Just added this forum and a new section to the SWJ Library - Foreign Internal Defense (Indigenous Forces). The library section concentrates on the training and advising of foreign military forces. This forum is open to all aspects of FID...

Here are the first two "new" additions to the library (with a hat tip to Council member CaptCav_CoVan).

Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador by Robert Ramsey III, US Army Combat Studies Institute Occasional Paper.

Mr. Robert Ramsey’s historical study examines three cases in which the US Army has performed this same mission in the last half of the 20th century. In Korea during the 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in El Salvador in the 1980s the Army was tasked to build and advise host nation armies during a time of war.

The author makes several key arguments about the lessons the Army thought it learned at the time. Among the key points Mr. Ramsey makes are the need for US advi*sors to have extensive language and cultural training, the lesser impor*tance for them of technical and tactical skills training, and the need to adapt US organizational concepts, training techniques, and tactics to local conditions. Accordingly, he also notes the great importance of the host nation’s leadership buying into and actively supporting the development of a performance-based selection, training, and promotion system. To its credit, the institutional Army learned these hard lessons, from successes and failures, during and after each of the cases examined in this study. However, they were often forgotten as the Army prepared for the next major conventional conflict.
Advice for Advisors: Suggestion and Observations from Lawrence to the Present by Robert Ramsey III, US Army Combat Studies Institute Occasional Paper.

CSI is publishing this occasional paper as a supplement to Occasional Paper 18, Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Viet*nam, and El Salvador. In that important study, Mr. Robert Ramsey dis*tilled the insights gained by the US Army from its advisory experiences in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador. In this anthology, Mr. Ramsey presents 14 insightful, personal accounts from those who advised foreign armies in various times and places over the last 100 years. Unlike most of the monographs in our GWOT Occasional Paper series, this volume is an anthology.

The articles are from past and present advisors, and they are presented without editing or commentary. Each one presents valuable lessons, insights, and suggestions from the authors’ firsthand experiences. Readers will thus make their own judgments and analysis in support of their unique requirements.