Distiller--

Advisory duty really is much more than just training American kids to be soldiers. It takes much more than being able to work in the language to do it well. It takes being alert to the fact that another country's soldiers believe that they honestly know what they need to do and that you and your advisors don't have all (or even most) of the answers. But it is in our national interest to get them to change their way of doing business. Not in every way but in some critical ways.

Let me give you 3 examples of the difficulties of an advisory effort:

1. In Honduras, I led a team that was working with the Honduran military in a situation that could have resulted in serious misunderstandings and down the road difficulties for us. My team was an ad hoc group of officers from SOUTHCOM HQ & USARSO. One of the officers was a female captain from Puerto Rico - a native Spanish speaker. At one point, she braced the Honduran LT who was working with us and began to direct him using the familiar form of you - tu. What she didn't realize was that Honduras is one of the most formal Spanish speaking countries in the world and that using tu with this officer was a serious insult. I found it necessary to intervene to remove her from the situation and repair the damage.

2. In Panama after the invasion, my organization was charged with providing the initial training for the Panamanian police who were made up of exclusively Panama Defense Force personnel brought back on duty. They had all been trained as soldiers and most had spent careers as police officers. So, when our 3 took a group of them out to the range to fire their weapons he asked if they knew how to shoot. They all answered that of course they did. So, he put them on the range and began to fire familiarization. He quickly realized that their fire discipline was a disaster and that they were "drilling holes in the sky!" So, he had to adjust and make sure they understood that they really needed some refressher training. I should add that he was a fully qualified Latin American FAO who spoke excellent Spanish and was, himself, a graduate of the Colombian Lancero (Ranger) school. No US MP who was not also a FAO could have turned that situation around.

3. Throughout our successful advisory effort in El Salvador, the USMILGP was commanded by fully qualified FAOs who were often SF as well. All the trainers were SF or FAOs (or both). Yet, from 1981 through the end of the war in 1992, the MILGP always wanted to get the Salvadorans to develop an NCO corps like ours. But it wasn't going to happen. Their military culture would not stand for it. My point is that even the best qualified US officers and NCOs in an advisory situation may well miss the point and attempt something that is undoable. Part of the problem was that tours as advisors were only a year long. As the tour was ending the advisor was just beginning to understand what was doable and what was not.

So, while I don't think John's Advisory Corps is the best solution, I do think it can serve as a fair to middling interim solution to the problem we are currently facing along with some of the other things patmc discussed.

Cheers

JohnT