US military cannot find enough capable, motivated Iraqis to train against ISIS

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from  Russia Today,  Moscow

When they strip off their uniform to run, they were never soldiers in the first place
When they strip off their uniform to run, they were never soldiers in the first place

[ Editors Note This claim of the ghost soldiers was put on display when Mosul fell, so the merry-go-round has returned with this mention of it with Ramadi’s fall. The good troops fight and die while the bad ones run off to collect another pay check.

New forces with fighting ability can never be created quickly. Sure, if a country has money they can put them in uniforms and give them weapons, but desert fighting is a specialty, and all we mostly saw were the AK-47 armed troops, a weapon that does not have the range for open country shooting.

Troops who have them tend to want to stay with armor columns that they hope will kill most of the enemy for them so they are used for mop up operations. Maneuver operations require good leadership, logistics, and non commissioned officers to effectively control green troops.

The videos of some of the fighting footage of Iraqi troops looked like a disorganized mob with huge amounts of ammunition to blast away with. Virtually everyone was doing directional shooting, meaning they did not have a target sited, but were just shooting at an area. That is what artillery is for, not infantry.

Unmentioned by Carter is that this training of the Sunnis is a double edged sword  as you always have a lot of infiltrators that get into the program.  Our sources there tell us these Sunni infiltrators played a key role in helping the dozens of car bombers that broke into Ramadi and sent the Baghdad troops running for their lives. Usually this means they are trying to catch up with the officers.

I made a comment about this “officer problem” on an Arab TV program one time and it was my last show with them. Welcome to that world. On the bright side the Iraqi army has gotten some combined operations experience, and there is much blame for the poor showing of the coalition air campaign where forces enough to take Ramadi should have been destroyed from the air while they were out in the open.

Everything that moves is under the coalition drones and satellites, all wonderful real world practice for a theater commander. No enemy forces should be able to move and launch major attacks over open desert unless allowed to do so. Not a word about this is addressed in the article below… Jim W. Dean ]

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–  First published  …  June 18, 2015 

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter has admitted to Congress that the Pentagon has not been able to find enough “legitimate” Iraqi recruits to fight off Islamic State extremists. So far, the US military has trained some 9,000 Iraqi soldiers – far short of its 24,000 goal, Carter said.

Appearing before Congress on Wednesday, Carter said that efforts to train “capable, motivated, legitimate ground forces in Iraq and Syria” in order “to seize, clear, and hold” terrain from Islamic State (formerly ISIS/ISIL) has proven difficult.

“Our training efforts have been slowed in Iraq by a lack of trainees. We simply haven’t received enough recruits. Of the 24,000 Iraqi security forces we originally envisioned training at our four sites by this fall, we’ve only received enough recruits to train about 7,000 in addition to 2,000 counter-terrorism service personnel,” Carter said.

He has insisted that only “motivated” Iraqi soldiers can ensure the defeat of the terrorist group, not American boots on the ground.

“Putting US combat troops on the ground as a substitute for local forces will not produce enduring results,” Carter said.

The anti-Islamic State coalition’s bombing campaign has produced results in “limiting ISIL’s movement, constraining its ability to reinforce its fighters and impeding its command and control,” Carter said. However, those efforts were chiefly designed to buy time and space to carry out the recruitment efforts and develop legitimate fighters, which is “a work in progress,” he added.

Islamic State forces still hold the city of Mosul, while last month its fighters took Ramadi, a provincial capital west of Baghdad, without a fight, despite being outnumbered more than 10 to 1.

Carter said after Mosul fell last June, Iraqi security forces were severely degraded, with four divisions dissolved from a combination of “disunity, deserters and so-called ghost soldiers, who were paid on the books but didn’t show or didn’t exist.” That greatly diminished local forces’ capacity, and then Ramadi fell, he said.

“What we saw in Ramadi last month was deeply disappointing – and illustrates the importance of a capable and motivated Iraqi ground force,” Carter told Congress.

That failure prompted President Barack Obama to send an additional 450 US soldiers to a base in Iraq’s Anbar province, and to step up efforts to recruit and train Sunni soldiers, who are underrepresented in the Iraqi army.

In Syria, Carter thinks the situation is even more complex because of the lack of a “legitimate government partner” and competing forces. He said the US will continue launching airstrikes on Syrian territory, working with Syria’s neighbors to stop the flow of foreign fighters into the region.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, blasted the Obama administration for a failed six-year-long strategy to secure the Middle East, riven by failed and failing states. No strategy coming from the White House will “change that trajectory,” Thornberry said.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the committee, acknowledged the problem posed by Islamic State but said deepening the US commitment there without a reliable partner in Iraq would be useless.

Carter ended his testimony to Congress by saying: “It will take time.”

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Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.