Officials say the new force will start training at the Smithsonian Institution over five days in March of 2020, and that they hope to have about 25 experts ready to be deployed immediately afterward.

The training will encompass military doctrine as it relates to cultural protection, no-strike lists, and procedures to work with host nations to evacuate and safeguard museum collections.

The initiative comes at an urgent time for a region where human settlement dates back as far as 10,000 years and includes the remnants of Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Persian, Assyrian and Babylonian cultures. Afghanistan has been pillaged and desecrated by the Taliban for two decades; the Islamic State has wrought destruction and looted artifacts in Iraq, Syria and Libya; and rebel factions have sacked museums and mosques in Yemen.

While American forces are hardly expected to defend cultural treasures everywhere there is conflict, the military field manuals indicate that preserving artifacts “is not only a legal obligation but also plays a vital role as a force multiplier, winning the hearts and minds of the local population.” It also sends “a strong message that the U.S. military is respectful and professional,” the manuals say.

The United States suffered a black eye during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it was faulted for failing to protect the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad from plunder amid the chaos of the city’s fall. Archaeologists and State Department officials had warned that the museum’s tens of thousands of ancient objects were vulnerable, but the military had no equivalent of the monuments team at that point.

After that ransacking, Matthew Bogdanos, a colonel in the Marine reserves and classics scholar, formed an ad hoc group that took charge of protecting the museum and hunting down its stolen items. He wrote a book on his experience, “Thieves of Baghdad” (2005). He serves as chief of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the only such department in the nation.