Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 104

learn at their own rate and following their own course. However, after the security force, operating in a largely alien way to the outside counterinsurgent teachers, had proven to be successful over time, the students might be able to articulate to the teachers why they became successful. Now the teachers truly would reduce their ignorance and learn from their students.32 Of Myths and Men: Tensions Between Teaching Epistemologies An Army unit’s overall approach to understanding and teaching counterinsurgency to foreign security forces will have profound effects on the subordinate methodologies they subsequently apply. Requiring soldiers to use the traditional explication approach drives soldiers toward teaching only what they know, thus producing imitations of U.S. forces in the host-nation force. This approach will become counterproductive if the cultural, economic, societal, and other interacting tensions demand a novel security force that is nothing like our ow n. In Afghanistan, U.S. military advisors have struggled with one significant example of this: the pull logistics system that is technological, user-based, and highly decentralized. In contrast, the Afghans have a long familiarity with, and strongly embrace, the old Soviet-style push logistics system that is centralized, hierarchical, and conducted in a completely different manner than the U.S. system. To add further friction, the extremely low literacy rate of the Afghan logistics forces, along with very limited automation technology, means that the explication approach to teaching logistics by coalition logisticians has been fraught with problems. In this environment, Army teachers (who are masters of a technological, decentralized methodology that demands high literacy) were directed to instruct students who were in many ways their opposite. Nevertheless, instead of appreciating the lack of literacy and experience with technological culture among Afghan students, and switching to an emancipatory method to allow them to move on a different path towards a logistics structure the teachers might not recognize at first, Army teachers instead attempted to force the Afghan students toward what the Army teachers knew. With every cycle of new logistics units arriving in Afghanistan, there have been repeated failed efforts to push computers and automation onto the Afghan security forces, and to change their paperwork processes to make 102 them use a decentralized pull model. The ineffectiveness of this teaching process has been worsened by frequent interference from advising teams that circumvented the Afghan process by moving paperwork within coalition lines to get it done.33 This illustrates the tension between applying an explication approach where the teacher does not have a mastery of the topic, or the students are not interested in the knowledge the master has to offer. Students soon learn that old master judo instructors only can teach judo, and even if the class shows up to learn yoga, they will be forced to learn judo. At the epistemological level, whether one uses a stultifying or emancipatory teaching approach, there still is a key relationship between ignorance and knowledge. We want to know exactly when we have solved a problem, with something definitive, like accomplishing a checkmate in a game of chess.34 Yet, complex situations immerse us more in our own ignorance as we progress, with few if any authoritative end states. We have a fear of ignorance and the application of ignorance for action. To put the tensions of ignorance-knowledge and stultifying-emancipatory teaching approaches into a quadrant chart for further discussion, the figure on page 103 provides some insight into how these four elements interact. Interaction Among Teacher-Student Paradigms The predominant military approach appears in quadrant 3 (labeled Q3), in which U.S. military teachers have a mastery of counterinsurgency knowledge based on the organizing methodologies of our military, and they can disperse that knowledge to any foreign military student population to train them to secure their own nation. This may work with a security force assistance mission in a similar society or with a nation that has comparable security capabilities, but it may not work with the diverse, non-Western, hybrid environments where different variables drive the emergence of a novel counterinsurgency solution. This is where quadrant 2 (Q2) of the figure, the emancipatory approach, allows teachers ignorant of certain counterinsurgency disciplines to teach on the topics they do not know, to students who might need to learn in a direction the teachers might be unable to fully imagine or recognize. In quadrant 1 (Q1), the emancipatory approach also features cases in which the teacher has mastered the March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW