The Importance and Role of Training in Creating/Sustaining the Best Possible Forces

[Norfolk]

I concur wholeheartedly that main forces can do so much more (and probably have a baseline of training to do so well) than they currently have the authority for. It's that trust and confidence that's lacking. The opposite attitude rears its ugly head when SOF cannot accomplish some things (I'm currently reading Robert's Ridge) and the more conventional folks start to throw the Rambo moniker around.

When I was in Australia this summer, I had an interesting discussion with one of my counterpart umpires. He mentioned that among the Australian Army, the main forces are generally considered better prepared for COIN, humanitarian assistance, FID, and all-round small wars, while their SOF formations are better trained to execute conventional ops.

As jcustis pointed out, there is quite a difference of perspective between what Commonwealth Armies (and to a certain extent, the USMC as well) view as properly belonging to Main Forces and Special Forces, respectively, and what the US Army views in said matter. Most COIN and unconventional warfare that the Commonwealth (and for that matter, the USMC) has ever waged, has been done with Main Forces; Special Forces more often than not simply played a supporting role, and in some cases were not even present.

The US Army of course, takes a different view, and has two or three times as many Special Forces troopers as it does Rangers. While that certainly makes sense from the US Army's point of view, from a Commonwealth (and I suspect to a large extent, the USMC) point of view, it's just bizarre. Look at Commonwealth SF - even the UK has no more than a single Regular Army SF Battalion - 22 SAS, and only 2 Reserve Battalions and a Reserve Company (The HAC), plus the Royal Marines' Company-sized SBS. The only US SF of the same calibre - 1st SFOD-Delta (or whatever it's calling itself these days) and SEAL Team Six similarly amount to quite small proportions of the entire Army (or Navy's) force.

And like Commonwealth SF, they do guerrilla warfare very rarely, and only when necessary - if at all. So why all the other Army SF ("Green Berets")? The Commonwealth had its delusions of raising guerrilla armies dispelled over the course of WWII and the 15 years or so following its end; in the end, most of them tend to turn on their teachers. I would suggest that the US experience with the Montagnards/Hmong in Indochina was quite atypical and extraordinary.

So why have thousands of top-notch, highly-trained and experienced NCOs (I know the latter has changed recently) and officers separated from the rest of the Army and placed into Units that rarely get to perform their main mission, the raising of guerrilla armies - a mission with ultimately dubious consequences - and not in the regular infantry? The Commonwealth learned in the decades after WWII that the old way of giving someone 3 or 4 months of "training" (too much of it spent on nonsense and not real training) didn't cut it when you had to perform LIC and COIN in former colonies and still prepare to fight WWIII in Europe, all the while on very constrained budgets.

That's where the 6-month Infantry syllabus for Riflemen came from - necessity in the face of shrinking budgets with attendant lower manpower levels and cuts in equipment procurements. While SF became even more specialized, most of the roles previously reserved for Commando Forces were (sucessfully) taken over by Line Battalions (with vastly improved training), and the remaining Commando Forces concentrated on Mountain, Amphibious, and Airborne Operations (as the Royal Marines and the Rangers do). Fewer troops have to be able to do it all (or almost all), with less.

Rob's right; the SOF-type training that his CO was able to let him pursue in his old Unit was exactly the right thing to do. As the Marines say, a Rifleman can do anything - provided he is afforded and allowed the proper training, and sufficient of it. There certainly is a role for Special Forces - of the SAS/SBS kind, which is in line with what Lord Slim described as being the sort of unit that requires no more than a handful of men for its missions. But realistically speaking, I rather doubt there is a real justification for maintaining seven 1,200 or 1,500-man Groups of first-rate officers and NCOs for a (primary) role that has rarely panned out in practice. Much better to take Slim's advice and put these fine men into the Regular Army and to help assimilate the standards of the Main Forces much closer to that of the US Army Special Forces than those of a draftee mass-army.

The English-speaking Armies are only going to get smaller for the most part, and on even tighter budgets. There's only so many (or rather, so few) troops to go around, and funds to kit them out. One of the main antidotes to this problem is going down the road that Rob proposes: SOF-type training for all Infantry.