The background photo really is of the IA base at Al Kasik, although I seem to have spelled it “Al Kisik” every time I had to label a photo. It was overrun and extensively wrecked up by ISIS back in 2014, then by us again in 2016, so I doubt if this shows anything really relevant. Comic text notwithstanding, it wasn’t actually that much of a shithole by Iraq standards in as much as it had prewar hard stand buildings with hot running water, heat and electricity, and if really was far enough from the flagpole that, while you didn’t get USO shows, you also didn’t get visiting brass.
MITT Team stands, of course, for MIlitary Transition Team Team, whereas SFAB is Security Forces Assistance Brigade, which does indeed have the same mission only better organized and with slightly more in the way of institutional support. MITT Teams were a flawed execution of a good idea, and were example #2,196 of the U.S. Army self-sabotaging in wartime in furtherance of institutionally entrenched and inflexible management practices that have nothing to do with victory*. Of course, the flaws in the way the advisor system was run had little to do with why the ISF collapsed in 2014, making the whole thing somewhat academic, and the Army, in restructuring it into the SFAB framework, belatedly learned the lesson; at least, until someone realizes that for the annual cost of six SFABs you can put green paint on over half the armored vehicles earmarked for deployment to Europe, and they scrap the whole thing. I give it ten years.
I digress. This matters for the story because probably the number one flaw in the MITT Team execution was that - and this is key - no matter how good an advisor you were, it didn’t count much for promotion because it was considered a Broadening Assignment and not a Key Developmental Assignment, and (if you're an officer, especially) you HAVE to punch your ticket at a KD assignment AND do well at it, ideally (in the height of GWOT) while deployed, in order to get promoted. So, if you’re an ambitious, highly motivated young Captain, say, serving on a MITT team meant that you’d be doing a year-long deployment, probably under pretty austere conditions and with lots of violence, followed by (or just following) your KD assignment in Company Command, which almost certainly meant ANOTHER deployment, back to back, the later of which you'd be totally burnt out for and probably not performing at your best. This meant that MITT teams had a hard time attracting the high flyers.
This is not to say that these were not brave, competent patriots. Many were. But you did have a tendency to get the JV team: guys with prior enlisted service who didn’t have to worry about getting promoted again before retirement; mediocre LTCs who weren’t going to command battalions; LOTS of reservists on IMA orders; guys who got tasked with it because they didn’t know the right people; guys in unhappy marriages who were happier in Iraq &c. Plus whatever lower enlisted were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got tagged with it.
Which is all relevant to the story, as we shall soon see.
*But, then, why not overhaul our outdated and inflexible personnel management practices? HERESY! Why would we change the way we do things, when it’s worked so well? **
** Worked so well = got the G1 promoted to his current rank and position. And his predecessor.