What Gen. McChrystal realizes, in effect, is that we need to create our own Robert Warburtons. If his experiment succeeds, future commanders can build on the precedent to provide the kind of cultural and linguistic skills that we will need to win the long war against Islamic extremists.
I read this story, and Tim Lynch of Free Range International came to mind as one of those ‘Warburton types’ that are mentioned in the article. But I also think the mention of contractors as ‘Robert Warburton‘ types was incredibly understated. I have known guys in Iraq who have worked the same gig or region for years. The private industry has easily created individuals like this, and many of them.
Also, the deployment and leave schedules for private industry has evolved to be way more conducive towards what Gen. McChrystal is wanting to do. In our industry, most companies do not go beyond a 6 month deployment. I have seen everything from 2 month, 3 month, 4 month, 6 month, and even some 12 month deployment(rare). My personal view on it is that 2 to 3 month deployments are about perfect, and this allows as much time as a contractor needs to do their business at home(if the contractor is given a sizable amount of time home, with some flexibility built into it). And that is what it really is all about. Companies have to know, that if you want to attract or even keep your really good employees, taking care of them means giving them a leave and deployment schedule that is family and life friendly. Burned out employees or contractors make mistakes.
I also think deployment length is a huge problem for today’s military men and women. From a private industry point of view, the longer the deployments, the longer the chance for burn out incidents to happen. Fights, suicides, shooting incidents, etc. can all happen as the soldier’s stress is increased over time. By changing the time frames a little, I think we could see some really positive developments. And if General McChrystal and Max Boot get their way, if units are assigned regions and allowed to cycle in soldiers in more condensed deployment cycles, then I think that will have a dramatic impact on morale and troop welfare. It will also contribute to creating better learning organizations, for each specific region.
Finally, and this is a call to guys like Max Boot and others who have the ear of the military strategists out there. We must have the conversation about contractors and war, in a strategic sense. We are not going away, and if General McChrystal, President Obama, General Petraeus, and the rest of the US (and worldwide partners) are actually serious about winning in the wars we are fighting in, then eventually they are all going to have to talk about the 246,000 of us contractors that are in the war. We have an impact on the war–we are fighting and dying in these wars, we are rebuilding in these war zones, we are working with and around soldiers from all over, and we are intimately connected with much of the local populations out there. What other reasons do you guys want for this discussion?
246,000 of us folks in the Warburton Fan Club are waiting for an answer….and some leadership.-Matt
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General McChrystal’s New Way of War
The U.S. has been bringing soldiers home as soon as they get any experience.
JUNE 17, 2009
By MAX BOOT
Gen. Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander in Afghanistan to shake up a troubled war effort. But one of his first initiatives could wind up changing how the entire military does business.
Gen. McChrystal’s decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.
Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan or Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what’s going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don’t have a grip on local conditions.
There was a saying that we didn’t fight in Vietnam for 10 years; we fought there for one year, 10 times. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, continued fighting until they were killed or immobilized. That gave their forces a huge advantage.
In Vietnam, units already in the field would get individual replacements from home, thus making it hard to maintain unit cohesion. Sometimes new soldiers were killed before anyone even knew their names.
The policy now is unit rotation — an entire battalion or brigade (or a higher-level staff) trains together, deploys together, and leaves together. That makes for better cohesion, but makes it even harder to maintain continuity because there is little overlap between units.