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The Real World Consequences Of When Army Leaders Become Complacent Dealing With Foreign National Soldiers

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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the real world consequences of when Army leaders become complacent dealing with foreign national soldiers, and the day to day operations while in a combat theatre. To gather lessons learned from the example discussed in order to lower the probability of a reoccurrence among the force. Through the example demonstrate the need for Army leaders to constantly fight against complacency, and the extreme importance that leaders know their soldiers, and place their soldiers’ needs before their own. The scenario discussed was a real incident that took place in Iraq in 2009, at a Coalition Outpost (COP) approximately 30 kilometers south of Mosul, in a city called Hammam al-Alil.

I was assigned to …show more content…

We were an American COP right in the middle of an Iraqi Army complex. While conducting our left seat/right seat rides with the MiTT team it was apparent that security was not a major concern with them, which can hardly be surprising when you understand that they probable had a force that at best constituted a squad-sized element. I cannot honestly recall if they had anybody pulling any type of security on the entrance of the COP or not. Once we finally took over the COP, we ensured that there was a soldier pulling security at the entrance, along with another soldier pulling radio guard in a Bradley about 25 meters behind his position. After a span of about 2-3 weeks, D Co 1-12 Cav (Armor) also moved into COP Scorpion, and we effectively became attached to D Co for the rest of the deployment. With the numbers of the COPs occupants swelling, the mission tempo began to increase, but our security measures, by and large stayed the same, with one man on the gate. It wasn’t long for the company to get settled into the COP and the platoons used to the mission tempo of daily conducting mounted and dismounted presence patrols, humanitarian aid missions, and census gathering. For the first few months our AO remained very calm. There was no direct fire from the enemy, and I don’t recall there being many, if any, improvised explosive devices (IED). If the other platoons came across any, they didn’t cause any battle damage to the vehicles. As any Army

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