One of a Kind (2nd Edition)

TRAINING THE TRAINERS

FIVE

The Advisors were the font of all knowledge, which was based on combat experiences at

home. At the sub-unit level, tactics were reduced to drills that were then subjected to typical

anticipated enemy reactions and counter-actions by own forces, by way of enemy simulators

or verbal inputs to the role-play appointees. Perhaps the most important lessons of all were

to approach an objective from an unexpected direction and that night is a pretty good time

to fight.

However, it was to turn out that while the Advisors had developed the process of military

instruction to a pretty fine art, many of the basic concepts were still closely related to British

field manuals, which was not surprising, considering the participation of Israelis in WWII

under the British in the Middle East. This came to light when the Doctrine Department in

SAFTI began to write training formats under the supervision of the Advisors, although the

British field manuals were broad-brush and left much to the imagination of the trainer.

IV. FRICTION IGNITOR

Not everything went smoothly during the First Instructors’ Preparatory Course. There

was already some latent friction between the Advisors and the local career officers arising

from the suddenness of the changes that they introduced and the occasional personality

clashes. One thing that kicked off resentment was an IQ test the Advisors conducted for

the selection of students as part of the preparatory course. One of the most senior of the

career officers walked out in high dudgeon after turning in a blank paper. A second was that

it became clear that the Advisors, who had an important say in assignments in SAFTI in the

initial stages, would not be respecting seniority in key posts, a problem already aggravated

by the absorption and amalgamation of personnel from many different sources into the

commissioned ranks. Things took a dramatic turn when the Advisors started the preparatory

course with the raw basics of stripping and assembling of weapons and fieldcraft. Their

reasoning was sound: coming from such a variety of backgrounds including the Police

Force, and ranging from Sergeants to Captains, trainees had to be levelled up or down to

a common baseline.

But, they may have cut too close to the bone. After two weeks of

this the trainees appealed through LTC Vij. The Permanent Secretary of MID, Mr. George

Bogaars was believed to have stepped in. The course was halted for two weeks for a review

of the syllabus, which resulted in a programme that was structured around some of the key

modules of the proposed course for the first intake to the up and coming training institute

less several local specialties like Internal Security and basics that were to be taught during the

recruit, section and officer cadet training stages of that course. Several graduates of the First

Instructors’ Preparatory Course had the impression that they were, in fact, going through a

compressed version of the whole course conducted for the first intake at SAFTI, including

the officer cadet stage.

Given that the preparatory course was only 12 weeks, of which two

were suspended, this was unlikely. Even allowing for the fact that the officer cadet phase of