Will Reid & Pelosi Give Iraqi National Police Time?

Bruce “McQ” McQuain, at Q and O blog, sat in on a briefing today by “with COL Mark R. French, Deputy Commander for Professional Development and Training, Civilian Police Assistance Training Team (CPATT), Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq (MNSTC-I) about the new Italian Carabinieri Police Team sent at the request of the Iraqi Government to help train the MoI Police on special military police tactics that will go into effect in September when the new school is built.”

Bruce “learned a lot about the plans for the National Police, the problems they've encountered until now and how they're rectifying (or attempting to rectify) them.”

French described them as a "bridging force" between the local police and the Iraqi Army, much like the Italian Carabinieri. They are a national civil security force that will, it is hoped, be the "first responder" to any situation which is more than local police can handle. If successful, that would then allow the Iraqi Army to concentrate on external threats.

The training process:

Anyway, Phase I of the plan has already been completed and it was mostly an assessment phase - where are they weak, where do they need help, etc. It also included a command climate survey which is an anonymous questionnaire in which all parts of the command climate are examined. As COL French said, it was very revealing and helped immensely in determining the rest of the training needed.

They're in phase II now. It was originally scheduled to be a 3-4 day refresher or "re-bluing" as he called it, but once they got into it, decided they needed to spend more than a few days re-emphasizing various aspects of their duties. As he said it is about 75% on policing skills (basic policing, human rights, etc) and 25% tactical (patrolling, check points, etc). This phase will end 10 October.

On 18 October, the Carabinieri like training will begin. It is a "train the trainer" effort where selected members of each brigade will be trained by Italian teams of Carabinieri and then go back and become the trainers for their brigades. This is where the true national character of their police work, to include investigation and forensics, will be taught and learned.

Phase IV, at a date to be determined, has the National Police disbursed outside of Baghdad. Presently there are small NP elements in Balad and Samara, but the vast majority are in Baghdad, integrated into the Baghdad security plan and fully invested in that until completion. However, even if they were released from that duty, their training level and their logistics wouldn't allow them to deploy. It won't be until a sufficient level of the Phase III training is complete within the brigades that they'll be deemed tactically ready to go.

The other problem is one we've seen throughout the effort with both the army and police. They cannot, at this time, logistically support themselves. COL French reports a logistics brigade is being stood up right now to support the NP. Obviously that'll take some time. Until it is up and properly functioning, the NP are pretty well tied to their Baghdad bases….

That's the short version of what I learned today about that very critical effort. Yes, it has languished for quite a while, it is an organization that gained a bad reputation because it almost 'self-organized' with little or no vetting. But it appears that the effort under way now has either corrected or is in the middle of correcting most of those deficiencies.

Was Bruce being fed a line?:

Like I said, an interesting call. And another bit of information I can now use to further analyze our effort in Iraq. To me, that is the purpose of these calls. I consider myself and those who sit in on these calls smart enough to know when an effort to spin us is underway. To this point I've not really detected such an effort. And with an open question format at the end, anything that has even remotely smelled of such has been questioned in detail.