“The big problem is that our headquarters is in Baghdad and most of the military leadership has no idea where we are working or what we are working with. They are driving a timeline to start on April 1, 2007, based on political and general officer demands, not the reality on the ground,” Major Brad Head explained of the challenges facing their mission to begin a training program for the Iraqi Air Force.
Air Force staff at headquarters in Baghdad thought the renovation of the designated Iraqi Air Force training buildings at Taji was complete. They were mistaken. The facilities were in shambles, with no electricity, functioning sewage, or water.
“It could take months to secure the funding and then who knows how long it will take the Iraqi contractor to actually renovate our facilities. In the meantime we don’t have a single vehicle, computer, printer, phone, or any office space to place equipment, if we did manage to get our hands on the tools we needed,” Head explained.
Because the United States Army was in control of Taji, Head and his team often took their supply requests to the Army. They found themselves navigating key differences between the Army and Air Force, such as the number of officers to enlisted men. The Army at Taji had thirty enlisted men/women to each officer. The Air Force had a smaller ratio, with six enlisted for every ten officers. When an Army colonel offered to supply Head, a Major, with one of his office chairs, he was surprised when Head picked up the chair himself instead of asking the Air Force Captain with him to move it.
The cultural differences between military branches were nothing compared with the cultural differences with the Iraqis. Iraqis think in terms of decades and centuries while Americans tend to think in terms of days and weeks. The Iraqis wanted a three-year program to commission their new officers; too long by U.S. military standards for standing up the Iraqi Air Force.
The U.S. military convinced the Iraqis to begin with a special fifteen-week senior term at the Iraqi Military Academy in Rustamiyah specifically tailored for cadets indentified to come into the Iraqi Air Force. However, these different approaches made it difficult to know how to guide the curriculum. What should an Iraqi Air Force lieutenant fresh out of the Academy know and be able to do?
“We literally have nothing,” Head explained.
Their true mission was to make something out of nothing. And that requires resourcefulness and faith.
Thank you for the abundant resources you have given me and for your faithfulness to make something out of the nothings in my life and in others.
“He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” (Romans 4:17b)