Training for Afghanistan

[marct]

Moderator's Note

This new thread is a collection of now historical posts on various aspects of pre-deployment training: COIN, language, people and more. Part of SWJ's mission is to record lessons learnt for the future. Due to the posts being old they will appear before this post (ends).

Post relevant to intelligence have been added to an old thread 'Company Level Int Led Operations', although they also apply to working in a larger command:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3797

I still think as a non-military "armchair" intelligence officer that is one of the threads that remains of value today.



Hi Folks,

Here are the original terms of reference - just for the record

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As a brigade we are spending the next 18 months getting to grips with COIN; a better understanding of and working in different cultures and then getting to know and understand Afghanistan.

These are in 3 main areas: COIN theory and practice, cultural awareness and flexibility. Lastly Afghanistan, acknowledging that the situation now is going to be very different from the situation in two years when we deploy again.

Army officers mostly like to be spoon-fed stuff, while acknowledging that there is an element of spoon-feeding required we have issued a fairly extensive reading list with training aids and expect then to feed themselves, but what we want to encourage and develop is the ability for our people to think more deeply and critically about the issues concerned and ask 'why': 'Why are we doing this?' 'Why are they doing that?' 'What should we be doing?’

To do this we are looking for speakers to engage with us, but also to challenge us. Speakers from non-military and non-western backgrounds can be particularly effective at this.
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Personally, I'm looking forward to this. I think we can do an excellent job and put together a really great program and set of resources.

Cheers,

Marc