I disagree with you that the so-called foot-soldiers need to know about the details of humanitarian aid efforts. The military command structure is such that only officers would really need to know what’s going on.

And I agree that it’s a shame they weren’t trained well. But when you’re given a week to get everything ready for deployment, including making arrangements with your job, family, house, and so on, there’s only so much reading you can do. And the training they got pre-deployment was all tactics and didn’t exactly leave much time for outside studying, at least if they enjoyed eating and sleeping after playing in a swamp for 10 hours.

Plus, and I hate to make this point because it strays dangerously close to Kerry’s malformed “joke”, but these are young, sometimes teenaged grunts who never went to college. How can they be expected to educate themselves on a region the brass hasn’t yet bothered to learn?

Hrm. The more I ponder this the more I realize I need to better clarify what exactly I am talking about. I fully agree with you that the military is really good at moving supplies – it’s part of what makes them so damned good at fighting wars. But I seriously question whether the DoD should have a role in crafting humanitarian policy, at least apart from a security and maybe logistical perspective.

Let’s consider this post a muddled start, and I’ll try to craft a more useful framework for further discussion, maybe over the weekend when I’m not at work all day.

Your friends in Iraq that learned nothing – well, double shame. On them for not learning, and even more on their command (and the S-5) for not teaching.

And I think the combination of aid and military is actually a Cold War concept – pre-Cold War, one could say, if you’re making a Wilsonian argument. The problem is, if the military is to be retasked to perform humanitarian missions, then they need to be re-trained as well, and that does not happen. My friends get sent to Iraq with training in the tactics they’ll need, and learn almost nothing about the locals, the neighborhoods, the major personalities of the areas they go to. NATO, and USAID, have both fallen into this trap as well – I documented a joint USAID/NATO team building a dam that had not a single speaker of Dari with them, and the NATO soldiers had bulldozed houses for its construction. Since they couldn’t speak with the locals, there was deep resentment and anger toward them.

This kind of thing is routine, even if you didn’t experience it. Unless and until humanitarian field work, including basic health, developmental economics, institutional theory, and local language and culture, is included as a standard and locally-tailored training package for soldiers being deployed on MOOTW missions, I will not trust the military to get the job done. It would be asking them to do a job they never trained to do.

Oh and about the shrill thing: not to disparage your branch or anything, but I find the “Army of One” commercials incredibly annoying, especially the one where the guy says he joined so he could help flood victims – this during the War on Terror. What happened to defending the country?

Although I grew up, so to speak, in the Cold War military, I have seen warfare change. If helping with “foreign aid” is now part of it, so be it.

Oh, and “shrill”…?

Good food for thought, your post is. And the debate you mention is still active inside the Armed Forces too.