinsurgency training. The advisers get a couple of weeks of additional training and briefings in Kuwait and Iraq before reporting to their assigned units.

According to a recent article on the Council on Foreign Relations website, there are about 4,000 advisers in Iraqnow. No advisory team has yet been betrayed by Iraqi forces, say Pentagon officials. “Progress in training, equipping, and ’standing up’ Iraqi security forces has been slower than advertised. Three years on, Iraq’s police and army remain less than effective and riddled with corruption, mixed loyalties, and equipment shortages.”

The original plan for the Iraq invasion contemplated an orderly surrender of the Iraqi Army though coordination with unit commanders. This did not happen. The army and the police changed into civilian clothes and melted away. Rather than try to re-constitute the former regime’s security forces, the Coalition Provision Authority decided to disband them and start from scratch. This is now regarded as a very big mistake, because it made all of Iraq’s trained soldiers and police (most of whom still had their weapons) unemployed and available for recruitment into the Sunni-led insurgency and the Shiite militias. This fiasco was described in several books and an excellent article by James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly.

By October 2003, Donald Rumsfeld was claiming that 100,000 Iraqi security forces had already been trained. The Bush administration continued to offer this same number a year later. It gradually became public knowledge that the “trained” units were useless for counter-insurgency operations. In 2004, IA and IP often fled when insurgents or the Mahdi Army came into an area. News reports revealed widespread human rights violations, especially by the IP.

Eventually, IA units were rated according to readiness. However, the rating system proved to be an embarassment to the Bush administration when it was revealed to Congress in the summer of 2005 that just three out of a total of 115 police and army battalions had attained Level 1, “fully capable.” In September the U.S. military commander in Iraq, General George Casey, lowered that estimate to one.

The ad-hoc training and advisory effort was at last institutionalized with the advent of the Transition Teams, but the first set of teams didn’t begin training at Fort Riley untiil June 2006. The Iraq Study Group recommended that this effort be expanded so that teams could be assigned to individual Iraqi companies, however there are no plans to do this.

The rule of thumb for counterinsurgency is that to be effective, government forces have to outnumber insurgents 10-1. In Iraq, that would require 500,000 combat soldiers. The U.S. and British have about 70,000, and the IA has (at most) 300,000. Polls indicate that virtually every non-Kurdish Iraqi supports attacks against Coalition forces, which makes the number of potential insurgent/militia recruits very large indeed.

Some of those insurgent recruits (present and future) are among the ranks of the Iraqi security forces. Our advisers teach them how Americans fight, and obviously this intelligence can be used to improve insurgent tactics.

UPDATE:

Chris Weigant has more on The Huffington Post. He references an article based on first-hand experience by LTC Carl D. Grunow in Military Review, a publication of the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (quoted here).

One of the most critical tasks for the [Iraqi] army is recruiting and retaining soldiers. Soldiers are under no effective contract, and they always have the option to leave the service. As of this writing, the only power holding them is the promise of a paycheck (not always delivered) and a sense of duty. Good soldiers leave after receiving terrorist threats against their families. Less dutiful soldiers fail to show up for training if they think it will be too hard. In areas where the duty is difficult and deadly, unit AWOL rates approach 40 percent. The old IA executed deserters unhesitatingly; the new army watches powerlessly as soldiers walk away from their posts, knowing full well that the army has no real means to punish them.

The Iraqis are horrendous at keeping track of their soldiers… In one instance, Coalition partners and advisers to 2d Brigade observed with alarm that a 550-man infantry battalion could only put about 150 soldiers in the battlespace at any given time.

There is a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Securing, Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq: Key Issues for Congressional Oversight (PDF file). It discusses the refusal of the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide Congress with data on the status of Iraqi units. “DOD provided GAO with classified, aggregate information on overall readiness levels for the Iraqi security forces—including an executive-level brief—and information on units in the lead, but has not provided unit-level reports on Iraqi forces’ capabilities.”

UPDATE: Writing in the International Herald Tribune, CPT Luis Carlos Montalvan suggests that American advisers be responsible for head counts of Iraqi units because so many commanders are corrupt.

The greatest amount of corruption in the Iraq military and police forces occurs when payrolls are handed out at the unit level. Because the country doesn’t have a functioning banking system, military and security commanders receive large sums of cash every payroll period based on the number and rank of soldiers on their personnel rosters. The endemic problem is that commanders frequently put nonexistent soldiers and security personnel — “ghosts” — on their rosters and pocket their salaries.

…It would… help if American advisers embedded with security forces were charged with ensuring that all Iraqis are actually on duty with their assigned units.