Army: 6 New Security Force Assistance Brigades

[Il Duce]

Good points.

A lot of the ideas for the SFAB brief well but are impossible to implement. The company that @Il Duce and I were in was the linguist company for the Second Infantry Division in Korea. To get the kind of language proficiency one needs to actually be useful in that language takes something on the order of 16 months, not 16 weeks. And once you achieve proficiency, you have to maintain it or you'll lose it. Language maintenance consumed a large portion of our training week. When I commanded the support company in 5th Group, the language proficiency expected of the SF soldiers was 0+/0+, and even then some couldn't sustain it because they were consumed with all of the other tasks expected from them.

And even if you train someone up to a usable degree, will it be a usable language? OK, so you train someone in Arabic. Maybe Egyptian dialect. Is that going to be helpful when they get sent into Pakistan? No? So why bother with it at all?

Kill the SFAB idea, make the training a school that confers an ASI (additional skill identifier), assign individual brigades the SFAB mission on a rotating basis.

Also, what does the language get you? You're telling me some 'expert' from an SFAB is going to teach me to run BN/BDE level operations when they've got the language skills of Jean-Claude VanDamme in Bloodsport? No way, even if they had the technical expertise beyond the language - and I'm not convinced any training the SFAB does is going to impart that expertise. Plus, as @Marauder06 says that maybe gets you set for a couple countries.

To me, any country with the resources, organization, and commitment to field BN/BDE sized units to train ought to have the ability to provide interpreters. That to me is a part of the strategic problem in the first place - without the right commitment from the HN, the will to organize and fight, it doesn't matter how much training we do with their yahoos that show up. They're going to lose, we're just delaying the inevitable. Without a better way to pick folks with a chance of winning before dropping a few Trillion dollars on them we're wasting everyone's time.

Uh-oh, it appears I've stepped on a cynicism mine...

 

[Teufel]

Good points.

A lot of the ideas for the SFAB brief well but are impossible to implement. The company that @Il Duce and I were in was the linguist company for the Second Infantry Division in Korea. To get the kind of language proficiency one needs to actually be useful in that language takes something on the order of 16 months, not 16 weeks. And once you achieve proficiency, you have to maintain it or you'll lose it. Language maintenance consumed a large portion of our training week. When I commanded the support company in 5th Group, the language proficiency expected of the SF soldiers was 0+/0+, and even then some couldn't sustain it because they were consumed with all of the other tasks expected from them.

And even if you train someone up to a usable degree, will it be a usable language? OK, so you train someone in Arabic. Maybe Egyptian dialect. Is that going to be helpful when they get sent into Pakistan? No? So why bother with it at all?

Kill the SFAB idea, make the training a school that confers an ASI (additional skill identifier), assign individual brigades the SFAB mission on a rotating basis.

This is a good idea. I don’t understand the language requirement either. Just get Terps.

 

[AWP]

The Army's hubris is tragically funny. We're going to send soldiers who are (in theory) very good at their jobs within the American system to a foreign nation...and replicate our system? All of the language and cultural training in the world can't overcome cultures that are built over hundreds upon hundreds of years. We're going to train these soldiers to adapt an American system built within our cultural norms to countries that could be the polar opposite of ours?

Where's the State Department's "SFAB" in all of this? Yeah, fail.

Look at SF soldiers: they spend their careers focused on a region. One could argue training at the platoon and company level is much easier than formulating battalions and larger. Big Army's solution is to run some soldiers through a couple of schools and then PCS them after 3-4 years? Return them back to their primary MOS?

The Army's not even bringing a 50% solution to the table.

 

[Topkick]

One improvement should be a better quality of soldier assigned to the mission. With MITT, we were asked to give up soldiers to that mission. Don't think for a minute that unit leadership gave up their studs.

 

[DA SWO]

The great personal irony of this situation for me is if I don't retire this summer as planned, I'll probably be in one of these brigades.

You should have taken the AFA gig.

I kind of think it will be the opposite. This is the Army's shiny new object and I think people will be jumping for the opportunity. People will definitely be jumping for the $5k bonus.

Why is a bonus required?
Promotion rates for those assigned here will suck, and I am using past experience as a guide.
Will each Brigade have an assigned AO, or deploy "when it's their turn"?

Maybe plus up USASOC (with a mini-selection) and send those Soldiers off to do Bde and higher staff level training?

 

[ThunderHorse]

This sounds like AFPAK Hands on steroids when I was exploring the program and everyone telling me don't do it because the promotion rates for those in the program was a fat zero.

 

[Teufel]

You should have taken the AFA gig.



Why is a bonus required?
Promotion rates for those assigned here will suck, and I am using past experience as a guide.
Will each Brigade have an assigned AO, or deploy "when it's their turn"?

Maybe plus up USASOC (with a mini-selection) and send those Soldiers off to do Bde and higher staff level training?

The best way to train someone be to a Brigade staff member is to assign them to a Brigade staff for three years.

 

[ThunderHorse]

Who stays on a Brigade Staff in the Army for three years? The Chemo?

 

[Teufel]

Who stays on a Brigade Staff in the Army for three years? The Chemo?

I’m not in the Army so I don’t know how long people stay in their billets at Brigade. Our MEU/Regiment/Division principals tend to stick around for 2-3 years.

My point is that you can’t send someone to a course to learn how to be an effective Brigade S3 for example. The best way to learn it is to do it, and usually that means you had to hit all the building blocks before that step as well.

 

[Marauder06]

You should have taken the AFA gig.

I tried brother, but the Army had other plans. It all worked out for us in the end.

Why is a bonus required?
Promotion rates for those assigned here will suck, and I am using past experience as a guide.
Will each Brigade have an assigned AO, or deploy "when it's their turn"?

Maybe plus up USASOC (with a mini-selection) and send those Soldiers off to do Bde and higher staff level training?

The Army is throwing big $$$ around because they know people are going to be reluctant to sign up after the "Af-Pak Hands" abortion and attitudes about the MiTT program.

I wonder if we would be better off doing something along the lines of what you suggested, plussing up the TSOCs with Os, WOs, and SNCOs who know logistics, intel, policy, economics, politics, and strategy.

It's not really that hard to teach people how to fight. Teaching them everything that goes into winning, and sustaining the win, is very difficult. That's where we've been failing in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's the problem the Army should be fighting.

 

[AWP]

It's not really that hard to teach people how to fight. Teaching them everything that goes into winning, and sustaining the win, is very difficult. That's where we've been failing in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's the problem the Army should be fighting.

Very true, but if State doesn't RSVP to the party in kind it won't matter what the Army does or doesn't do. The kinds of conflicts/ near conflicts where we would deploy an SFAB team makes State's participation essential to the effort.

The Army could clone Steven Hawking, place him in a mech, and arm him with a lightsaber and it won't matter. All of the genius and lethality in the world won't matter without a coherent foreign policy administered by State. As we all know, we can't even develop a coherent foreign policy.

Thye SFAB's are wasted money. We might as well set it on fire than fund more senior NCO/ O slots to feed and clothe.

 

[ThunderHorse]

Go to SFAB...be SOF-Like...Get SOF-kit
1st SFAB Issued Crye Precision’s Adaptive Vest System - Soldier Systems Daily

 

[Il Duce]

A friend of mine and colleague from my 10th MTN days wrote this article for strategy bridge just published: Turning the Corner in Afghanistan

I think he's spot on, I wish Foreign Affairs would feature his article as a rebuttal of the McChrystal piece they ran last issue.

 

[ThunderHorse]

Your full insignia primer: It’s official: Army unveils brown beret, new patch for military advisers, SFAB

 

[Ooh-Rah]

Huh, so these guys are pretty much Green Berets with a more hip and modern color?
And that flash doesn't look too familiar....

LOL

 

[DA SWO]

I see this mission getting sucked up by SOCOM in the future.

 

[Gunz]

Wait...so Army SFAB and Air Force CAA's are BOTH getting the brown beret? How did that happen?

 

[Raksasa Kotor]

Wait...so Army SFAB and Air Force CAA's are BOTH getting the brown beret? How did that happen?

Looks like SFAB's beret is a slightly lighter shade of brown than the CAA beret. That said, I think there was a degree of fatalism on the part of the CAA community that allowed this to happen. HAF and AFSOC were not too thrilled about the CAA beret to begin with, so I'm sure they weren't too worried about trying to dissuade the Army.

 

[ThunderHorse]

Wait...so Army SFAB and Air Force CAA's are BOTH getting the brown beret? How did that happen?

Why would the Army care about the Air Force beret choices?

 

[AWP]

SFAB: For those times when you're afraid of Camp Mackall....