June 24,
2008: For U.S. Army officers, spending
time training foreign soldiers, as part of some peacekeeping operation, will no
longer be career suicide. Until recently, such duty did not count towards
promotion, as much as time spent commanding a unit.
But one of
the most important peacekeeping tasks is training the locals to take care of
their own security. For the U.S., normally, the Special Forces takes care of
this sort of thing. Such training duty is simply one of the jobs that Special
Forces operators are prepared to take care of. But when there's a really big
operation, like Iraq or Afghanistan, regular army officers are sent off on
these training missions as well. This is important work, as the sooner the
locals can deal with security problems, the quicker American troops can leave.
But until the recent change, army officers saw such training chores as another
example of "no good deed goes unpunished." But with a simple change to the
formula used to determine eligibility for promotion, trainers get rewarded for
their efforts, even though most would rather be commanding American troops.
