Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 73

MILITARY ADVISING AFTER 9/11

One consequence is that there is great reluctance
among many service members to serve as advisors.
This stems from uncertainty about whether serving as
an advisor hurts their careers. There is much concern that serving as a conventional U.S. advisor will
reduce a soldier’s chances for promotion, as compared
to peers who serve in more traditional and bureaucratically well-rewarded roles—especially command
positions.27
Such uncertainty is exacerbated by the Army’s inconsistent advisor selection process that often appears
to support the idea that the Army treats advising as a
second-tier mission. Nevertheless, in some cases, the
Army solicits and selects volunteers with strong and
relevant performance records, particularly for senior
officers assigned as advisors and advisor team leaders. The budding use of a centralized selection list to
assign senior advisors is a step in the right direction
for the Army, as long as the results of future promotion boards reveal that advisor selectees actually fare
comparatively well.
In other cases, the Army haphazardly and involuntarily assigns soldiers as advisors and disregards their
background, motivation toward the mission, disposition (personality), and potential to advise well. This
seems to apply more commonly to the assignment
of junior officers and noncommissioned officers as
advisors. Further, at times it seems that the Army uses
advisory units as a dumping ground for poor performers or problem soldiers.28
The Army’s inconsistent approach to the assignment of advisors may stem from the problematic
assumption that anyone can successfully advise.
Most veteran advisors view this as a damaging fallacy
that some senior military leaders still believe. Thus,
the Army appears ambivalent toward the advising
mission, with public pronouncements of support for
the mission by strategic political-military leaders,
but mixed and inconsistent levels of support for the
mission on the ground.
Solving some of these problems to ameliorate the
second tier military advising mission syndrome will
take greater organizational commitment—reflected
in focus, motivation, allocation of resources, concrete
steps taken to cultivate and preserve advisory competence, and ultimately, the development of greater
organizational acceptance of the mission.
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

Other Impacts on the Contemporary
Military Advising Mission
Numerous other conditions characterize the U.S.
military advising mission that require advisors to employ additional applicable skills. Some of these additional important lessons learned are as follows:
Subject matter expertise is vital in the advising mission. Advisors who are sent to advise on a specific specialty or set of skills must possess those skills, or have the
ability to obtain the services of experts who do. Common
areas of required expertise include numerous military
and police specialties, combat and noncombat organizational and technical skills, and expertise in leadership or
organizational training for different positions and roles
(e.g., how to serve as a noncommissioned officer).29
Advisors need to draw on, work with, and navigate
other influential agencies in the field. These include U.S.
and coalition partner units, the media, nongovernmental
organizations, and a plethora of other organizations that
operate in the advisors’ working environments.30
“Goodies” can benefit the advising mission.
Advisors provide information, intelligence, resources,
money, and other desirable resources to advance the
mission—as long as this support does not create excessive counterpart dependency, or stymie counterpart
development.31
Information age technology can benefit and
degrade the advising mission. Advisors should apply
suitable new technologies to augment the mission, but
they should not expect counterparts to use technology
the way the U.S. Army and other U.S. services employ it
(e.g., the U.S. military’s sometimes obsessive application
of PowerPoint).
Special considerations are needed for deploying
women advisors. Women can serve as very effective
advisors, but advisor units should first conduct a careful
analysis of the situation (such as determining a counterpart’s openness to engagement with females and understanding the country’s culture and gender norms) before
assigning a female advisor.32 Some circumstances make
the use of women advisors imprudent.33

Defining Military Advisory Success
One conundrum of the mission is the difficulty
advisors share in defining success. The unconventional
mission’s ambiguity and long-term nature, and some confusion about the overall nature of advising, contribute to
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