Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 67

MILITARY ADVISING AFTER 9/11

with a wide array of pertinent advising lessons and
skills. However, for a variety of reasons, including some
misunderstandings of—and some outright resistance
toward—the “softer” unconventional advising mission
by the combat-focused mainstream U.S. military, the
Army did not internalize and preserve its advising
lessons from Vietnam. Consequently, as the Army distanced itself from the memory of the Vietnam experience and turned its attention to the threat of large-scale
standing conventional communist forces in the context
of the Cold War, it gradually forgot many of the hardearned lessons about advising (despite some small-scale
conventional advising missions that occurred after
Vietnam).5
In any case, as the mainstream U.S. military gradually shelved the advising mission, U.S. Army Special
Forces wholly adopted the unconventional advising
mission as one of its core charters. Thus, after the
Vietnam War, Special Forces honed their advising

capabilities and deployed military advisors to numerous regions around the globe—albeit typically in
much smaller advisor teams—while the conventional
Army generally lost its advising capability until the
Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts after 9/11.

Relevant Lessons from the Korean
and Vietnam Wars to the Present
A retrospective of the U.S. military’s historic advising experiences provides some vital insights and lessons
learned that are consistent with the contemporary
advising lessons offered in this article.6 Despite some
differences between the past and the present, many
historic advising mission insights from the Korean and
Vietnam Wars ring true with relevance for the present.
These include the importance of building relationships
with foreign counterparts; the need to draw on numerous pertinent skills, including combat proficiency;
the requirement for substantial cross-cultural and

Capt. John Washburn, 2nd Battalion, 136th Combined Arms Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, listens as an Iraqi
army officer briefs his soldiers before a convoy 20 November 2006 near Rawah, Iraq. Washburn is a member of the 1st BCT’s military
transition team working with the Iraqi army near Rawah.
(Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Clinton Wood, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division)

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