Anyone have any thoughts on using that avenue as a means of getting the job done. We could develop a training cadre for another country's armed forces--sure would seem to be as cost effective as us sending a bunch of our folks down range for extended deployments. Sort of like Patrice Lumumba University on a larger, more conventionally focussed scale.
We have done that withn School of the Americas. It has its strengths and it has its weaknesses. We have also done it here with partnership units from the newly emerged republics and we do it as a matter of course with JMRC and flyaways. The differences are in degrees of stability in the particular country and region as well in the visibilty we and the host nation desire. There are also questions of intent and force design. When you bring another country's individual soldiers here you are training the soldier and then allowing him to adapt what he learns to his own circumstance. If you bring a unit here, then you are training that unit to do it the way we do it. That works well with some countries and less so with others. But if your intent is to assist a country by increasing its military capacity, advising on the ground with some external training is at least to me the best way to go.

Tom