Educating US Soldiers

Going to the conference yesterday involved a two-hour commute to Asia.  Traffic in Istanbul is horrid at any time, but crossing the Bosporus at rush hour involves spending part of the day waiting. 

After the first day I sat across from a professor who works at the Marine Corps Command and Staff Academy, which is the required school for Marine majors.  He is a civilian who teaches a year-long course in culture and history, mostly focusing on the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world.  We spent about 45 minutes talking while waiting to cross continents.

Mostly we talked about setting up a curriculum for training the top leadership of combat forces.  Almost all of his students have combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan or both.  He said that they come back more curious than angry.  His job is to answer the questions and provide context for what they may encounter in the world.  He also said that several of his students will be in positions later of advising civilian leaders on policy. 

He mentioned the inadequate education given to soldiers in counter-insurgency training in the first years of the last decade and how that influenced the poor military decisions being made.  They only knew how to fight a fixed enemy in conventional war. 

He said that the main lesson to be learned at that time was from the former Yugoslavia, which broke up into nationalist factions after the collapse of their authoritarian leader, Tito.  Civil society does not come naturally after the fall of a dictator, tribalism does.  When Saddam Hussein was removed, US leaders thought that the Iraqis would naturally want to support a new national government. 

I also asked him about the units that he teaches, which turn out to be similar to some of the issues that I use in the April curriculum for my World History students.  I asked particularly about the film, Battle of Algiers, which shows terrorist groups in the war in Algeria fifty years ago and French counter-terrorism efforts.  He said that a unit has been built around that movie so that every high marine officer has discussed it and picked apart the lessons to be learned.  The movie is essentially a propaganda film by a communist director and with actors who actually were the real terrorists who conducted operations shown in the film.  My classes will see clips of the movie in late April. 

After the discussion I was first of all pleased that our soldiers seem to be getting a broad-based education in culture and history before they command large numbers of troops in the field.  I was also pleased that my own curriculum is not far off in its topics and coverage from the cutting edge of "applied history."