18 Nov. Los Angeles Times - The Nation.

About 350 Marines here and at Camp Pendleton are being trained as advisors to the Iraqi army, in the hopes that a strategy honed during the Vietnam War can be used to improve Iraq's military and hasten the withdrawal of U.S. personnel....

Split into teams of 11 to 15 men, the Marines will provide monthly evaluations of the Iraqi troops they are embedded with. In many cases, that will mean living outside the security of U.S. bases...

"We have taken a page from Vietnam," Sattler said. In Vietnam, the "combined action platoon" concept brought U.S. and Vietnamese troops together in a counterinsurgency strategy...

Bing West, former assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration and author of two books on the Marines in Iraq, said the advisor idea involved a trade-off of "risk of casualties versus [the] reward of better-trained Iraqi soldiers..."

Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and author of "The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century," said he would like the advisor course at Camp Pendleton to be expanded to six or 12 months, including language training...