By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Sunday, November 5, 2006; 4:31 PM
FORT RILEY, Kan. -- As the Army sees it, the way home from Iraq begins here.
On a desolate plain dotted with splashes of yellow and gold foliage, soldiers are preparing not to defeat the insurgents in Iraq but to coach the Iraqis to do that for themselves.
It is an approach born of the realization that giving the Iraqis uniforms, rifles and bullets and training them in the basics of combat is not enough. To get the Iraqis ready to handle their own security, U.S. officials have concluded they need more American soldiers inside Iraqi army and police units to advise them.
President Bush, under intensifying pressure to curtail America's role in the deeply unpopular war, has said that once Iraq shows it can stand on its own, U.S. troops can go home. The Army hopes its advisers will make that moment arrive sooner.
In teams of 10 to 12 soldiers each, the advisers live and work with Iraqi forces who have completed their basic training _ not only Iraqi soldiers but also the national police and border agents.
The advisers act as role models, steering Iraqis away from corruption, human rights abuses and other problems, while also going on raids and other missions to coach them and assess weaknesses.
"It's the way ahead," says Maj. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of the 1st Infantry Division. In June, the division began training the advisers, who are selected from throughout the Army to spend 60 days at this post overlooking the Kansas River.
Some are more skeptical.
"It certainly is vital, but there are severe limits," says Anthony Cordesman, who monitors Iraqi security forces for the private Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Army is hard-pressed to find enough qualified soldiers for this duty, he said _ a problem that could worsen as the number of advisers grows.
One of the toughest obstacles the advisers face is a language barrier. They get 42 hours of instruction in Arabic at Fort Riley, enough to make them familiar with the language but not fluent.
The Army has had to dip into regular combat and support units to find the midlevel officers and senior enlisted soldiers who make up the teams. It also has used reserve soldiers. That has added further complications for an Army already straining to find fresh combat forces for one-year tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are more than 3,000 U.S. military advisers in Iraq, and the number is growing weekly. The teams operate in units of about 500 Iraqi soldiers or more. The Pentagon is considering expanding the size of the adviser teams to perhaps 25, and some have suggested expanding the number of adviser teams so they can work with smaller Iraqi units.
"You can ask yourself: If 10, 12 folks is working, would more folks be better or not? The answer could be yes," Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month. He added that arguments against it include a fear of making the Iraqis more dependent on U.S. help.
About 310,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained and equipped so far, with more on the way. But many are on leave at any given time, some refuse to serve anywhere but their home region and they have been criticized for being undisciplined, fleeing from danger and using excessive force.
The Army also is beginning to provide adviser teams for the Afghan national Army.
The Marines have a similar though smaller Iraq adviser corps that it trains at Twenty-nine Palms, Calif.
Capt. Scott Vores is one of the Army's advisers-in-training. On a sunny afternoon in late October he led his team, with a group of U.S. soldiers playing the role of Iraqi security forces, into "al Amir," a mock Iraqi village at Fort Riley.
Vores, with an Iraqi-American translator, sat with the village mayor (also an Iraqi-American) and heard requests for help with electricity and other basic services and for more U.S. troop patrols to stop insurgents from infiltrating the village.
"We are going in circles," the mayor complains through an interpreter, with insurgents moving from one village to another.
The exercise was designed to replicate the cultural and security problems the advisers are likely to encounter in Iraq. Vores, 36, managed to get across his key message to the mayor: The U.S. wants to help, but mainly by putting Iraqi security forces in position to provide it.
"To give them advice on how to work out their own problems _ that's our goal," Vores said later.
Another adviser team fared less well when it accompanied a group of "Iraqi" soldiers to a different mock village to arrest an insurgent. The senior "Iraqi" soldier announced to the Sunni mayor that his men were arresting him, ignoring the targeted insurgent. The mayor vigorously protested, but the Americans did not challenge the arrest plan. And when a pregnant "Iraqi" woman approached seeking urgent medical help, the Americans brusquely turned her away.
Afterward the soldiers training the advisers said they should have stopped the arrest of the mayor, who had been cooperating with U.S. forces. They also should have helped the woman instead of missing an opportunity to create good will.
In an interview last week in his office on this sprawling fort near Junction City, Kan., Ham acknowledged that training the advisers has been slower and harder than the Army foresaw.
"As an Army we were not doing this as well as we needed to do it" even a year ago, Ham said. The instruction has been expanded, with more emphasis on cultural awareness and language, less time studying PowerPoint slides and more hands-on work with weapons and communications.
Col. Jeffrey Ingram, commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry, was blunt about early weaknesses.
"The transition teams a year ago were not prepared in any way, shape or form," he said in an interview.
He summarized the old approach as telling advisers, "Here's your body armor, here's the equipment you need, here's an M-16 (rifle), and off you go ... with the assumption that they'll figure it out when they get there."
Before the Iraq war, advisers came from the Army's elite Special Forces, who specialize in the language and culture of a particular region of the world. Because the Special Forces are tied down with counterterrorist missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Army got its advisers for Iraq by plucking soldiers from regular units _ even from Pentagon desk jobs.
The advisers are trained to resist the urge to lead the Iraqis in battle.
"This is the art of establishing a rapport with your (Iraqi) counterpart and being able to nudge him in just the right direction so that every day he gets better _ not so much by U.S. standards but by his standards," Ingram said.
The last time the U.S. military used advisers in large numbers was the Vietnam War. The advisers were the first entrants in that war, followed by combat forces.
Ham described advisers' jobs in Iraq as "certainly less sexy, certainly less visible, certainly less understood" than other assignments.
He estimated that one-third of each incoming class of advisers are volunteers. "Others will tell you they tried everything they could to not get this mission because it is so different" from what soldiers see as attractive. Even so, Ham said the adviser program is a key part of the Iraq campaign.
"If we don't get the (adviser) team part of this equation right, the rest of it may not be all that important," he said.
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On the Net:
Background on Iraq Assistance Group: http://www.riley.army.mil/view/document.asp?ID194-2006-10-25-37600-36
