New Passengers on the AAC Advocacy Train

Westhawk has been keeping an eye on US military advisory missions, noting both the renewed hiring of contractors for Iraq and the overstretched optempo of SOCOM. The former has been commented on by others, but yesterday one of the most prominent critics of Private Military Companies weighed in on the situation.

Peter Singer has been kept busy ever since he published Corporate Warriors, one of the first academic works about the PMC phenomenon (I listened to him give a talk on the issue just two months ago). Singer's opposition to the inclusion of contractors is no surprise, but his voice still carries considerable weight (given Democratic ties to the Brookings Institution, among other things).


Translated from bureaucratic-speak, the Pentagon is seeking to hire private contractors to help fill out the teams that will train and advise Iraq army units, including in their operations in the field. In more blunt terms, arguably the most important aspect of the operation in Iraq, the crux to defeating the insurgency/getting our troops out of there (whichever you care more about), is starting to be outsourced.

The real eye-opener, though, is at the end of the piece, where Singer mentions a certain LTC...

It is completely understandable why a hard-pressed force would contemplate contracting out advising the Iraq military. From a bureaucratic standpoint, it’s the easy way out. Despite repeated calls by such top military thinkers as Colonel John Nagl, the U.S. Army still does not have an official advising capacity. Advising has never been something “Big Army” has been all that interested in doing (it has traditionally been viewed as a career drag) and moving officers and NCOs into these roles would mean moving them out of other units. By contrast, all the muss and fuss can instead be handed off to a company to handle.

But just because a company can do the job, doesn’t always mean it should. Advising the Iraqi Army has been determined by our national leadership as a task that is essential to our successful war effort. We should treat it that way in how the job is executed.

Now, numerous bloggers have mentioned the Advisory Corps (Westhawk has given it a plug on both his posts), but I can't recall Singer getting involved before. This is yet another indication that the Army Advisory Corps is gaining traction, and a sign that others are beginning to recognize the hole that the AAC will attempt to fill. It seems Nagl will get his Corps sooner, rather than later.