Training a Quality Fighting Force

Fire of Liberty

Christian Lowe, a staff writer for Army Times Publishing Company, has a good piece over at the Weekly Standard on the slow but competent training of the security forces throughout Iraq. Though we hear a lot of Senators and partisans arguing ad nauseum on the T.V., radio, and the print-media about how there's not a large enough contingent of Iraqis being trained as soldiers/security forces at the moment (even though countless folks show up everyday to enroll) but what Lowe points out and the talking heads don't is that the true benchmark to judge the progress in Iraq in not the number being trained but the quality of the soldiers being trained. If we are going to put our time and money towards training and beefing up the stock of their soldiers to allow our forces to place their sites on higher risk areas in this counter-terrorism campaign in Iraq, then by all means the folks doing the training should be focused on generating high quality soldiers. I'd say that the American soldiers and their higher ups who are currently training the Iraqi forces have been reading The Marine Corps' Small War Training Manual, Savage Wars of Peace and various other publications in their efforts of preparing the Iraqi forces to take on the Islamic fascists who threaten the peace and livelihood of the people who embrace freedom and democracy. So keep up the good work.