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
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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