What would you change about current ops in Iraq?
I'd like to take a moment to pick some brilliant minds here gentlemen if I may. If you had the authority to change anything we are doing in Iraq, what changes would you implement regarding military tactics, troop levels, equipment? The table is wide open, all the way to the nuclear option. Or, would you change anything at all?
Heard this time and time again...
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I also think soldiers serving here (at least the squad-level leadership and up) need REAL cultural training. I'm not talking about the silly "Arabs consider the left hand dirty" type kindergarten ####. I mean the real, in-depth "how does an Arab think and feel" GRADUATE-LEVEL type knowlege.
Well said...
Totally agree, but how would you do it?
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Originally Posted by 979797
I also think soldiers serving here (at least the squad-level leadership and up) need REAL cultural training. I'm not talking about the silly "Arabs consider the left hand dirty" type kindergarten ####. I mean the real, in-depth "how does an Arab think and feel" GRADUATE-LEVEL type knowlege. .... For all you "Boydists" out there, you cannot get inside the enemy's OODA loop thinking like a westerner. You get inside it and think LIKE AN ARAB THINKS!!
There is a lieutenant in my supported unit who is a company XO. He was amazed at the books in my PSYOP team's collection and he wanted to read them. #### that I thought was basic-level stuff that my team and I had read or at least looked at and discussed. I have the advantage of a team member who serves on a congressional staff as a middle-eastern specialist, but still... what sort of prep work had this LT been doing apart from an NTC rotation and checking off the blocks on a CTT worksheet?
979797, you've got some really good points here. I guess that my main questions would be a) how do you go about doing it and b) how do you sell it institutionally?
Back in WWII, there was a concerted effort to get inside the heads of the Japanese. Given that the traditional methods of doing ethnographies couldn't be used, Ruth Benedict pioneered a new method - "culture at a distance" (see The Chrysanthemum and The Sword). This method allowed her to get a gut-level (i.e. internal, "intuitive") understanding of Japanese culture that was worth a lot more than a Western, intellectual knowledge based understanding (i.e. typical graduate level stuff, at least in Canada).
The start of this methodology, however, was with reading the "basic level stuff", followed by a sensory immersion into everything she could find (language, film, food, clothing, etc.). From what I have seen, which I will admit is woefully inadequate :o, I get the feeling that, barring Maj. Gen Mattis' 2003 work towards this, there seems to be very little work on institutionally supporting this type of training for troops going on regular deployments. Is it possible that the LT you mentioned is from a unit where the emphasis is on "real military training, not that fuzzy ####"?
Another question, again coming from my ignorance, is given that you have such a great library and obvious expertise in the area, are you tasked with any in-field training? I'm asking, because one of the roles that Anthropologists traditionally played when working with non-Anthropologists was as in-field trainers in both the local culture and, perhaps more importantly, in the attitudes and perceptions of how to analyze and get to know a local culture.
Marc