On the other side of the coin, I was one of those contractors in Afghanistan (2011-2013). I specifically co-developed an in-depth intensive five day course for all designated terminal operators. We didn't care what your background or experience was, we took everything from truck drivers to satcom techs through the same course. Taught the basics of RF theory, signal flow, troubleshooting, fault isolation, operations, and maintenance. Only the first two days were PowerPoint heavy(with very few words on the slides, mostly picture to relate concepts). After that, it was three days of hands on doing setup, tear down, and fault isolation. We would break all kinds of things, and they would repair it. All the problems we presented to them were real life issues that had been observed in the field.
The high point of that work was when one of the satcom techs came up to me after the course and said that they had learned more from me in a week than in six months at the schoolhouse.
As much support as we gave the folks we were there to help, it was all organic knowledge gained through experience. The satellite dish controller was a black box that we, as technicians had to reverse engineer because the company would not provide us with schematics. This was made worse by there being at least four hardware revisions (despite the company saying there were only two) with only some parts compatible across revisions.
The reason for not providing schematics? They feared one of us would clone it and sell it to the Army for cheaper, since it was the only custom piece of hardware in the entire system.