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Soldiers excel at working with Iraqi trainers

At the beginning of June, the Iraqi army had generated only one enabler unit, a motor transportation regiment; four months later, under a stepped up train-the-trainers program, they have built and equipped all 12 ordnance companies and all 48 of the needed administrative platoons.

In August, just one mortar platoon was in training, but now 25 are being trained.

As the U.S. military prepares to draw down in Iraq, trainers assigned to advise and mentor the Iraqi army are focusing on building their counterpart’s force of “enablers” by teaching the Iraqis to train their own forces.

During the height of the war in Iraq, American and civilian trainers concentrated on putting as many boots on the ground as possible. But as security conditions have improved, the U.S. is now able to retrain groups of Iraqi infantrymen and build much-needed combat support and combat service support units, including engineers, mechanics, signal officers and administrative clerks.

“The Iraqi army was built rather quickly, and those 14 infantry divisions were trained and fielded so they could go out and conduct the [counterinsurgency] fight,” said Col. Frank Sherman, chief of staff for Iraqi Training and Advisory Mission-Army, which is part of Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq.

“With the success of the surge, that allows them to pull the infantrymen out of those units, cross-level them so they can continue to build and professionalize their force,” he said. “They need those engineers, those maintainers, those fuel specialists.”

The model ITAM-Army has built and is executing could some day be replicated in Afghanistan, which is now building its own infantry-centric army to take on the insurgency.

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who is nominated to take command of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Training Mission-Afghanistan, recently visited Iraq and asked officials there to work with the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., said Col. Hardee Green, chief of ITAM-Army’s training division.

“[Caldwell] came here and asked for lessons learned because they’re going to get to the point of where we are now,” Green said.

ITAM-Army has nearly 250 soldiers and civilians at training centers across Iraq, Sherman said.

These trainers, typically split into four-man combat arms or logistics and supply training teams, work at the Iraqi army’s training centers and schoolhouses.

They conduct train-the-trainer programs where they teach the Iraqi noncommissioned officers, who in turn train their own soldiers.

The Iraqis have made a lot of progress, Sherman said. About 70 percent of the programs of instruction taught at the training centers and schoolhouses are taught by the Iraqis, with the Americans providing guidance and advice, Green said.

There still is a lot of work to do, and the goal is to have all the enabler units completed by summer, Sherman said.

Another challenge is finding American trainers with the required expertise, Green said. For example, ITAM-Army has asked for about 30 soldiers with the 11C specialty, or indirect fire infantrymen, to help train the Iraqi mortar platoons.