Effort to Train New Iraqi Army Is Facing Delays

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Effort to Train New Iraqi Army Is Facing Delays
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 20, 2004

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - Three months into its new mission, the military command in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces has fewer than half of its permanent headquarters personnel in place, despite having one of the highest-priority roles in Iraq.

Only about 230 of the nearly 600 military personnel required by the headquarters, from lawyers to procurement experts, have been assigned jobs with the group, the Multinational Security Transition Command, military officials in Washington and Iraq said. One officer said the military's Joint Staff had given the armed services until Oct. 15 to fill the remaining jobs, but other officials said those people might not actually be in place until weeks later.

The effect of the headquarters' shortages on the actual training of Iraqi forces is hard to measure, military officials and reconstruction specialists say. But at the least, the gaps mean fewer people to lobby Washington for resources, coordinate with Iraqi officials and get money and equipment into the hands of trainers around the country. Despite recent attacks on Iraqi security forces and their facilities, American officials say Iraqis in search of work are still signing up in large numbers.

Senior military officials in Washington and in the Persian Gulf region say the delay in filling the headquarters jobs stems from the Pentagon's methodical - critics say plodding - approach to establishing a new organization with the extremely complex mission of preparing more than 250,000 members of the Iraqi police, border patrol, national guard and army units for duty.

"It takes time to build these new organizations and to man them," said one military official who has been briefed on the personnel requirements of the group's commander, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus. "The bureaucracy of the process is necessary but time consuming."

Frederick D. Barton, a senior adviser at the Center of Strategic and International Studies here and one of the authors of a new report that assesses Iraqi security and reconstruction measures, said, "The fact that Petraeus, who is really the poster boy for doing things quite well over there, is still building his team shows that this doesn't have that urgency that you've got to have."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/politics/20army.html

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