Of course how did Vietnam turn out in the long run in its relationship with China?  The PLA got their butts kicked by them in 1979 and now there is friction over the South China Sea with Vietnam siding with other regional powers and asking the US for support.  The Chinese advisory operations did not result in an alliance that was closer than lips and teeth the way their intervention on behalf of the north Koreans did (though they are probably regretting that relationship now!)

But these three factors for Chinese success (or effectiveness) outlined here are are important considerations and should factor into both decision making and planning.  There are a number of very important lessons to which we should pay attention though those with professional advisory experience will tell you they are common sense. E.g.:

In contrast, the US advisors shared no historical background with their South Vietnamese counterparts, and there was a complete lack of cultural understanding between the two. American advisors were confident in their experience from World War II and the Korean War, and any reluctance by their Vietnamese counterparts to do exactly as the Americans would do was often perceived as laziness or incompetence[II]. The foundational relationship for a successful military assistance partnership was simply not strong as it was for the Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists.

The highlighted excerpt above is an illustration of our lack of cultural understanding and the one track path we follow, e.g., fight the American way or you cannot fight.

To be clear, China’s assistance was critical. As Seals[VIII] points out, China provided professional advice, weapons, logistics, and a strategic deterrence against a US invasion of the North Vietnam. But the fighting was always left to the PAVN and thus China never took the feeling of ownership of away from the Vietnamese.

This is why I advocate that while we need expertise in counterinsurgency we should not be conducting COIN ourselves but instead  conducting foreign internal defense to help a friend, partner or ally in their internal defense and development programs so that they can defend themselves from lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism.  If we are doing it for them then we know how that turns out.

Could we substitute Iraq and Afghanistan below?

This is in stark contrast to the ARVN forces who, as US support decreased later in the war, complained that their way of fighting had become dependent on massive amounts of supply and ammunition and significant air support[VI]. They had become accustomed to fighting a materiel and ordnance heavy fight like their US advisors, which was not at all suited to the nature of counterinsurgency warfare fought among the civilian population. Nor were such methods of fighting suited to the ARVN forces capacity to sustain it.

But we should also realize that no two situations are the same and that there are no exact models that are transferable in every way but there are many lessons that do carry over.

Conclusion:

The Chinese may have simply been lucky to support a motivated and culturally compatible Vietnamese military. Given less favorable circumstances the task would no doubt have been exponentially more difficult.  Could Mao’s PLA have advised the Vietnamese, if necessary, in a strategy other than People’s War? Could it have successfully advised a military with which it shared no culture or history if the situation required it? Could Chinese encouragement have provided the necessary enthusiasm for the cause if the Vietnamese Communists were reluctant? One can only speculate. More importantly, can the US advise any of its allies in anything other than its own methods and doctrine if the situation requires something different? Can it tailor advising and assistance to a military that culturally is a poor fit for US institutions? Can the US encourage host nation ownership? Judging from the current efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the answer unfortunately seems to be no.

And a friend responded to my comments on this article on my national security list serve to remind me of this pithy quote that also illustrates one of our American strategic weaknesses:

• “The very massiveness of our intervention actually reduced our leverage. So long as we were willing to use U.S. resources and manpower as a substitute for Vietnamese, their incentive for doing more was compromised.” – Komer, Bureaucracy At War.

Why Military Advising Was So Successful in Vietnam…

by Peter Murphy

Journal Article | June 28, 2015 - 3:58pm

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-military-advising-was-so-successful-in-vietnam%E2%80%A6

Why Military Advising Was So Successful in Vietnam…for the Chinese: And What the US Can Learn From It

Peter Murphy

In post-World War II Vietnam, the fact that the Vietnamese Communists consistently demonstrated more motivation to fight and maintained greater popular support than their adversaries leads many to conclude that the communist victory was inevitable and no military action would change what was ultimately a political situation favorable to the communists. It is true that the Vietnamese Communists did enjoy these advantages over the French and later the South Vietnamese government and its poorly motivated military forces. But military action was necessary for the Vietnamese Communists to force out the French and later to force out the South Vietnamese government. No popular uprising was sufficient to create the unified Vietnamese state under communist control without the military victory.

The Vietnamese Communist government and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) received some material assistance from the Soviet Union, but were primarily advised and assisted by People’s Republic of China (PRC) throughout most of the Indochina Wars. Those Vietnamese troops decisively defeated the French, survived a war of attrition against the US, and completely overran the South Vietnamese forces that had received decades of French and US assistance. It seems the Chinese must have done something right in their military assistance effort.  There are undoubtedly many contributing factors that led to the success of the Chinese assistance effort in Vietnam.  The three most significant of those factors will be examined to see how they facilitated such a success, and why it seems the US continues to have difficulty finding similar success.

The Historical Relationship Between Advisors and the Advised

The first key factor contributing to China’s successful assistance to the Vietnamese Communists was the dynamic of the relationship between the two countries. The Vietnamese Communists and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shared a common brotherhood from their leaders’ mutual involvement in the communist movements of the early twentieth century. Additionally, both countries had recently emerged from struggles against the Japanese and had both been the victims of western imperialism. But perhaps even more important, the two countries shared a much longer historical relationship. The Chinese empires had always exerted a significant cultural and philosophical influence on Vietnam, a country on the periphery of the old Chinese tributary system. But Vietnam also had its own unique heritage and with it a history of resisting Chinese interference in Vietnamese affairs[I].

This created a situation where some cultural similarities mixed with the shared communist ideology and resistance to colonialism would facilitate a mutual understanding and a good working relationship.  Yet this was balanced by a history of Vietnamese independence and mistrust toward their larger neighbor. This second element of the relationship is important because though Vietnam and China quickly established an effective cooperative relationship, this sense of Vietnamese independence helped Vietnamese Communist leadership resist attempts by the Chinese to play too active a decision making role in what was after all a Vietnamese struggle.

In contrast, the US advisors shared no historical background with their South Vietnamese counterparts, and there was a complete lack of cultural understanding between the two. American advisors were confident in their experience from World War II and the Korean War, and any reluctance by their Vietnamese counterparts to do exactly as the Americans would do was often perceived as laziness or incompetence[II]. The foundational relationship for a successful military assistance partnership was simply not strong as it was for the Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists.

The Assistance and Mentorship Was Appropriate

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-military-advising-was-so-successful-in-vietnam%E2%80%A6

If we cannot get the highlighted line imprinted in our brains or at least tattooed on the inside of our eyelids we will never be successful at working through and with indigenous or host nation forces.  This is probably our single most problematic weakness with all the concepts of building partner capacity, train advise and assist, organize, train, equip, rebuild and advise, and yes even foreign internal defense.  We have spent the last 14 years believing we could organize and train Afghans and Iraqis and others and yet we have not learned from history and we have tried so hard to create not only militaries in our image but also many other institutions.  We have spent so much time coming up with new concepts with new names and variations on foreign internal defense that have NOT been built on the important history we should have learned long ago and instead we continue to conduct social experiments to try to create armies and governments in our image.  Until we understand and accept the sentence below we will never be able to work effectively with host nation forces.

Can the Iraqis readjust their army to better reflect culture and clan in time for the next offensive? Can the United States commit to an air campaign to rival Desert Storm? Can we provide enough moral and technical support to make all this possible by the beginning of the next campaign season in April and May 2016? I don't know. But I do know that history has been harsh to those who try to build alien armies in their own image. All the American firepower and "boots on the ground" will be for naught unless we allow the Iraqis to fight their war their way.

The Iraqi Army Can't Be Westernized

Arabs fight best in formations organized around familiar groups sharing more than the same national flag.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12104187675579354294504581041941772488936

By  

ROBERT H. SCALES

June 25, 2015 7:10 p.m. ET 

42 COMMENTS

Twenty-four years ago, in June 1991, as American troops began to gear up to invade Iraq, I started writing and researching my book "Certain Victory," the U.S. Army's official history of the Gulf War. I spent nine months reading documents and interviewing soldiers ranging from private to four-star general. I asked one question of everyone: How did the U.S. defeat the world's fourth-largest military in only 100 hours of combat?

The universal answers from the soldiers: We fought with superior equipment, bought by the taxpayers during the Reagan years; our leaders overcame the malaise of Vietnam to build a new volunteer military; the revolutions in training and doctrine of the 1980s proved their worth.

All true. But as I started to write, I knew something was missing. One afternoon at my office I convened a roundtable discussion with some of the most successful operational commanders against Saddam Hussein in Desert Storm. I asked the same question and got the same stock answers. But then one general and dear friend of mine paused for a moment, looked into the air pensively and said: "You know, Bob, Arab armies really can't do this very well. Remember we not only fought an Arab army, we fought with Arab armies, and the Saudis and Syrians weren't any better than Saddam's Republican Guard."

It was a politically incorrect moment to be sure. But after watching nearly a quarter-century of history pass, I must conclude he had a point. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) certainly knew this to be true when he ignored orders from senior British Army officers to make his Saudi Bedouin brothers into a proper conventional force. The Israeli Defense Forces have racked up four wins and zero losses in wars against Arab armies that tried to fight them with Western methods and equipment. Our march to Baghdad in 2003 lasted only three weeks and crushed Iraq's conventional army.

The stark consistency of contemporary history tells us several things as we ponder why the Iraqi military is proving to be so inept in its war against Islamic State. First is the immutable tenet that wars are human endeavors and that culture counts. Arab culture is based on family, tribe and clan. Thus it should come as no surprise that Arabs fight best in formations that are organically grown and organized around familiar groups that share more than the same national flag.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12104187675579354294504581041941772488936

Bring back the MATA course at the US Army Special Warfare Center and School:  See page 34 of the Joint Staff Decade of War Report: http://blogs.defensenews.com/saxotech-access/pdfs/decade-of-war-lessons-learned.pdf

V/R

Dave

Giving Advising its Due

by Carl Forsling

Journal Article | January 22, 2014 - 3:57pm

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/giving-advising-its-due

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Giving Advising its Due

Carl Forsling

Almost every conflict the United States has fought since Korea has involved advising foreign forces.  In Vietnam, advising was how we got into and out of that war.  In Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, Americans have trained foreign units at the tactical level.  In Iraq (the second time around) and Afghanistan, enabling foreign militaries to assume security responsibilities on their own has been a key part of the operational and strategic goals.

The special operations forces doing this mission, such as the US Army Special Forces and the Marine Foreign Military Training Unit, are well-resourced and given wide freedom of action.  However, those units do not perform the preponderance of training and advising foreign forces in major theaters, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That has been the job of an assortment of conventional troops given this extraordinary mission.

The final success in those campaigns does not rest upon the battlefield victories of large American units.  It rests in the abilities of host nation security forces.  Good advisors, increasing the capabilities of host nations, are worth many times their numbers in line units. 

In spite of this fact, the selection, training, and employment of advisors does not reflect either the stated or actual importance of the mission.

For example, most of advisor team leaders assigned to advise Afghan commanders of battalion-level or higher are greatly different from those assigned to command American battalions.  An American battalion commander is board selected, once to be a lieutenant colonel and again to be a commander.  After he completes his tour as a commander, he will likely attend a top level school, be it the Army War College or the Marine Corps War College, followed by another tour in a high-level staff before being promoted to colonel.

By comparison, the advisor to a host nation commander may as well be randomly selected.  He could be an officer just finishing a tour at an operational unit, waiting for the three years he needs to move.  He could be an officer passed-over for promotion.  He could be basically anyone.

The rest of his advisor team was likely also grabbed from units for any number of similar reasons.  His officers were those who, at best, happened to be between assignments, and at worst, were those who were unneeded or unwanted at their home units, be that for them getting out of the military or for being on a commander’s excrement list.  His enlisted were also likely not in key billets or crucial to their home units.

In addition, save for a few select billets, such as logistics or communications, most advisors are not working within their specialties, so they are losing credibility within their community every day they are on the job.  Advisor duty is not seen as a career-enhancing or broadening billet.

As currently designed, advisor duty is not going to attract the sort of individual that the military institution values.  Nor does it promote those individuals within the institution afterwards.  That shows the priority associated with it, and that the grand words given honoring the importance of host nation security forces are just that.  Words.  Making an effort to professionalize advisor duty will greatly increase its effectiveness.

Several steps can be taken to professionalize advisors within the conventional forces of the US military.  Those start by holding the duty in high esteem.  Typically, advisor teams are organized one grade below the unit they are advising—teams led by majors advise battalion-level elements, those led by lieutenant colonels advise regimental-level elements, and so on.  Lieutenant colonels advising large units should be selected for advisor duty by a formal board, just as lieutenant colonels are selected for battalion command.  Only those lieutenant colonels who have previously served as advisors should be considered to lead advisor teams at the regimental-level or higher.  Upon completing a tour leading a regimental-level advisor team, they should be eligible for top level schools and considered for colonel alongside their line commander counterparts.  Over time, having an additional track for assession to the senior ranks will encourage top officers to volunteer for advisor duty.

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/giving-advising-its-due