Re: Saudi Arabia drafts in up to 10,000 troops ahead of pr...

[Guest guest]

If these are indeed new recruits, their performance in a fight will be questionable. It is easy to drag men into military service and get raw numbers, but finding quality leaders to lead them is another matter. Good leaders are rare and training them can take years of classroom teaching and field experience. It was estimated in Afghanistan that it would take as much as 15 years to train up a decent corps of NCOs and officers. Many other nations have the same projected time span.

What's interesting is that a lot of the countries we devote expensively trained troops and loads of cash to helping train their soldiers often lose what we teach them shortly after our trainers leave. The reason for this is two-fold. On the one hand, these nations don't have a history of creating good soldiers. Usually this is a two-tiered system where officers have their posts through some kind of pull and live well while the troops are treated as cannon fodder, are barely fed or trained. Such troops aren't good for much more than beating up protesters and might not be good at that since they might defect because of their own bad treatment.

The second reason is that many of these nations fear a special operations groups of well trained soldiers because of the frequency with which such groups plan coups. So, while the US might train up a unit, the host country often disbands the unit as soon as the US troops leave. Sent back to their regular units, those skill quickly degrade and are lost and are rarely passed on. The palace guard units are usually family, tribal members, etc., that the rulers think they can trust enough to be trained a little better than rabble.

In a message dated 3/4/2011 9:08:49 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

Saudi Arabia drafts in up to 10,000 troops ahead of protests