WASHINGTON – The U.S. Army of the future will need to concentrate more on training foreign militaries, mastering other languages and customs, and honing its ability to fight smaller forces of insurgents, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.
In broad strokes, Gates laid out a vision for transforming the Army to a force better able to fight the type of unconventional warfare it has seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he said will “remain the mainstay of the contemporary battlefield for some time.”
Speaking to the Association of the United States Army, Gates said the Army may also need to re-examine its policies for promotions and assignments to make sure the best and brightest officers – who have learned much over the past six years of war – stay in the service.
Success in future wars, said Gates, “will be less a matter of imposing one’s will and more a function of shaping behavior – of friends, adversaries and, most importantly, the people in between.”
Gates said that after the Vietnam War, the military spent little time training for irregular conflicts, leaving the Army “unprepared to deal with the operations that followed in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq – the consequences and costs of which we are still struggling with today.”
In a recognition of the training and mentoring of Iraqi soldiers that U.S. forces are doing now, Gates said that “the most important military component in the war on terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries.”
His call for a greater emphasis on learning other languages is a recognition of problems the military has had recruiting and keeping enough Arabic speakers. And he said that until other civilian agencies, such as the Agency for International Development, are strengthened, the military will need to take on many of the rebuilding tasks, as it has done in Iraq.
Another key challenge for the Army, Gates said, will be to continue to improve its technologies, while not losing the critical human element of intelligence gathering.
