For the first time, the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) has sent a team of its conflict-management specialists to train an entire U.S. military unit preparing to deploy to a war zone—Afghanistan.

The December training of a unit of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, brought together some of USIP’s Afghanistan experts with instructors from its Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding to provide an integrated, week-long program designed to describe the challenges the unit is likely to face in Afghanistan later this year. About 85 soldiers from the 101st’s 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT) participated; they will be taking on advisory roles with the Afghan Army and police at the provincial, district and village levels during an important and sensitive period of transition, with Afghan forces taking over leadership of the country’s security operations from the U.S.-led coalition of international forces in 2014.

The 101st—the famous “Screaming Eagles” Army paratrooper division that has fought in numerous conflicts—approached USIP last year about providing the training as it considered how best to prepare for the non-traditional demands of providing security advice and support to Afghans rather than fighting insurgents and holding territory. The program developed for the 101st Airborne, said USIP Chief of Staff Paul Hughes, “signals a need within the U.S. Army for the unique training offered only by the U.S. Institute of Peace. The training was initiated by the unit itself because it could not find a resource within the Army.”

Said Hughes, “A gap has now been identified within the Army’s training system for brigades assigned to perform security and foreign assistance missions—a gap that USIP has the capability to fill, if properly resourced.”

Previous deployments of the 101st in Afghanistan have generally focused on counterinsurgency combat operations, often called "clear, hold, build." Soon, members of the unit trained by USIP will return to southeastern Afghanistan and be “embedded” in Afghan Army and police units, serving as part of the U.S. Army’s new Security Force Assistance Teams. The 4th BCT wanted conflict resolution and management training, with instruction on how Afghans communicate and negotiate as well as on the country’s complex political and social environment.

Lauren Van Metre, the Academy’s dean of students, called the pairing of Academy and country specialists “a new education model.” USIP and 101st Airborne officers worked together on developing specific instructional exercises that would “introduce soldiers to problems and dilemmas they will likely encounter as advisers and partners to Afghan security forces,” Van Metre said.

Participants from the 101st said they welcomed the practical preparation provided by the USIP training. “The strength of this program is it presented conflict-resolution theories and concepts consistent with soldiers’ experience in Afghanistan. Arming soldiers with this training will help them develop strategies informed by theory and better predict the effect of their actions,” said Army Major Mark Federovich, who was then with the 4th BCT.

The USIP-Army training collaboration reflects not only the changing U.S. military role in Afghanistan; it is also indicative of a broader shift in Army modernization efforts to align its forces with specific combatant commands and to organize units “for specific mission sets and regional conditions,” as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno noted in a speech to the Association of the United States Army last October. “Units will gain invaluable expertise and cultural awareness, and be prepared to meet the regional requirements more rapidly and effectively than ever before,” Odierno said.

The soldiers from the 101st joining in the training were sorted into groups of about 20 each who will work together in Afghanistan. Those groups rotated among four types of instruction as the week proceeded: community assessment and rule of law; engaging differences through reconciliation; negotiation and political transition; and security sector reform and reintegration. On the final day, Van Metre led a capstone exercise that focused on the challenges they will face advising Afghan forces on providing security for the conduct of the 2014 Afghan presidential elections. “It was an opportunity for the 4th BCT to brainstorm election challenges, but also to discuss—before they deploy—the competing pressures they will face.” For example, Van Metre said, the U.S. advisers will be working with Afghan provincial counterparts who are under pressure to facilitate “getting out the vote” in ethnic Pashtun-heavy areas, but in the villages there will be countervailing pressures to secure polling stations, perhaps even closing some if they are threatened with insurgent attacks.

“It is likely that the brigade will be caught up in a major political event, the presidential elections,” said Scott Smith, deputy director of USIP’s Afghanistan and Pakistan programs and one of the Institute’s trainers at Fort Campbell. “We tried to focus on providing an accurate sense of what some of these impacts would be and how it would affect their counterparts—district and provincial governors and Afghan police and Army units that the 101st will embed with.”

Smith noted that the USIP training emphasized “real-life stories, anecdotes and examples.” He said that his instruction on Afghanistan’s political transition centered on “how Afghans use negotiation as a means of allocating power rather than, for example, our idea of the rule of law.”

He added, “Using the varied expertise within USIP, we tried to provide an idea of how Afghans resolved conflicts among themselves, and how the country’s specific cultural and religious environment affected that. In the end, we didn’t want our students to be surprised by anything they might see.”

One of the USIP trainers, U.S. Navy Captain Jeff Canfield, is an interagency professional-in-residence at the Institute and has experience as the International Security Assistance Force advisor to the Ministry of Rural Development and Rehabilitation in Afghanistan. “USIP really has the unique expertise in how you adapt to uncertain and chaotic situations in failing or post-conflict countries,” he said. “USIP can call on internal and outside experts to provide tailored sets of training modules.”

Canfield, who taught the 101st participants about security-sector reform, said he and his colleagues conveyed practical information about “who ought to be in their network” in Afghanistan—government specialists, individual experts, nongovernmental groups and international organizations that they can call on for advice and perspectives on dealing with fast-changing events on the ground. “They’re going to have to form a network quickly to succeed,” he said. “And they’re going to need to be very adaptable.”

Federovich of the 4th BCT said the training will help those being deployed to “develop an appropriate strategy for solving the complex problems they face….As we shift towards an advising role, the indirect approach becomes increasingly important. Through dialogue and other skills we learned, we can assist our Afghan partners to develop strategies that are both appropriate and sustainable.”

Army Major Mario Oliva called the education “an eye opener that the government structure in Afghanistan is still unstable. Now I understand the second- and third-order effects of the tribal system and events in Pakistan and how that affects the government system in Afghanistan.”

Another participant, Captain Kelsey Worley, described the training as helpful preparation for the complexities he and others from the 101st will face in their security force advisory mission in Afghanistan. “This education program by USIP has taught us to think outside our military perspective and offered us a different paradigm,” he said. “It has taught us to not see the problem as black and white, but to understand the Afghanistan context and the dynamics of the situation.”

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