The Way Out

The Pentagon has a new plan for training Iraqis. Will it work?

By Douglas Waller and Sally B. Donnelly Monday, Jan. 31, 2005

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    The U.S. wants to pick up the pace. Pentagon officials say they plan to begin deploying a U.S.-trained Iraqi force salted with 10,000 or more U.S. military advisers. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dispatched General Gary Luck, U.S.A. (ret.), to Iraq to investigate, among other things, how closely U.S. advisers should work with Iraqi soldiers in the field. "We are specifically looking at whether we ought to be putting more of our own people on training and mentoring, and bringing Iraqi forces along faster, as opposed to using our own for military operations," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells TIME.

    The man who will soon oversee that mission is Lieut. General John R. Vines, 55, an Alabaman who cut his teeth on combat parachuting into Panama during the 1989 Operation Just Cause invasion. Vines, who will become the ground commander of U.S. forces in Iraq next month, has spent a year prepping his 18th Airborne Corps staff for the postelection mission. He has brought in Arab experts to lecture his aides on local culture and assigned them books on Islam to read before they fly to the region. Last October he staged a weeklong computer-generated war game at the corps's Joint Operations Center in Fort Bragg, N.C., to test staff members on how they would manage a typical day--filled with car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. "It's a pretty tough environment over there," an Army officer said after going through the dress rehearsal.

    The most urgent challenge Vines and his staff will face is preparing Iraqi forces to quell that violence. Wolfowitz flew to Fort Bragg three weeks ago to brainstorm with the general on his future mission. The two men agreed that the new Iraqi government may have to increase the ranks of its army soldiers, police and border-patrol agents beyond the 271,000 personnel the U.S. has projected the Iraqis need. But attracting Iraqis to join the security services has been easy compared with persuading them to stand and fight. Though recruits continue to join the security units for the promise of a paying job, many cut and run when the shooting starts. The new U.S. strategy aims to curb dereliction. Instead of just handing off sectors of the country to Iraqi units to police on their own--where they might be overwhelmed by insurgents--Iraqi forces will be deployed with American officers and enlisted soldiers throughout their ranks to guide them in the early months of their missions. Defense Department policymakers say the approach grew out of the U.S.'s handover of the Shi'ite city of Najaf to Iraqi forces early last year. When U.S. forces pulled out, the city was overrun by Shi'ite guerrillas. The U.S. was compelled to wage a bloody battle to reclaim Najaf last August. "We probably should have kept an American backbone in place," says a senior Pentagon official.

    The advisers program is still getting off the ground. Even now, some of the Americans don't have translators. Senior Pentagon officials say Iraqi soldiers don't have to be trained to U.S. standards to be able to battle the insurgents. But Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official who has been a frequent visitor to Baghdad, estimates that even in the best-case scenario, Iraqi forces won't have the training and equipment to begin significantly engaging insurgents until the end of the year.

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