It's Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps
Recently retired Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker stated in his valedictory testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Army's counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan are not an aberration; instead, they offer "a peek into the future" of what kinds of wars the nation will be fighting throughout the 21st century.
This report, authored by Dr. John Nagl, an Army Lieutenant Colonel who served in Desert Storm and in Operation Iraqi Freedom and currently leads the training of Army advisors for Iraq and Afghanistan, is the first in a CNAS series of reports on the future of the U.S. military.
The report suggests that future counterinsurgency campaigns will require a very different U.S. Army than the one we currently have, and that the increase in Army end-strength announced by the President in December 2006 should be aimed at helping to build that Army.
The planned increases in Army end-strength should not simply create additional Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) - brigades that will be in far less demand two years from now as the American combat role in Iraq diminishes. Instead, this report argues that the Army should create a permanent standing Advisory Corps of 20,000 Combat Advisors, and describes in detail how this can be accomplished.
This report was published by CNAS in June 2007 as part of "The Future of the U.S. Military" publication series (see below).
