I think both Rob and Jimbo hit on the head. In Iraq where you have such a large transition team mission focusing on so many different aspects of security (army, navy, air force, police, national police, border troops, customs, logistics, transport regiments, base support, etc), merging PRTs and TTs is not only a bridge to far, but I believe would be counter productive. The PRTs need to have the freedom of movement to continually get around to see all the various elements of their provience to build up infrastructure, and more importantly, trust. The MiTTs need to focus on not only their Iraqi counterparts, but also serving their higher master, the US BCT/Division they are attached (and therefore rated by) to. Trying to develop such a large amount of security forces really puts the two missions in two different camps. Hence Jimbo's point.

Rob, however, does bring out another good point. It should be considered and possibly resourced for a different conflict, one where we are not trying to rebuild a government, economy, and military from scratch. In a more permissive and structured environment, I suspect a joing PRT/TT would have more value and success, especially when the TT is doing more FID training with an already standing and established military. In this scenario, the TT has less of a building job and more of a coaching job. The PRT/TT would not only assist the military but integrate the civil aspects as well.



In Kosovo, our CA team had their own security and moved around all over our AO working different issues.