The US experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that building local allied forces and capabilities will be major mission requirements in future wars and US military interventions. Placing greater reliance on local forces provides a mechanism for reducing the demands placed on US forces; it helps the US compensate for the religious, ideological, and cultural differences that the US faces in fighting the war on terrorism; and it can help compensate for the lack of US civilian counterparts to the US military that can take up many of the potential burdens in stability operations and nation building.
History provides consistent warnings about the need for the US to build-up local forces and capabilities. This is also a key point in the new, draft US Army Field Manual (
FM 3-24) on Counterinsurgency issued in June 2006, and it is touched upon in part in the new Department of Defense Directive on stability operations,
DoD Directive 3000.05. Establishing security in postconflict areas has always required a broad effort at the regional and local levels to create a mix of military forces to deal with the main threats. But it has also required developing police or paramilitary forces, establishing some kind of local government presence and services to provide credibility, and creating courts and legal institutions to establish a rule of law that kept corruption, arbitrary official violence, and the abuse of minorities and human rights within workable limits.
One of the most serious US strategic failures in Iraq was the lack of effective planning to ensure the continuity of government, police, and legal operations. The US realized late in the nation building game that the only strategy that could allow it to remove most or all of its forces from Iraq within a few years, produce some kind of victory, and solve America’s immediate problem of “overstretch” on a timely basis, was to create a mix of Iraqi forces and Iraqi governance that could relieve the burden on the US, and support this effort with added economic aid...
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