Study: U.S. lacks counterinsurgency skill

WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 (UPI) -- A study commissioned by the Department of Defense says that U.S. capabilities for counterinsurgency are "seriously deficient and out of balance."

"Large-scale U.S. military intervention and occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible," said a statement from the RAND Corp., a think tank with historic ties to the U.S. military, which carried out the study.

The authors conclude the United States "should shift its priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local security forces, and exploit (intelligence) information -- capabilities that have been lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Effective and legitimate governments" that can provide "an efficient and fair justice system … accessible mass lower education," and a rehabilitation process for ex-combatants are essential for counterinsurgency, states the report.

"When it comes to building these and other civil capabilities abroad, the United States is alarmingly weak," said one of the study's authors, David Gompert. "To fix this problem, the federal government will need a dramatic increase in civilian capabilities, new organizational arrangements, and more flexible personnel policies."

The study says the U.S. government will need to add thousands of deployable civilian professionals to its workforce and spend billions more in foreign aid to meet these goals. The costs could be halved "if U.S. allies and international organizations matched U.S. efforts."

U.S. forces also need to "improve their ability to organize, train, equip and advise" local militaries. But training of police forces "should be done by professional police trainers, not military troops."

"As the ability to build local forces is improved, U.S. military capabilities should concentrate on border and coastal surveillance, technical intelligence collection, air mobility, large-scale logistics, and special operations against high-value targets," concludes the report.