adviser team

Increasing the size of the American adviser teams would be aimed at maintaining discipline among police and army units.

However, some adviser teams already report that their Iraqi counterparts have said they intend to desert if the Americans leave too soon.

For the last year, the police paramilitary units have had 11-member American military adviser teams assigned to them at the division, brigade and battalion command levels.

The National Trust saw through a controversial restructuring plan which led to its gardens adviser team being made redundant or demoted to 'consultant' status.

"But the farther from Nouveau Paris, the better a shrewd adviser team's chances of adjusting the doctrine to the situation.

While consolidating bases is a short-term way to reduce troop requirements, fielding more adviser teams will eventually allow more Americans to come home.

Expanding on those adviser teams, the proposal before General Casey would probably provide 10-man teams with 45 existing and 20 emerging national guard battalions.

In addition, adviser teams from Army Special Forces and other American units are with most of the Iraqi National Guard forces.

The American military adviser team to Iraqi special police forces in Salman Pak, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad, said it had been seeing more sophisticated shaped-charge explosions since last spring.

The adviser teams embedded with Iraqi units will become increasingly vulnerable, and a smaller force left behind in Iraq will find itself called upon to fight the inevitable worsening of violence with far fewer troops.

The small American adviser team said it saw itself as an honest broker, reporting abuse where it is found, but also helping the Iraqi forces get badly needed bullets, blankets and radios for their pickup trucks.

But such steps would be taken only after progress on political reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite factions, and a major increase in the size of the adviser teams, among other steps, according to a military official in Baghdad.

Both problems with our current strategy - not waiting for Iraqi forces to be ready, and consolidating our bases at the expense of classic counterinsurgency tactics like small adviser teams - emanate from the overriding concern for bringing the troops home.

His policy agenda is still the one which dominates and his success in working with Nick Clegg's adviser team, and melding them into his own operation is a key reason why the Coalition has got off to a smooth start.

Senior Pentagon officials and commanders credit the adviser teams, which also work with Iraqi special police and border security units, with improving the Iraqis' combat ability, building stronger chains of command and identifying equipment and training problems faster and more precisely.