When U.S. trainers returned to Iraq in November to rebuild an Iraqi army that fell apart last summer against the Islamic State, Army 1st Division Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Grinston was tasked with rewriting the training manual so the next wave of Iraqi fighters will be able to hold its own in Mosul later this year.
Before holding his first class in late December, Grinston took some time to observe what had happened to a force he had helped train the first time around to identify what needed to be changed. He has been revising the manual ever since, even as his first Iraqi trainees have finished a full training cycle and are about to be dispatched by the Iraqi government for their first missions.
In the last few months, U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey have discussed the political aspects that eroded the will of the force — the loss of faith between Iraq’s Sunni population and the Shia-dominated government. But there also were practical factors that led to last summer’s collapse, Grinston said, namely that when U.S. personnel left in 2011, continuous training came to a halt.
“They were mostly just sitting on checkpoints, not doing good maintenance on their weapons, and not doing training. If you took any force [and let its skills erode] for a number of years, they would not be able to defeat an enemy,” Grinston said.
When Grinston got his first recruits in December, his assignment was to quickly turn the trainees, many of whom were new to combat, into an organized fighting force who would not run when they come into contact with the Islamic State.
“That is actually what we were asked to do — to get these forces ready. We were really looking at ‘how do we rebuild the Army, and how do we give them the will to fight?’ It is a challenge every day,” he said.
Grinston’s first class of about 1,500 infantry recruits went through six weeks of basic training, on how to shoot, maneuver and communicate on the battlefield, and basic medical responses. Then they received three weeks of advanced training that focused on more complex maneuvers.
He also incorporated two new elements so the forces will stand their ground against Islamic State fighters. First, he copied the “real-world” pre-deployment training scenarios that the U.S. military ran its soldiers through at Fort Polk, La., during the later years of combat. In that training, soldiers run though fake villages and encounter threats that mimic what they would experience in battle — from explosions to buried IEDs to civilian interaction.
“We do opposing forces…We use the same type of IED they’ve found in the past, so they learn how to defeat these techniques the enemy is using — to get them used to voices of battle so that the first time they hear the ‘boom’ it doesn’t scare them to death and they don’t run away.”
The second was a focus on ethics — not only on how to treat Iraqi civilians they encounter, but also to get Iraqi generals involved in addressing what Grinston called “the mental part of it.”
“That is the reason we train — so we don’t run away when we come into contact. Those classes with the Iraqi generals and our soldiers on the will and ethics — it gets after the mental part of it.”
Across Iraq, the training brigades are mostly still separated by sect, but Grinston said at least one brigade is integrated. Since December, more than 6,000 fighters have gone through basic training at the four U.S. sites in Iraq. But it was not clear how many of those have begun additional advanced training, although the first graduates of the advanced training recently displayed their abilities to the Iraqi defense minister in a combined operations exercise that involved coordinating some air and ground support.
None of the Iraqi trainees participated in the recent fighting in Tikrit, but that victory and the training has helped them build confidence for their upcoming battle in Mosul.
Grinston said he has seen a change in the attitudes of the troops, especially after the joint exercise and the recent victory in Tikrit.
“They once thought the enemy was 10 feet tall,” Grinston said. “In the last couple of weeks their attitude has changed — they see it differently. The soldiers are excited and feel ‘we can do this.’ They no longer fear the Daesh,” Grinston said, using the Arabic slang term of the Islamic State.
