Tentative Guidelines for building partner armies post conflict

[Schmedlap]

*Fifth, the creation of a reserve force should be carefully considered. Such a force might employ those people who would benefit from having an occupation to avoid them causing trouble, but are unsuitable for the regular army.

Also, a reserve force may be wholly adequate, depending upon the security situation. Consider the American experience with Minutemen and not having a standing Army.

*Sixth, after individual and unit training, major exercises need to be scheduled to maintain skills and keep soldiers busy.

Soldiers know when they are being given busy work and it is a morale killer. If there is a concern about idle Soldiers, then I think the leadership should begin by asking, "what is it we're afraid the men are going to do if they are too idle?" Then choose an appropriate course of action from there. I suspect there will be many alternatives less costly or complicated than major training exercises. Exercises are also not necessarily something that keeps the Soldiers occupied as one would expect (and I'm only speaking from the experience of seeing some jaw-dropping idiocy occur during US Army training exercises).

*Care should be taken to restrain pressure for higher quantities of new army personnel over higher quality personnel.

If you are just standing up an Army, I would think you could tend toward quantity in the short term, just to ensure enough young, able-bodied men have employment. Once the situation stabilizes, then you can focus more on quality.

[Colin Robinson]

Thanks for your thoughts Schmedlap. I've revised the exercises section already. Appropriately sized exercises rather than major exercises, though, I believe you have to at least work the command staff to make the formations operation in the right manner in the field. Maybe CPXs instead of with troops.
Case in point is the new Armed Forces of Liberia 23rd Infantry Brigade (named for the 23rd president of Liberia). As far as I can tell, the AFL has never operated a brigade headquarters in the field, though the Nimba campaign of early 1990 may be an exception. They need to get some practice.

Very good point about reserve forces only. This was backed by British advisors in E Timor who wondered about only having militias post-2001 rather than a standing army. But only Switzerland seems to do it nowadays. Nevertheless, I will add it in as well.

Thanks again for your thoughts. Hope all is well downrange.

Regards

[JPS]

Just one small comment (secondary to time constraints):

Private contractors such as DynCorp need to ensure a consistency of quality and experience (both in terms of the general tasks at hand and also in terms of theater contextual specificity) of their trainers. The commentary on the performance of DynCorp trainers made by Seth Jones (2008) are more likely than not generally applicable for both military force, paramilitary and police training.

References:

Jones, S. (2008) Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. RAND Counterinsurgency Study: Volume 4. Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation.

[John T. Fishel]

Joint, in Spanish. I think you are right about using the old M1A1 paper files with literate secretaries. My point was simply not to reject computerization (or other technology) out of hand. The problem, most often, runs the other way - technology is the solution so we have to have the very latest, forgetting, of course, how long we did without it and how well. As the "unsung hero donkey" thread keeps pointing out, there are many very useful adaptations of old "technology." Last, while I would rather do without PMCs for most things, it can't happen overnight. We need their capabilities and will continue to need them for a while even if we decide that certain functions need to be returned to the govt.

Cheers

JohnT