COIN standards for Afghanistan approved - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

COIN standards for Afghanistan approved

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved a list of essential counterinsurgency skills that troops need to be successful in Afghanistan.

The COIN Qualification Standards are a list of nine major skill areas with roughly 52 subtasks meant to focus units’ training before they deploy to Afghanistan.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, approved the standards Aug. 27. He then sent them to the commander of U.S. Central Command, who, after approving them, forwarded them to Gates.

Gates approved the COIN standards during the last week of November, according Army Col. Daniel Roper, director of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

In a Nov. 23 memo, Gates alerted CENTCOM that he had approved the standards for incorporation into pre-deployment training.

In a separate Nov. 23 memo, Gates told the services to start implementing the guidance.

“What this document does is, in one place, it gives a unit preparing to deploy these specific tasks and subtasks that [Petraeus] felt were important enough both for him to approve and for him to send it to the Secretary of Defense,” Roper said. “That’s not insignificant.”

As director of the Army and Marine Corps COIN Center, Roper helped develop the standards with teams in Afghanistan.

The intent of the standards is to provide focus, rather than having units trying to be prepared for everything, Roper said.

Some of the skills are not Afghanistan-specific, such as “understand the operational environment.” Others apply directly to current operations, like “conduct detainee operations.”

“We’ve all learned that’s something that we just can’t assume away; we’ve got to invest some real intellectual energy and leadership in that,” Roper said.

The tasks are really aimed at the company level, “because that’s where the work occurs” and that is who is “with the population on a continuous basis,” Roper said.

“As the document works its way down from the secretary to the services and ultimately to [Army Forces Command], some of it may translate into individual pre-deployment training tasks for individuals, regardless of the kinds of units they’re going to,” Roper said. They could also impact professional military education courses, he said.

The COIN Center, which begins teaching pre-deployment COIN training in May, will use the qualification standards as the “intellectual foundation” for its COIN seminars, Roper said. The COIN Center is taking the seminars over from the Battle Command Training Program, which is transitioning to a full-spectrum operations curriculum.

The COIN seminars began when Petraeus was commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. They’re designed for a brigade combat team commander and his leaders as they get ready to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The group spends about a week “getting immersed in counterinsurgency theory and doctrine and works their way through some practices and things that would apply to the area they’re going to, as well as video teleconferences with units in theater,” Roper said.

Roper said he thinks the COIN Center can address about 27 of the 52 subtasks in the seminar environment.

Next week, the U.S. COIN community heads to London for a conference, which is being co-hosted by the United Kingdom COIN Center. The COIN Advisory and Assistance Team from Afghanistan will also be there, Roper said.

His team will be listening closely for feedback to the standards to provide additional implementing instructions.

After the conference, a small group will stay in London to help the Afghanistan team develop a separate essential skills list specifically for village stability operations and the Afghan local police, Roper said.