Iraqi Army Planning A Long Term Alignment With the U.S.?
Backing up McCaffrey’s assessment is the fact that Iraq’s military has requested everything from U.S. surveillance equipment to F-16 fighter jets. With U.S hardware also comes U.S. training. “It is extremely important that the Iraqis have made it clear they want to purchase Western military systems and particularly American military systems,” Fred Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who helped craft the surge strategy in 2006, says. Such purchases, Kagan explains, “impl[y] an expectation of a certain kind of relationship with the supplier. There are upgrades and replacements over time. When you have people training your soldiers on how to use the equipment, how to upgrade it, how to work it into their doctrine, who are those trainers going to be? It is a below-the-line statement of alignment.”