US Army overhauls education: Eating soup with a knife

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kansas, Mar 16: The US Army, the world's most powerful fighting force, has overhauled its education and training to prepare for conflicts that cannot be won by military might alone.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 15 countries combined, and its superiority in conventional warfare is overwhelming. But that is no guarantee of victory against enemies who fight like the insurgents of Iraq and Afghanistan or come up with novel ideas such as ramming civilian airliners into skyscrapers.

To cope with the conflicts of the future, the US military has changed its educational philosophy. ''The emphasis used to be on teaching what to think,'' said Brigadier General Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the US Army General Command and Staff College (GCSC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. ''Now it is on teaching students how to think.'' The college, overlooking the Missouri River, prepares army majors for the next 10 years of their military careers -- and for the murky future wars that ''will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries round the world,'' in the words of the Pentagon's latest strategy review. ''This requires the US military to adopt unconventional and indirect approaches.'' Such approaches used to be largely the preserve of Special Forces, but under the new strategy, every American officer is meant to be equally adept at fighting war -- conventional and unconventional -- and keeping the peace once combat is over.

That thinking is reflected in the curriculum of the 10-month course taught here.

It draws from lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan and includes material that ranges from the Arab revolt led by T.E.

Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) against the Ottoman empire to the ''man on the moon syndrome'' that often bedevils relations between American forces and Iraqi civilians. The ''man on the moon'' syndrome boils down to a question: ''If you Americans could send a man to the moon, why can't you fix our sewers?'' Lawrence wrote 80 years ago that fighting insurgents was ''messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.'' The US military's 2006 recipe for eating soup with a knife is encapsulated in the acronym DImE, part of the new vocabulary in what the army describes as its most profound restructuring in half a century.

MILITARY WITH A SMALL

''M'' DImE stands for Diplomacy, Information, military and Economic. The ''m'' is a small letter because only about 20 per cent of progress in a counterinsurgency is thought to stem from military actions. Progress in rebuilding Iraq after the US invasion in 2003 has been slow, set back by an insurgency that flared soon after major combat ended and confronted American forces with unexpected problems, from suicide bombers to sectarian strife and fractious politics.

Counter-insurgency and reconstruction training was not part of the preparations for the armoured units that stormed across Iraq and captured Baghdad in a 20-day campaign seen at the time as evidence of US invincibility. Since then, suicide attacks, roadside bombs and ambushes have killed roughly 10 times as many US soldiers as died in major combat.

Before the war in Iraq, counter-insurgency was treated as an afterthought by most of the military's three dozen schools and academies. Now, counter-insurgency runs like a red thread through much of the material taught at the college and adjacent institutions, such as the School of Advanced Military Studies.

A draft of the first new counter-insurgency manual since 1986 is now going through revisions. Compiled jointly by the army and the Marine Corps, the draft notes that ''counter-insurgency is ounterintuitive to the traditional American approach to war and combat operations.'' For decades, that approach has been to employ overwhelming force to win a swift, decisive victory, as the United States did in the first few weeks of the war in Iraq. Fighting irregular forces, post-combat reconstruction and stability operations, also known as nation-building, did not rate high on the list of priorities.

The draft manual says that overcoming an insurgency is ''always an inherently political problem (and) the formulation of a solution must start here.'' Minimum force is often the best solution. ''It is futile to mount an operation that kills five insurgents if the collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more.'' The draft also says, ''There are many times when the wisest counsel for military commanders and their forces is not to do something, but just sit there.'' Translating such concepts into operational reality requires changing mindsets, a process driven in classrooms and by encouraging debate. The December issue of the army magazine Military Review ran an article that said US forces in Iraq had acted ''like fuel on a smouldering fire'' and displayed cultural insensitivity amounting to ''institutional racism.'' Instilling cultural awareness is an important part of the new curriculum as well as of the training schedule of troops before they deploy to Iraq. At the National Training Center, a vast area in the California desert, pre-deployment exercises used to involve tanks and enemies called ''Krasnovyans.'' Now exercises feature Arab-speaking role players driving Toyota pickup trucks in villages that look as if they had been airlifted house-by-house from Iraq's Sunni triangle.

Many of the students at Fort Leavenworth are veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq who add their own experience to the classroom.

The debate is often lively, in response to arguments meant to provoke thought.

In a recent history seminar, for example, the professor, Lieutenant-Colonel Shawn Faulkner, invited comment on an analogy between the US army today and the German army after the 1941 invasion of Russia.

What they have in common, the premise went, is an invading army, its confidence buoyed by a streak of victories, initially advancing at great speed; an enemy who swiftly changed tactics and rallied support against the invader; and a war that did not turn out the way it was planned. Up to a point, argued the students, and they found more differences than parallels.

''What we teach here is not meant to provide answers,'' said Warner, ''because in many situations there are no 'right' answers and we face an infinite variety of problems in the future. What we can provide is an education that allows officers to ask the right questions.''

REUTERS