Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[John T. Fishel]

Dayuhan, I hear what you are saying and all too often you are right. But what I mean by advice - and this is the way I practiced it as a civilian USG type, soldier, and free lance researcher - is that my advice to my counterparts was just my best guess as to what would work to achieve their goals. I never claimed to have a monopoly on truth and I always listened to their views. Sometimes their views would come out on top; sometimes mine; most often some amalgam of both brought out by mutually respectful discussion during which there was quite a bit of disagreement. My experience was that this worked and whenever I saw this approach tried, the outcome tended to be good. What didn't work was a "my way or the highway" approach. that only pissed the counterpart off. The other thing that never worked was not listening to one's counterpart's analysis of a problem and assuming that you (your guys) understood the problem. Mostly, they (and you) didn't. That is often the source of your observation that the counterpart will simply agree with you in public while continuing to do the thing his own way - which rarely advances a solution to the still incorrectly defined problem. One of the reasons for our continuing to make this kind of mistake is the relatively short term assignment policy. A one year tour is simply too short to get a solid grounding in all the situational and personality quirks. Two years would be much better with, generally, return to the same area after going home for "reblueing." Still, as with all such generalizations, this won't work all the time and needs to be modified to fit circumstances.

Cheers

JohnT

[davidbfpo]

Colin,

I have read through the thread, but have we not missed those countries where post-conflict and post-intervention there has been a long term relationship between the West (generally) and the national military?

A few examples come to mind: RoK and Taiwan (with the USA); Kenya, Oman and Malaysia (with the UK). Some of these relationships have lasted, others like Taiwan have been ceased.