Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 66

armed forces treat the advising mission after the troops
withdraw from Afghanistan?
The main purpose of this article is to provide a set
of the most important military advising lessons learned
from past and present. These lessons have been distilled
from comparing historical and contemporary advisory
experiences extracted from dozens of sources including military journal articles, doctrine, book chapters,
and monographs. Although my tour as an advisor in
Iraq from 2009-2010 proved informative, I tried to
canvass and examine myriad advising sources with an
open mind toward capturing the major patterns that
emerged.
Recognizing that recording every germane advisory
insight in a single short article would be an impossible
task, I focus instead on presenting a discrete set of the
most salient major contemporary military advising
lessons learned in the post-9/11 era, with special focus
on combat advising in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some
of these lessons learned apply directly to individual
advisors, while other topics provide organizational-level
insights and considerations for the U.S. military and its
friends and allies.

History of the U.S. Military Advising
Mission
Military advisors are not a new phenomenon
for the U.S. military. In fact, they played a key
role in the founding of the United States itself. A
small group of competent and dedicated Prussian,
French, and other military advisors helped emerging
Continental Army forces increase their warfighting
capability and professionalism as they waged war
against the British Crown for their freedom.
These included such notables as Prussian officer Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who produced
early manuals of arms, drills, and other training
products to instill discipline and order into the
new Continental Army. The efforts of advisors
such as von Steuben ultimately helped the fledgling
American nation successfully fight for and win its
independence.1
America’s relatively short national history includes significant involvement in sponsoring numerous large- and small-scale advising missions for
strategic reasons of its own. Some of the purposes
to advise include, “modernization, nation building,
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economic penetration or purposes, ideological reasons, and counterinsurgency.”2
Among the more prominent examples, U.S. advisors
were assigned to work with surviving national military leaders in Japan and Germany after World War
II to stabilize the societies of their war-torn nations
and then help rebuild military forces appropriate for
each nation’s post-war national defense. The nature
of those advisory relationships reflected the idiosyncratic post-Hitler landscape in Germany as well as the
post-atomic bomb setting in Japan. Each case required
close association among U.S. advisors and military
units with German and Japanese military forces for a
prolonged period. Not coincidentally, the close working
relationships that developed between U.S. advisors and
their foreign counterparts, coupled with the subsequent establishment of military bases in Germany and
Japan, provided the United States with vital regional
and strategic advantages.
In another example, a contingent of U.S. advisors
working with South Korean military forces during the
Korean War era provided significant leverage against
North Korea to halt its aggression.3 Furthermore, the
success of U.S. advisors led to the establishment of
a permanent U.S. military presence in South Korea,
which has facilitated the U.S. advising mission there
from the Korean War to the present.
This particular advising mission has not only contributed to a dramatic improvement of South Korean
security force capabilities over the long term, but also
has enabled U.S. and South Korean military units to
train and prepare together. Advisory support has thus
undergirded America’s longstanding pledge to stand by
its South Korean ally in its still unsettled con fƖ7Bv