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In the spring of 1947, when the United States decided to support the Greek government's fight against communist insurgency, President Harry Truman sent American Army advisers, headed by then-Maj. Gen. James A. Van Fleet, to oversee the effort.
Following the success of the Van Fleet mission, from 1947 to about 1974, military advisory teams, headed and staffed by U.S. Army officers and noncommissioned officers, served at the forefront of U.S. efforts to combat communist aggression. In the mid-1960s, more than 60 military assistance advisory groups (MAAGs) deployed worldwide were partners with State Department foreign missions and other governmental agencies in supporting U.S. allies and struggling new nations. In today's parlance, these MAAGs, with their State Department counterparts on embassy country teams around the world, played a key role in shaping the allied fight against communist aggression.
Today only a few scattered MAAGs remain, the others being casualties of post-Vietnam and postCold War contraction, congressional restrictions and pre-2003 strategies that downplayed long-term engagement in favor of expeditionary operations and sharp, decisive victories. As the United States begins to recast its future security strategies, rebuilding State Department and MAAG capacity overseas is a hot discussion subject in Washington think tanks and in the policy camps of both political parties. Thus far, no discussion has completely captured the complexity of a shift in U.S security policy that would switch emphasis from expeditionary to a more patient forward engagement. Nor is the impact on the two executive branch departments-State and Defense-and especially the Army, very well understood. The Army stands poised, as it did in 1947, to play an essential role in such a dramatic-and overdue-shift in national security strategy. The two key concerns are whether the Army can anticipate the shift as it comes and whether it can overcome the restraints of the past decade's flawed planning.
Even as Army troops are hunting down terrorists in Baghdad, jihadi influence-what scholar Mary Habeck calls the "radical faction of a multifaceted Islamist belief system"-is spreading in the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia and even parts of Europe. Military audiences are accustomed to thinking about war in terms of the "spectrum of conflict," a 1960s term that has undergone a dozen transformations since then, but which remains a useful concept....