Photo By Capt. Olivia Cobiskey-Haftmann | U.S. Marine Col. Sandy Guptill, director of the NATO Regional Cooperation Course,...... read more read more
BAGHDAD - The room was stifling and crowded, men smoked, shuffled papers, argued. Their country was on the verge of becoming a failed state and they had five days to address the increased insecurity and growing insurgency before their country disintegrated into civil war.
This scene is not uncommon, only the language and the room change. For these men; however, the country is factious and the room is part of a Crisis Management Exercise at the Iraqi National Defense College.
The exercise is set on a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, said U.S. Marine Col. Sandy Guptill, director of the NATO Regional Cooperation Course.
"NATO typically takes this kind of approach in order to not offend nations or to have participants get to entrenched in sensitive national issues," Guptill told students. "However, the issues on this island are very real. There are problems involving security, economy, governance and corruption, border security and many more issues."
The aim of the CMX, which ran from July 25 to 29, was to provide a practical exercise to confirm and reinforce an understanding of the strategic issues that impact on effective governance, inter-departmental operations, internal security and the provision of essential services.
A team - three instructors from the NATO Defense College in Rome, advisors from NMT-I Officer Education and Training Branch, two U.N. Liaison officers and staff from the National Defense College - Iraq - helped students define the nature of the problem, decide on what a sustainable solution looked like, provided recommended objectives in the security economy governance and society arenas and identified which national and international entities might help achieve a solution.
There are no right or wrong answers, Guptill reminded students.
The 19 students - one military and 18 civilians - have worked together for a year and will graduate Sept. 10.
Jamil Othman Abdulhadi-abdulhadi, a general director at the Kurdish Regional Government Defense Ministry, said the class as given him the self-confidence he'll need to speak his opinion during a crisis. The exercise also highlighted many of the issues facing Iraq today.
"The Iraqi constitution is very clear, it deals with everything, it gives opportunities to all the people inside Iraq regardless of ethnicity or religion," said Abdulhadi. "However, it's not implemented."
It was the same with the country of Raleigh, he said. "We learned from this exercise that if we don't implement the constitution we will have many of the same problems in Raleigh."
The fictitious country of Raleigh is plagued by piracy, sabotage, civil disorder as the poverty gap between the north and south continues to grow.
One of the suggestions to alleviate the north's growing feelings of inequity in Raleigh was to develop a national "strong and professional armed forces."
Florence Gaub, a professor specialized in Arab military society, agreed multi-ethnic and religious units will work as a bonding agent and help solidify a national identity regardless of whether it's the fictitious country of Raleigh or Iraq.
"The Iraqi Army is a potential for hope," said Gaub, whose book "Military Integration After Civil Wars," come out in September. "The Iraqi military did not dissolve along ethnic lines during the Iran-Iraq war or during the Gulf War."
The military relies on cooperation of its "men" more than any other organization, she said. It also provides a place to deconstruct negative images of one another. As long as issues like pay and promotion are equitable, that the force is seen as professional, there is little chance the military will break under outside sectarian pressure.
However, this takes time to build a professional force from the ground up. Nearly 60 percent of the new Iraqi military enlisted force was incorporated from the former military - more in the officer corps - which offers a certain amount of cohesion but there is still a lot of work to do, she said.
"This is the direction both NTM-I and ITAM efforts are going into," Gaub said. "By building a strong Iraqi military we build a strong Iraq which in turn overcomes its sectarian divisions helping stabilize the region."
The five-day CMX provided a key opportunity to consolidate learning from the various topics taught during the course and achieve the long-term goal of training the NDC staff how to manage and run similar exercises, said British Brig. Gen. John Wootton, chief of Training Education and Doctrine Branch of NTM-I.
"The exercise is a vehicle for increasing a broader view of complex situations and problems that will benefit the senior officials of the government of Iraq and the KRG," Wootton said. "We want them to be self-supporting and self-sustaining. Everything we do is to develop the capability and capacity for them to run and develop the training. Part of that is the ability to critically analysis the course through internal and external validation of the course work."
| Date Taken: | 07.25.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 07.31.2010 07:21 |
| Story ID: | 53737 |
| Location: | BAGHDAD, IQ |
| Web Views: | 190 |
| Downloads: | 80 |
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