Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Page 29

BUILDING PARTNERSHIP CAPACITY

For years, junior officers in
the JAF had been performing the
functions that Western armies,
including our own, normally
designated as NCO duties. These
ranged from accountability of
equipment to training management. Such a broad span of
responsibility for a junior officer might work adequately in a
placid and routine-bound garrison
environment but not for a force
deployed thousands of miles from
home facing an adaptive enemy in
a dynamic, hostile environment.
In the caldron of wartime operations, JAF officers simply could
not effectively oversee in person
every aspect of the broad array
of key activities units needed to
perform in a combat environment.
Difficulty in traveling between
subordinate unit locations under
dangerous conditions impeded
their approach to commanding
and controlling forces. Moreover,
there simply was not time enough
in the day to oversee every activity.

Building a
Noncommissioned
Officer Corps

of Staff, knew by 2010 what was
missing when his forces where
struggling to adapt in Afghanistan:
a professional NCO corps.
Consequently, after the JAF had
two years of combat experience in
Afghanistan with mixed results,
al Zaben and U.S. senior advisors
agreed on the need to make institutional changes to NCO development, and they outlined a plan.

In this context, al Zaben sought
to build the kind of robust NCO
corps th