To: Win Smith who wrote (161043 ) 4/27/2005 5:09:09 PM From: TimF Respond to The U.S. military is superb at defeating conventional forces--as its three-week blitzkrieg from Kuwait to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 demonstrated--but not nearly as good at fighting the kind of guerrilla foes it has confronted since. Bush and Rumsfeld have adamantly resisted any permanent personnel increase because they insist, contrary to all evidence, that the spike in overseas deployments is only temporary. The bulk of Iraqi reconstruction funds have gone through the cumbersome procurement bureaucracy "fifty-five Special Forces trainers in El Salvador accomplished more than did 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam." There are other ways the United States can take advantage of foreign fighters. Washington could, for instance, create its own version of the French Foreign Legion or the British sepoy regiments--the "Freedom Legion," a force that would be led by a handful of American officers but made up of non-Americans who would be lured into service by the promise of U.S. citizenship when they completed their tours of duty. Unlike the hordes of freelance security contractors hired today, the Freedom Legion would at least be under the direct control of the U.S. government. IT IS BY now a truth universally acknowledged that the United States government is woefully deficient in "human intelligence." There are plenty of Americans willing to move to lands that Wal-Mart has not yet penetrated. Most of them work for charities, businesses, media organizations, and other nongovernmental entities. Those who work for the government cannot possibly hope to advance their careers by long service abroad: one wins promotion by spending time inside the Beltway, not in Baghdad or Tora Bora. That has to change. Robert Scales, a retired general and former commander of the Army War College, has proposed creating "global scouts"--military officers who would spend years, even decades, living abroad "with no diminution in career progression." Even if such scouts fell behind on the promotion ladder, they could still be compensated in other ways. Such a program could be built on the back of the existing foreign area officer program, which allows some officers to specialize in foreign cultures but which is generally regarded as a dead-end career move. Scales argues that, as part of a transition to "culture-centric warfare," global scouts should be given precedence in military intelligence agencies over the "technologists" now in control. The State Department and the CIA need to institute similar programs to allow talented individuals to spend longer in the field, so that they can develop true expertise. If the military needs a spur to action, it should recall what happened the last time it failed to take guerrilla warfare seriously: the time was the early 1960s, and the United States was just starting to get embroiled in a conflict in Vietnam.
