Gentlemen,

Fuchs, is the problem really training at all, in some of the historical episodes you enumerated? Meaning, in the narrow sense of competently drilling troops on a parade ground, marching them to a rifle range, equipping them, etc.

Take Iraq and Afghanistan, and our problems training national armies there. Is the problem we Americans have some kind of genetic predisposition to not knowing how to train foreign troops, or that there is no loyalty to a central government above the clan, region, tribe, or sect in the places we have tried to do it?

To use a German example, consider the troubles with the Weimar Republic, the people who are really willing to fight--Freikorps or Spartacist League--they've got something else in mind if they are going to risk their necks. The Weimar government failed not because of inadequate training of the police and security forces, but something deeper.

Our problem has more often than not been wading into places where we have tried to prop up governments that have serious political problems inside their own country.