SFA capability is rooted in Individual Talent (part 1)
The research JCISFA conducts with respect to identifying best practices and the planning and exercise activities that JCISFA supports indicates that the cornerstone for SFA capability resides in individual talent. In some ways this may seem self-evident - in training for any mission essential task we identify what are the individual requirements such as marksmanship, driver skills, etc. which must be covered as prerequisites in our training strategy. Where SFA differs is that because the object is to develop sustainable capability and capacity in somebody else’s security forces, the individual ability to employ his subject matter expertise, experiential skills, and overall knowledge is the critical capability, e.g. the one that directly impacts the objective, vs. the collective capability in which it is packaged, and which enables it. Make no mistake, the collective capability is often the capability which enables, sustains and supports the individual capability, but the individual capability of being able to use your own individual skills, attributes and experiences to support someone else’s developmental requirements is the capability that influences the FSF opposite. Why is influence the critical piece? Because ultimately the goal is a degree of self sustainment in the FSF which achieves our policy objective(s), and that requires they (the FSF being supported) see where your efforts are beneficial or critical to them.
Within the debate on how best we should insitituionalize SFA as a capability there has been a great deal of discussion about organizational solutions. These include the capability of existing force structure to meet requirements, and the need for specialized force structure to meet these requirements. The discussion while generating friction does not really move the issue forward. It does not really address the fact that SFA capabilities are rooted in individual talent, and that any organizational solution in and of itself will not meet the range of operational requirements required by policy, but in fact will leave us with a limited capability that will often put the burden on the operational commander to either wedge it into an operational need, or to break it apart and reform it to meet that need as well as possible – both are current practice, and both are full of risk.
While it is incumbent upon the services and JFCOM to consider the risks to the institution with any course of action with regard to institutionalizing and generating SFA capabilities, it should first consider the risks to the policy objective, e.g. putting the “right” capabilities into the hands of the operational commanders. One comment on a large commitment to specialized force structure is the issue of it being an “unsustainable” option. This does not tell the civilian chain of command anything except that given the other things we think we must do, we cannot support that as a course of action. To this I suspect a response could be the directed elimination of other capabilities in order to make specialized force structure available and sustainable (either within a service or in DoD writ large). It does not show the civilian leadership the services can adapt their processes to generate capabilities required to enable a preferred operational course of action, rather it postulates that conditions and policy should be adjusted to support the capabilities it prefers to generate. Further, such rationale creates a false bottom as ultimately it will still have to generate those SFA capabilities in the same ad hock fashion as it has, which may in fact protract conflict by not putting the right capabilities on the ground, risk the policy objective, and create more stress on the force then if it had adapted its programs, policies and processes to be able to generate the right capabilities initially. Organizational solutions may be easier to program, but they are not necessarily effective.
There are in fact several good reasons why force structure (specialized in organization or by mission) is not an optimal solution to generating SFA capabilities.
1) Specialized force structures ultimately become special – that is they lose part of their utility, and develop safeguards to protect what they perceive as their mission. These walls not only keep things out, they also keep them in. No matter how much structure is allocated, it is likely that at some point the need to interoperate on fundamental levels with non specialized force structure will occur. At that point any lessons available to the non-specialized “rest of the force” will be hard to incorporate to increase the capacity of any capability. This issue is not so different the one we see between Special Operating Forces and General Purpose Forces (consider all the debate on SOF/GPF integration) . If it is true that we must be prepared to wage both conventional and irregular warfare (a useful bifurcation of warfare in terms of thinking about capabilities) to achieve our policy objectives, then it makes sense to take those steps which develop our total force to meet those challenges. SFA individual skills are fungible across the spectrum of warfare (they are ultimately about people and people wage war), and as such should be developed across the force – creating specialized force structure does not support this.
2) The subject matter expertise and skills required to conduct SFA come from being developed in various capacities and experiences throughout a career. – e.g. if someone is going to advise a foreign security force armor brigade commander on how to be an armor brigade commander, the range of developmental experiences accrued by the advisor need to be relevant. Having someone who at some point lived that developmental process rather than just studying it lends itself to credibility and legitimacy. The additional “advisor” skills can be trained in a relatively short time (relative to the time required for experiential development), provided there is both a well developed process for doing so (doctrine, training, leader development and education) and that the right people can be identified based n the mission (personnel policies).
3) This type of capability, rooted in individual talent, lends itself to tailored solutions. Specialized force structure is not too much different then saying a brigade sized unit is the answer to every set of conditions and objectives. Individual capability that is trained, developed and educated, which can refer to descriptive doctrine, and that can be tracked and identified to meet specific conditions provides for capabilities which can be assembled effectively and efficiently to meet a requirement. It does require organizational flexibility on a number of levels, and it does require acknowledgment that problems can be unique and have unique tolerances, but this approach ultimately generates less risk to the policy objective and less stress on the force by extension. In this case, while the assemblage of capabilities from the “talent pool” seems ad hoc in appearance, the processes which support it support a capability that is well developed and tailored to the requirements, e.g., it is a form of deliberate task organization.
4) The scope of SFA requirements are such that the breadth includes the range of possible security services that exist in a partner, or may be required of the partner, and the depth includes the individual patrolman, minister, soldier, etc all the way up to the institutions which sustain them. This requires us to be able to leverage the total force which includes the Active Component and the Reserve Component, SOF and GPF, the Generating Force and the Operating Force, the individual and the collective based on requirements that are defined by closely considering the objectives in light of the conditions (not I did not even account for those things which may be better done by another USG agency). This means that there is no standard answer and that any attempt to standardize an answer creates risk to the objective. We know by our current and historical experience that conditions change both in terms of geography, and evolve over time. When we try and deliver a standard package for SFA developmental capability without consideration of conditions and objectives it is akin to saying that saying that for all we are going to teach is 10th grade High School literature course regardless whether what you really need is an elementary level course, or a university level one and regardless of that you really may already be fine with literature and wanted math, science or history.
5) Finally, this approach supports maintaining our overall adaptability. Allowing leaders to move between the “controlled” environs of our CTCs and other events when eventually we return to a more normal set of conditions, and the “uncontrolled” environments associated with security force assistance (and other activities which take us out into the real world) supports a perspective that helps to prevent our building DOTMLPF practices which support war as we’d prefer it vs. as it is. We currently adapt well inside the operational environment because we face enemies and other adversaries who are trying to gain and retain the initiative, as such we must adapt of die. In the controlled environments the adversaries are often our faithfulness to practices and as such there are penalties for adaptation. We’ve fought hard for our gains in these areas which manifest themselves in the type of subordinate/superior tension in dialogue where disagreement is often healthy.
cont. below
Originally Posted by sapperfitz82
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"A Sherman can give you a very nice... edge."- Oddball, 
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