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Awake Before the Sound of the Guns

Preparing Advisors for Conflict

 

Maj. Robert G. Rose, U.S. Army

 

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On 25 June 1950, Capt. Joseph R Darrigo awakened to artillery fire in Kaesong. He was the lone American from the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) on the 38th parallel as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) initiated its assault on the Republic of Korea (ROK).¹ With an armored spearhead of Soviet-provided T-34 tanks, the DPRK achieved complete surprise against the ROK Army that was not deployed for battle.² It was the rainy season; an attack was unexpected. A third of Darrigo’s partners and most other advisors were on leave. As he hurried to assist his partners in the 12th Infantry Regiment to mount a hasty defense, he probably wished for more time: more time to organize a defense, more time for his partners and fellow advisors to mobilize for the fight, more time to advise the ROK Army, and more time to prepare them to fight an enemy ready for large-scale combat operations.

“Perhaps the most important limitation imposed upon KMAG was that of time itself,” concluded Robert Sawyer, a veteran of KMAG and author of the Army’s historical study on it.³ With more time, they might have produced an army that could have withstood the DPRK’s onslaught or even deterred them entirely. Instead, KMAG was not prepared to fight. They did not even know if they should fight or withdraw to Japan.⁴

KMAG was not prepared for war. In war, and preparing for war, time is the ultimate commodity. As the U.S. Army employs advisors worldwide to deter conflict and, if necessary, prevail with our partners in combat, we must ensure that we are effectively using the time that we have. We must learn from KMAG how to employ advisors for war.

It is easy to be myopic about the role of advisors, to think advisors just advise. After all, it is in the name. Army Techniques Publication 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade, defines advising as “providing guidance, coaching, and counseling to a foreign counterpart to make their operations or activities more successful.”⁵ However, providing guidance becomes a lesser task in large-scale combat operations, particularly when paired with a peer partner force. The partner forces we would likely fight alongside in a conflict with Russia or China are highly competent with time-tested systems. There is little time for coaching them to develop new systems as T-72 tanks approach.

In conflict, advisors’ true value comes from their ability to assess, liaise, and support. With these tasks, advisors coordinate between U.S. and partner forces to smooth over the frictions in coalition operations and achieve battlefield effectiveness. Advisors need to invest in the critical resource of time to effectively assess, liaise, and support. They need to deliberately prepare for these roles with their designated partner force.

However, advisors face a problem in preparing for conflict. Too often, they are seen primarily as a force for competition below armed conflict. In competition, advising predominates over other advisor tasks. Advisors become focused on building partner capacity, creating rapport, and hopefully influencing them to stay in the United States’ orbit. Although those are worthy goals, we need to prioritize our limited number of advisors. Considering our poor record of using advisors to build capabilities and influence partners in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Niger, Mali, Chad, and elsewhere, we should recognize that advisors are not the optimal tool to politically influence a country to either reform or align with the United States.⁶

Advisors are often not preparing for conflict when they are employed as a competition force. In Europe, for example, the United States could deploy advisors to Albania to help advise them on capability development, but they would be useless if Russia attacked the Baltic. Advisors cannot suddenly arrive to a conflict and expect to provide value. They will just be a burden on the partner force. They need to have already invested time with the partners they will fight with so that they are not caught even more flatfooted than KMAG. Although KMAG was surprised, at least it was in the right country and already had invested time into its relationship with the ROK Army.

Assessment

To be effective, advisors need to have time with their partner force to have a deep understanding of them. T. E. Lawrence had spent years as an academic studying the Middle East, but he still was an outsider to the specific context of the revolt in the Hejaz. Even though he was supposed to be an expert, he recognized his limited understanding, explaining that “under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”⁷

Those “odd conditions” are not just surface-level, outward displays of culture. Advisors need a deeper understanding. Advisors need to know their partner’s strategic culture, theory of victory, economics, demography, and geography. They need to understand the military’s personnel system, doctrine, and military-industrial base. They need to understand the logic of why a partner operates. This all takes time.

Frequently, the United States undervalues the time it takes for such understanding. It has been overconfident in the universality of its expertise and approach to war. As an example of the U.S. Army’s historic lack of focus on understanding, it has put minimal investment in language training. In KMAG, hardly any advisors learned Korean. In a survey of 255 advisors in 1953, no respondent reported using Korean to communicate with their partner.⁸ These trends repeated in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Today’s advisors in security force assistance brigades (SFAB) do not undergo any language training. When working through interpreters or relying on partner forces that speak English, advisors miss nuance and cannot identify when issues are concealed.

Advisors are too valuable of an assessment tool to be missing such nuance. Advisors are the lone Americans with a hand on the pulse of a partner force. Without the ground-level understanding provided by advisors, senior decision-makers act in a void. In the latter years of the war in Afghanistan, without advisors at the local level, policymakers were ignorant of the Afghan army’s will to fight. In Korea, by 1953, the U.S. Army recognized the importance of information provided by KMAG. KMAG advisors were tasked with a dual mission “to advise” and “to function as an information gathering and reporting agency.”⁹

Whether due to lack of time, language, or understanding, at the war’s onset, KMAG did not provide accurate reports. Its commander, Brig. Gen. William L. Roberts, claimed that “the South Koreans have the best damn army outside the United States!”¹⁰ With advisors sending such assessments, Time reported on 5 June 1950, “Most observers now rate the 100,000-man South Korean army as the best of its size in Asia ... And no one now believes that the Russian-trained North Korean army could pull off a quick, successful invasion of the South without heavy reinforcements.”¹¹ Twenty days later, that same North Korean army smashed through the ROK Army.

Such wrong assessments were made even though the ROK Army had no tanks, medium artillery, heavy mortars, antitank weapons, and combat aircraft, and it lacked spare parts with 35 percent of its vehicles unserviceable.¹² KMAG had emphasized developing internal security forces for Korea to defeat communist guerrillas.¹³ Even though the ROK government was concerned about an invasion from the North and pushed to develop a force to deter a conventional invasion, the United States did not support providing heavy equipment to Korea.¹⁴ KMAG influenced this decision by reporting that the Korean terrain did not lend itself to efficient tank operations.¹⁵

KMAG had not accurately assessed the threat. They had not prepared the Koreans to deal with enemy armor and “had talked endlessly about the insignificance and vulnerability of Soviet tanks.”¹⁶ Therefore, the Koreans did not have the tools to deal with armor. There was not a single antitank mine in Korea that could have blocked mountain roads.¹⁷ In a crucial opening penetration at Uijongbu, forty tanks filed through the narrow valley. A regretful U.S. military advisor recalled, “If one antitank crew had been able to pick off the lead and rear tanks, the thirty-eight others would have been sitting ducks.”¹⁸ But advisors had not assessed that they needed that capability.

The tanks foiled repeated attempts by ROK commanders to reestablish a defense. KMAG had advised their Korean counterparts on a defense plan, but it was “hasty, ill-advised, and impossible.”¹⁹ They did not base the plan on an accurate assessment of the capabilities of the newly created ROK commanders and staffs.

For a more contemporary example of shortfalls in assessments, I observed American-led training for a Ukrainian brigade that was not grounded in an accurate assessment of the brigade’s capabilities or the Russian threat. Although the training was on the military decision-making process (MDMP), the trainers did not understand the Ukrainian planning process or the staff members familiarity with MDMP. The trainers did not know how the brigade would be employed, so they reverted to a standard program of instruction for an American brigade. Even though the Ukrainian brigade would soon be thrown into the defense, its staff trained on attacking against a single enemy battalion with a three-to-one superiority in all warfighting functions. In the scenario, the Ukrainians had to breach a single two-hundred-meter minefield. The scenario was not grounded in the reality of Russian capabilities, force densities, or defenses in depth. If advisors had time to assess the brigade, they could have optimized the brigade’s training to properly prepare it to fight the Russians.

Advisors need to have accurate assessments from the tactical to strategic level. KMAG had been wrong in their assessment of the strategic situation, but ROK had been right in their appreciation of the threat from the North. The partner force’s strategic assessments will often differ. They will also have different political objectives. Advisors must understand the potential friction that can come from these differences.

At National Training Center (NTC) Rotation 24-03, I experienced a realistic scenario of friction from differing political objectives. I was partnered with a division from the fictional country of Pirtuni in a scenario that simulated a Russian invasion of Poland. Like the Polish in 1939, our partner wanted to defend forward near their borders to prevent a fait accompli. They did not want the enemy occupying their land and then digging in, as Russia has done in Ukraine. However, 1st Armored Division (1AD), the U.S. Army unit fighting alongside the Pirtunians, had expected them to withdraw toward 1AD to allow 1AD to destroy the enemy. Without advisors understanding this friction, 1AD would not have been in a position to affect the battle.

By investing time into assessing a partner, advisors will understand how a partner will fight based on political objectives, the enemy, the terrain, and preexisting war plans. For example, in Europe, advisors must understand how partner forces fit into NATO’s operational plans. They need to know specifically what that partner force will need to be asked to do and how ready it will be to fight so that they do not end up like the ROK Army unprepared to face T-34s.

Support

While KMAG might have assessed the threat wrong, the advisors played a crucial role in supporting the beleaguered ROK Army with air support. A month into the war, the U.S. Air Force conducted seven thousand close support and interdiction airstrikes that slowed the North Korean rate of advance to two miles a day. This support provided critical time to form the Pusan perimeter and prevent a total DPRK victory. Gen. Matthew Ridgeway said that except for air power, “the war would have been over in 60 days with all Korea in Communist hands.”²⁰

In conflict, the access that advisors have to U.S. intelligence, joint fires, and logistics can make a decisive impact on the success of a partner force. In our recent counterinsurgency campaigns, advisors have sometimes had to withhold aid to force partners to build their own capabilities; in a desperate struggle of large-scale combat, winning the immediate fight takes priority over capability building. The moral hazard of doing for a partner what they need to do for themself becomes trivial.

During the retreat toward Pusan, KMAG advisors often dropped their advisory roles and became operational. They were integrated members of ROK staffs, not simply offering advice but assisting in planning and bringing in U.S. assets.²¹

To support a partner force, advisors need to understand what is available and how to employ it. They need to have invested time to develop connections across organizations to understand what they can call upon and who to influence to get that support. Sawyer reports that KMAG advisors had to “beg, borrow, and steal” from U.S. Eighth Army units to receive support.²² With the way contemporary U.S. divisions and corps align assets in targeting cycles, it can be difficult for advisors to get support without fully understanding those units’ processes. During the NTC rotation, when the enemy was breaking through the Pirtuni defense, we had reached a trigger to request 1AD to seal the point of penetration with a scatterable minefield. It took over three hours for the request to be approved, far too slow to have an impact on the battle. If we had more time to establish a common understanding of release criteria and processes for the U.S. division to support the Pirtunis, we could have support that was responsive enough to matter.

In addition to supporting partners, advisors need to invest time into understanding how to support themselves. In Afghanistan and Iraq, advisors could easily rely on U.S. logistics networks. They will not have that luxury in a future war. While in Korea, operating isolated from American units, KMAG advisors ate Korean food and borrowed clothing, gasoline, and tentage from the ROK.²³ Advisors will need to understand what partners can realistically provide and what acquisition and cross-servicing agreements are established to formalize such support. By understanding what partner forces can support, advisors will be able to tailor their equipment to endure a conflict even if it means using civilian vehicles and local purchases. Advisors need to ensure that they are a minimal burden on their partner forces.

Liaison

Advisors, through their liaison role, provide support to partner forces, share assessments, and achieve shared understanding across U.S. and partner forces. According to Army Techniques Publication 3-96.1, “Liaison is the contact or intercommunication maintained between elements of military forces and other agencies to ensure mutual understanding and unity of purpose and action.”²⁴ To liaise, advisors need to understand the optimal placement of personnel and equipment to allow for effective communication. Providing an effective communication architecture between a partner and U.S. forces is a vital function of advisors.

On 28 June 1950, in the chaos of the retreat from Seoul, while three divisions and the KMAG headquarters were still north of the Han River, ROK Army engineers prematurely blew up the bridges across the river. KMAG had to ford the river. Abandoning their equipment in the chaotic withdrawal, the one vehicle that Col. Sterling Wright, KMAG chief of staff, was determined to save was his radio truck. They were able to procure a raft for the truck. The truck allowed KMAG to maintain communications with its scattered advisors and with U.S. forces in Japan. Critically, just after crossing the river, the truck allowed KMAG to coordinate with the U.S. Air Force as their first sortie roared overhead to strafe the pursuing DPRK forces.²⁵

In Suwon, twenty miles south of the Han River, Brig. Gen. John H. Church, the new KMAG commander, set up his headquarters. He flew in from Japan with orders from Gen. Douglas MacArthur to serve as his liaison with ROK Army.²⁶ Church suggested that the ROK chief of staff Gen. Chae Byong-duk move his headquarters into the same building. The combined headquarters established a common operational picture between ROK and U.S. forces and coordinated a coherent defense.²⁷

Under their previous commander, Roberts, KMAG advisors had become accustomed to sharing workspace with their counterparts. KMAG did not have a separate headquarters building before the war.²⁸ He believed that without such intimacy, advisors would not be effective. Unfortunately, during recent wars, often for security considerations, U.S. units became habituated to barriers with partners. These barriers inhibit shared understanding through both a lack of physical presence and the psychological walls of suspicion. Advisors, particularly when dispersed in small teams or as individuals, as KMAG often operated, need to be comfortable working in partner headquarters. Advisors cannot expect to show up in the middle of a fight and grab a desk. They need to invest time to build rapport, establish workspaces, and ensure that advisors have the appropriate communication systems to provide added value.

At a basic level, advisors need to analyze where they need to place personnel with the appropriate expertise in both partner forces and U.S. headquarters. Advisors cannot assume that partner forces command posts mimic U.S. practices. Each partner will have different approaches to command and control that will impact advisor placement. In a 2023 Military Review article on experiences at NTC Rotation 23-04, Maj. Zachary Morris recommended a task organization for covering a partner battalion; however, that concept was optimized for that unique partner force.²⁹ Advisors need to develop standard operating procedures for their placement specific to their partner force. For example, partnering with the Bulgarian army, we learned that they employ main and alternate command posts, which have redundant functions across warfighting functions, unlike U.S. main and rear command posts that have specialized functions. We needed to balance our advisors between the command posts and cross-train them to cover all warfighting functions.

We also needed to ensure they had the correct communications equipment. SFAB teams have an impressive communications suite, but we need to tailor our capabilities to our partner and their operational environment. We need to be able to operate dispersed, at distance, and with appropriate bandwidth. However, we also need to minimize our electromagnetic signature to not reveal our partner’s positions.

In Europe, our partners have learned from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to use stringent practices for electromagnetic concealment. To not give away positions with military-band tactical communications, they lay telephone lines for kilometers between units. They hard-wire command posts into their national network instead of relying on satellite communications. They expect to operate in the basements of nondescript buildings. Advisors need to conform to such methods.

During our NTC rotation, we initially planned to use tactical communications; however, Ghost Team coached us that the best practice for survivability was to “hide in plain sight” by using civilian bands. We used a combination of Starlink, masked connections to the cellphone network, and hardwiring to the physical network, to minimize our signature. This approach provided us with both better connectivity and far more concealment than units that used traditional military connectivity during the rotation. We integrated into our partner’s command posts in urban areas.

In addition to integrating with partner forces, advisors need to liaise with U.S. units to coordinate efforts across a coalition. Those U.S. forces may or may not have a command relationship with the partner force, but advisors need to facilitate cooperation. Advisors need to understand U.S. units’ systems and processes before being thrown into the friction of war. Tying into those systems takes time. At NTC, we worked over ten days to troubleshoot connectivity issues with 1AD. It took time, but it revealed how important it is for advisors to establish that interoperability early. It also reinforced how difficult it would be for a partner force to communicate with a U.S. force without advisors. During Austere Challenge 24, an exercise rehearsing a defense of the Baltics, advisors from 4th SFAB proved essential in establishing digital communications between the Estonian 1st Division and U.S. V Corps.

Liaison reduces friction, such as at NTC when the Pirtunian and U.S. divisions both planned to use the same locations for command posts and artillery positions. Liaisons can also prevent catastrophes in coordination. During the Korean War at Wawon, the 2nd Infantry Division instructed the newly arrived Turkish brigade to guard their flank but did not establish a liaison with them to provide shared understanding. They did not realize the Koreans in front of them were withdrawing ROK units. They engaged those ROK units and reported a victory. They assumed they had prevailed but then were in no position to fight the main strength of the pursuing Chinese forces. The Chinese overran the surprised Turkish brigade.³⁰ Advisors coordinating between the forces of those three nations could have prevented that disaster.

Advising

Of course, advisors will still advise to assist partners in preparing for conflict. However, our likely partners will not be building a force from scratch as in Afghanistan or Iraq. They are competent militaries with tested techniques and proud traditions. To coach such militaries, advisors will need a deep understanding of how they can improve. We cannot assume our approaches are superior and just coach partners on them.

I felt strongly that I could assist the Bulgarian army on combined arms rehearsals (CAR). I had even produced a video for NTC on how to conduct CARs.³¹ When at a division exercise, a Bulgarian brigade commander invited me to a battalion’s rehearsal, I was excited for the opportunity to coach them. When I got to the “rehearsal,” I saw a battalion commander and his subordinate commanders in a concealed observation post, each with a map, discussing their defense while pointing out their actions on the very terrain they would fight on. It was nothing like an American CAR, but it was very productive. They synchronized their plan while conducting a recon of the terrain they would defend.

I discussed possible issues with the rehearsal. What if they could not overwatch the terrain? What if they were passing through another unit in the offense? The Bulgarians admitted that they were valid points, but why build an American-style terrain model and gather people together for a theatrical production that enemy unmanned aircraft systems might observe?

The Bulgarian rehearsal would not work in the flat, wooded terrain of the Joint Readiness Training Center or in an offense across dozens of kilometers at NTC. However, the rehearsal would work in a defense of the rolling hills in the cleared farmlands of the Black Sea Coast. It was ideal for the context that they would have to fight in. To effectively advise, advisors need time to understand such context.

Advisors Need Clarity to Prepare for Conflict

All these tasks I described take time to prepare for. Advisors can only prepare for them if they know the specific partner and context in which they will fight. KMAG struggled in the opening days of the Korean War because it did not have a specified role in conflict that it could have prepared for. KMAG did not even know if it was supposed to fight in the event of war. A few months earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had left Korea out of his description of a “defensive perimeter [that] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus.”³² The Department of the Army had not specified KMAG’s wartime mission, and the U.S. ambassador had provided no guidance.³³ It also had an unclear command relationship with MacArthur’s Far East Command.³⁴ To effectively assess, support, and liaison, let alone advise, advisors need to have a clear mission for conflict and the time to prepare for it. They need to have a defined role in operational plans and a clear command relationship with U.S. forces in their theater.

There is a trade-off here. Advisors are often prioritized to countries to serve as a competition force to establish rapport, display American commitment, and build capabilities. For advisors to prepare for their role in conflict, they will have less time to work with such partners. There is a potential middle ground, with advisors still working in countries in the competitive space but having an enduring, episodic relationship with a partner force at the front lines of a possible conflict. For example, advisors could primarily work in North Macedonia but regularly interact with an Estonian brigade, so they are ready to integrate with them if Russia builds up forces in the Baltic.

Forward-positioned advisors can allow U.S. support and coordination with partner forces in the opening hours of a conflict, but only if provided the time to understand their partner force and threat beforehand. We cannot have another lone Capt. Joseph Darrigo without the time to assist our partners in stopping our enemies.

Given sufficient time, KMAG succeeded. Before the war, advisors had little familiarity with Korea. As the war progressed, advisors were recruited from soldiers with experience fighting in Korea.³⁵ They understood the context of the war and could effectively advise the ROK Army. By 1953, KMAG had assisted the ROK Army in growing to a six-hundred-thousand-man force that held two-thirds of the front line and took more than two-thirds of the total casualties.³⁶ Unfortunately, the Army did not retain the lessons learned from KMAG.

Why the Army Keeps Forgetting How to Advise

America has continued to struggle in advising because it does not invest time in advisors. The U.S. Army does not allow advisors to focus on a partner and its specific context. One KMAG advisor, explaining why advisors did not learn Korean stated that there was “no point in Americans learning Korean—we’ll be in Timbuktu next year.”³⁷ Advisors today face the same lack of incentive for a long-term commitment to understand a partner force. This shortsightedness comes from the U.S. Army’s personnel system, which does not allow the career flexibility for advisors to fully understand a partner and prepare to fight with them in conflict.³⁸

Advisors need a long-term commitment to a partner, as Lawrence spent years in Arabia before the Arab Revolt or Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener advised the Egyptian army for over a decade before they crushed the Mahdi in the Anglo-Sudan War.³⁹ In the U.S. Army, before the inflexible, centralized personnel system was emplaced after World War II, officers could spend years understanding a country.⁴⁰ Gen. John Pershing served four years in the Philippines building ties with local leaders and speaking with the Moros without needing an interpreter.⁴¹ During the interwar period, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway spent years instructing Spanish at West Point and serving and advising in Latin America.⁴² Unfortunately, the personnel system in place since the 1940s does not afford advisors such time to invest in partners; rather, it has caused underperformance.

Studies on Vietnam reported that “the system of short tours destroyed continuity in the U.S. advisor effort and ensured that it was dominated by amateurs.”⁴³ Vietnamese commanders recommended that their U.S. advisors have two-year tours to have continuity and devotion to a unit.⁴⁴ A RAND survey of Vietnam advisors showed that just as in Korea, advisors did not have time to learn the language and establish true understanding. Its primary recommendation was intensive language training.⁴⁵

Given limited time, advisors need a clear mission and need to prioritize their training time in understanding the partner and the context in which they will serve. Advisors currently spend too much of their time training generic tasks. Even their culminating training events are with make-believe partners like the Pirtunis. In a study of advisors, RAND reported that it was “almost impossible to find a complaint by any advisor ... who felt tactically, technically, or militarily unprepared for his duties ... however, almost to a man, advisors felt compelled to talk about the demanding challenges posed by language, cultural differences, and host-nation institutional barriers. It was in these areas—at the heart of an advisor’s effectiveness—that most felt inadequately prepared.”⁴⁶ If our personnel system will not allow us to invest the time to create effective advisors, we can at least focus their limited training time on understanding their particular partner force.

Now is the time to invest in advisor’s understanding of their specific problem set. Now is the time for them to become experts on their partners and their context. Now they need to know their role—now, and not when enemy artillery is waking us up.

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Notes

1. Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG in Peace and War (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 115, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA232746.pdf.
2. T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War (Macmillan, 1963), 35.
3. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 187.
4. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 35.
5. Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade (U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2020), 4-25.
6. On how Afghanistan and Vietnam were failures of overly centralized governance, which military advising did little to address, see Robert Rose, “All Power Is Local,” Military Review 103, no. 1 (January-February 2023): 76–87, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JF-23/Rose/rose-all-power-is-local-v1.pdf.
7. T. E. Lawrence, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” The Arab Bulletin, 20 August 1917, https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/lawrence.htm.
8. Alfred H. Hausrath, The KMAG Advisor: Roles and Problems of the Military Advisor in Developing an Indigenous Army for Combat Operations in Korea, Technical Memorandum ORO-T-355 (Johns Hopkins University Operations Research Office, February 1957), 67, https://nautilus.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/The-KMAG-Advisor-Role-and-Problems-of-the-Military-Advisor-in-Developing-Indigenous-Army-for-Combat-Operations-in-Korea.pdf.
9. Office of the Chief, Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG), Advisor’s Procedure Guide (KMAG Headquarters, 3 June 1953).
10. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 7.
11. “KOREA: Progress Report, Jun. 5, 1950,” Time, 5 June 1950, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,812568,00.html.
12. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 104.
13. Ibid., 57.
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Ibid., 100.
16. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 72.
17. Ibid., 67.
18. 18 “BATTLE OF KOREA: Little Man & Friends,” Time, 10 July 1950, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,805449,00.html.
19. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 45.
20. John T. Correll, “The Difference in Korea,” Air and Space Forces Magazine, 1 June 2020, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/the-difference-in-korea/.
21. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 140.
22. Ibid., 143.
23. Ibid., 152.
24. ATP 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade, 4-43.
25. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 127–28.
26. Time, “BATTLE OF KOREA: Little Man & Friends.”
27. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 54.
28. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 59.
29. Zachary L. Morris, “Concepts for Security Force Assistance Brigade Company Task Forces in Large-Scale Combat Operations,” Military Review 103, no. 6 (November-December 2023): 67–81, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2023/Maj-Morris/.
30. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 211–12.
31. “TAC Talks EP01: A Way To CAR,” posted 28 March 2023 by TAC Talks–Operations Group, NTC, YouTube, 25 min., 3 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BxeSq0FlDo&t=18s.
32. Dean Acheson, “Excerpts from Acheson’s Speech to The National Press Club,” 12 January 1950, https://web.viu.ca/davies/H102/Acheson.speech1950.htm.
33. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea, 121.
34. Ibid., 46.
35. Robert D. Ramsey III, “Advising Indigenous Forces: American Advisors in Korea, Vietnam, and El Salvador,” Global War on Terrorism Occasional Paper No. 18 (Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006), 12, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/ramsey.pdf.
36. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, 350.
37. Hausrath, The KMAG Advisor, 45.
38. Robert Rose, “Ending the Churn: To Solve the Recruiting Crisis, the Army Should be Asking Very Different Questions,” Modern War Institute, 9 February 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/ending-the-churn-to-solve-the-recruiting-crisis-the-army-should-be-asking-very-different-questions/.
39. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, vol. 1 (Longmans, Green, 1899).
40. Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Free Press, 2017), 152.
41. B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations Ten Years After (Little, Brown, 1928), 292–93.
42. Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Free Press, 2017), 162.
43. A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam, vol. 6, Conduct of the War, bk. 2, Functional Analyses (BDM Corporation, 1980), 12-24–12-25, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA096430.pdf.
44. Cao Van Vien et al., The U.S. Adviser (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), 69–70.
45. Gerald Hickey, The American Military Advisor and His Foreign Counterpart: The Case of Vietnam (RAND Corporation, 1965), 77, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2007/RM4482.pdf.
46. Ramsey, “Advising Indigenous Forces,” 109.

 

 

 

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