LOO team training
The term "LOO Team" is locally used by me to describe the group of folks within our battalion who are tasked with non-kinetic targeting and work along the Lines Of Operation of Internal Security, Governance, Essential Services, Rule of Lay, Economics, and Agriculture. In a perfect world, it meets regularly to engage in a review of actions past, current, and planned, in order to develop non-kinetic targets that can be addressed with a variety of options, ranging from info ops, key leader engagement between chaplains and mullahs, and CERP projects.
Team participation is expected to come from myself (Bn XO), the Bn Informations Officer, Staff Judge Advocate, Intel, Psyop, Operations, Civil Affairs, and a few other reps.
In practice during our last deployment, the LOO team did not fair well for a number of reasons, namely because our mission in northern Iraq meant that reconstruction and development was nowhere near the priority that it was in Anbar, and that we were constrained from project work because we expected to have a short-duration mission requirement.
I think we also did poorly because the focus of the unit's PTP was on the "tough math" of kinetic efforts, and therefore the components of the team never came together for any training, education, etc., prior to the deploy. We ended up doing a lot of exploratory learning that went only slightly farther than understanding the principles of money as a weapons system, and knocking out a couple of projects that, while doing some good, didn't get us to our commander's goal of using non-kinetic effects to glean information for kinetic targeting.
So...with all that out of the way, I have a chance to make things right this time and pull many of the team members together prior to the deployment so that we are more effective. Based on the description of our future task, I am seeking input on texts, training (in the way of courses/PME) and training methodology, etc., I could use in the pursuit of getting our LOO team organized and aimed in the right direction.
The first task for all hands will be a read and discussion of White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group's Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has essentially become the US administration's policy for action in the region.
That will be followed by a discussion of the Peters' book Seeds of Terror.
I think the next focus will be on leader engagement/shura participation strategies and perhaps some role-play, but beyond that I am starting to draw a few blanks and hence my quest.
Outside of a command of 30-50 Pashtu and Dari control words required by all hands, we are not (due to time constraints) learning the language. We are also limited (due to our primary billets) of only meeting perhaps twice a month between now and next Spring.
Originally Posted by Red Rat
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