What is JCISFA, what is SFA, and how does it fit in the greater scheme of things-PT 1

[Rob Thornton]

Hi Steve,
Great points. I do need to clarify something though for people who might pick up the thread without reading the original posts. You'd referred to "JCISFA" teams. JCISFA does not have the capacity to send out TTs from inside the organization itself - as mentioned, we are only about 25 folks.

Like other individual augmentees, these folks who will go out to ministerial level advisory positions come from somewhere else, and go to somewhere else ( assigned to MNSTC-I). They are not assigned to JCISFA. Like other advisory and SFA efforts, we may touch them to different degrees, often indirectly through our effects on the institutional side (like helping to est. a POI specifically for them); or more directly in our support to the operational side - but its a misnomer to call them "JCISFA" teams. If you remember the "BASF" commercial a few years back that "At BASF we don't make________, we just make _________ better" - that might be closer to what we do.

On the support to operational units, we do work with deploying units on challenges such as SFA planning - which could get you to how you might organize to best support ongoing SFA efforts in your AOR, or to how you might take on a larger chunk of the SFA mission. Primarily we are focused on supporting the SFA missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, again with 25 folks - you have to establish some priorities, but we have recognized the need to consider other areas as SFA as a way to build partner capacity and meet other policy objectives in many other areas.

Its probably also good idea to talk about the relationship with the various service training centers. Although we have "Joint" in our name, that does not put us at the top of a training hierarchy. Right after the word "Joint" is the word "center", which for those who have looked out into the world of centers, there is generally not a great deal of authority associated with it. This is a conscious decision when est. a center - you want them un-encumbered to do those things which a center can do. Center then, does not equal command - once you throw command responsibilities into an organization, you change the fundamental nature of what that organization is, and what it does, and how what it does is perceived. What we have done though, is serve as an integrator for education, best practices, etc. - we connect people and efforts so that people have a better understanding of what works and why, and what does not work and why. One of the recent things JCISFA did was bring representation from the various advisory training centers together to talk about ways they could leverage each other in near real time - so the advisors that go through the various service sponsored centers will have had the best and most up to date information.

Another example are the interviews we conduct with TT members, with GOs, and with BCT members about SFA as they saw it during their operational deployment (and how they might see it now), then we figure out how to work that into a product that informs the JIIM community, Ex. I'm working on a SFA Case study that interviews not only folks assigned to TTs in an AOR, but to members of the BCT, members of the higher echelon CMD, members of the PRT, and some of the folks from DoJ who worked advising Iraqi prisons. I'll take all that and synthesize it so what comes out will hopefully be a holistic look at SFA in that area for that period of time that shows the complexity of the SFA environment. The goal of that effort would be that when someone deploying, someone working institutional issues, some one working policy, or just an average civilian considering the war picks it up, they will have a better understanding of the challenges of conducting SFA simultaneously with offensive, defensive and other stability tasks.

Now I want to go back and look at your post in depth, I feel like there are some important things that should be talked about - I just needed to provide a little bit more info on this side of the original thread before doing so.

Best, Rob