This edited volume presents a number of historical case studies of military advisors and/or their missions in order to provide clear examples of the functioning, motives and evolution of foreign military and naval advising in the modern era.

This manuscript describes how US military advisors prepare for and conduct operations in war. Through two separate year-long combat tours as a military advisor in Iraq, the author brings true vignettes into modern military strategy and operational art. Further, the author provides multiple perspectives in command relationships. Through years of personal experience, direct interviews, and Warfighting knowledge, the author challenges conventionally accepted truths and establishes a new standard for understanding the impact of American advisors on the modern battleground.

This original edited volume is the only book on naval advising. Drawing upon the work of scholars and practitioners from all over the world, it takes a comparative and global approach to examining the history, theory and evolution of naval advising and assistance. Starting with a brief history of the evolution of naval advising, the book then moves to late-19th century naval advising efforts. These generally involved individuals such as the American adventurer in China, Philo McGiffin, but also included State-sponsored formal missions such as the first such US effort: Colonel John Lay’s 1870s mission to Egypt. A comparative multi-national examination of the ability of non-European States such as China, Turkey and Japan to adopt Western naval methods and doctrine - and an examination of the French naval advising mission to Peru - round out the book's pre-First World War offerings. The trends in naval advising between the World Wars—particularly their use as tools of economic and political penetration—are revealed through chapters on the British naval aviation mission to Japan; the British and French naval missions to Poland; the US mission to Peru; and a comparative study of Italian naval missions in Persia, China and Spain. The latter also reveals early ideological motivations for dispatching advising missions. The Cold War saw an intensification of military advising—including naval advising—as both the Communist and the Western Powers used advising as ideological tools. The US naval missions to Nationalist China and South Vietnam are assessed, as are the Soviet naval advising efforts in East Germany and China. Together, through a wealth of original research, the studies in this book provide numerous lessons for future naval advising efforts and constitute a unique contribution to the field.

The Will to Win focuses on the substantial role of US military advisors to the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) from 1946 until 1953 in one of America’s early attempts at nation building. Gibby describes ROKA’s structure, mission, challenges, and successes, thereby linking the South Korean army and their US advisors to the traditional narrative of this “forgotten war.” The work also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in national reconstruction, focusing on barriers in culture and society, and the effects of rapid decolonization combined with intense nationalism and the appeal of communism to East Asia following the destruction of the Japanese empire. Key conclusions include the importance of individual advisors, the significance of the prewar advisory effort, and the depth of the impact these men had on individual Korean units and in a few cases on the entire South Korean army. The success or failure of South Korean government in the decade following the end of World War II hinged on the loyalty, strength, and fighting capability of its army, which in turn relied on its American advisors. Gibby argues that without a proficient ROKA, the 1953 armistice, still in effect today, would not have been possible. He reexamines the Korean conflict from its beginning in 1945—particularly Korean politics, military operations, and armed forces—and demonstrates the crucial role the American military advisory program and personnel played to develop a more competent and reliable Korean army.

From the 1920s Afghanistan maintained a small air arm that depended heavily upon outside assistance. Starting in 2005, the United States led an air advisory campaign to rebuild the Afghan Air Force (AAF). In 2007 a formal joint/combined entity, led by a U.S. Air Force brigadier general, began air advisor work with Afghan airmen. Between 2007 and 2011, these efforts made modest progress in terms of infrastructures, personnel and aircraft accessions, and various training courses. But by 2010, advisors increasingly viewed AAF command and control (C2) as a problem area that required significant improvement if a professional air force was to be built. In the spring of 2011, major institutional changes to AAF C2 procedures were being introduced when nine U.S. air advisors were killed. The attack was the worst single-incident loss of U.S. Air Force personnel in a deployed location since 1996 and the worst insider-attack since 2001. From the day of that tragic event, the cultural chasm between Afghanistan and the West became more apparent. This dilemma continues with no end in sight to an air advisory mission of uncertain long-term value.

This is the first of a series of chronological histories prepared by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division to cover the entire span of Marine Corps involvement in the Vietnam conflict. This particular volume covers a relatively obscure chapter in U.S. Marine Corps history—the activities of Marines in Vietnam between 1954 and 1964. The narrative traces the evolution of those activities from a one-man advisory operation at the conclusion of the French-Indochina War in 1954 to the advisory and combat support activities of some 700 Marines at the end of 1964. As the introductory volume for the series this account has an important secondary objective: to establish a geographical, political, and military foundation upon which the subsequent histories can be developed.

The Army has recently embarked on massive advisory missions with foreign militaries in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the globe. We are simultaneously engaged in a huge effort to learn how to conduct those missions for which we do not consistently prepare. Mr. Robert Ramsey's historical study examines three cases where the US Army has performed this same mission in the last half of the 20th century. In Korea during the 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in El Salvador in the 1980s the Army was tasked to build and advise host nation armies during a time of war. The author makes several key arguments about the lessons the Army thought it learned at the time.Among the key points Mr. Ramsey makes are the need for US advisors to have extensive language and cultural training, the lesser importance for them of technical and tactical skills training, and the need to adapt US organizational concepts, training techniques, and tactics to local conditions. Accordingly, he also notes the great importance of the host nation's leadership buying into and actively supporting the development of a performance-based selection, training, and promotion system. To its credit, the institutional Army learned these hard lessons, from successes and failures, during and after each of the cases examined in this study. However, they were often forgotten as the Army prepared for the next major conventional conflict.