Educating Special Forces Junior Leaders for a Complex Security Environment

[Jedburgh]

JSOU, Jul 09: Educating Special Forces Junior Leaders for a Complex Security Environment

...the operational environment all SOF officers will face in the coming decades will include much more than irregular warfare, which greatly complicates the training and education requirements for the entire officer corps, but particularly for Special Forces officers.

This study contains six parts:

a. List of assumptions that will impact Special Forces officer education and training.
b. Best guess at what the “future international security environment” will look like.
c. Recommendations—based on the assumptions and the “future operational environment”—of several knowledge-based education competencies—some familiar, some not.
d. Survey of graduate programs teaching these competencies.
e. Statistical analysis and discussion of the “gap” in graduate education between Army Special Forces and non-Special Forces
f. Suggestions for providing Special Forces officers with a viable, tailored, and quality master’s degree that will enhance their operational performance, accelerate their capability for senior-level and joint staff billets, and increase their opportunity for successful command in increasingly difficult command situations.

[George L. Singleton]

In simple old Air Force and civilian language, it will be interesting to see how a Masters degree program is developed to train officers to "think outside the box." But this is the need now and for the forseeable future.

I wonder if National Defense University (NDU) will be the focus for the Masters program, or if we will look more to psyops and consider outsourcing to a major university which his both in attendance and on line computer driven classes or courses.

The few sociologists on SWJ should be of great value in the curicculum development if the DoD "thinks logically and quickly" to get outside brainpower to help develop the curicculum.

[Tom Odom]

Naval Postgraduate School has been doing this for decades via the National Security Affairs program as well as the new programs like that MikeF is in now.

On the Navy side the students in the NSA program were aviators, intelligence, or SEALS. Army was mainly FAOs with some SF and USAF were tracked toward embassy jobs.
Best
Tom

[George L. Singleton]

Tom, thanks for focusing a partial answer to my stumbling inquiry.

I was and am aware of the Naval College program (missed a chance to do it when a reservist with HQ USSOCOM) as I was committed to another continuing education task at that time...time conflict, near end of my active, then only reserve career.

Wishing no harm to the Navy school, I am still curious how any exisiting military ed program can "really" get us to think and then operate "outside the box"...in a manner necessary to show results sooner vs. later.

SECDEF Rumsfield seems to me to have tried, and failed, to use the Special Ops approach in Afghanistan, where it worked initially, then things within a year or two started falling down...perhaps, who the heck am I to know it all...perhaps due to in attention to two things:

1. (my penchant) for psyops/Voice of American radio and TV 24/7 in the appropriate dialects, to constantly put down the lies in the media all over the theater of operations region...including in the Pak press and TV/radio media.

2. Our inability to quickly stand up a stable Afghan Army and national police, for whatever reasons you better educated, younger, on the scene guys and gals know best.

Point well taken, Tom, about the Navy School. but I am a stubbord old coot and perhaps a whole sea change of mind set is yet not either allowed or is already, goofily in my personal opinion, "boxed in" by political constraints from on high.

Best muttering I can do short of self-explosion.

Good weekend to all, we are off the Gulf Coast beaches late in the weekend for a week of beer, beef, sun, and grown children still feeding from the proverbial "family" wallet as our "guests."

[goesh]

You want outside the box thinking? and I intend absolutely no sarcasm here: drop them off in the poor side of a big city with nothing but the clothes on their back , no money and a sworn pledge to make no phone calls to outside resources and tell 'em you will pick them up in 10 days at a designated location.

Let 'em rest up then drop them off on one of the Lakota Indian reservations in the upper plains for their last 10 days of thinking and living outside the box training - excellant COIN preperation as well - 2 for 1.

Why is a Masters degree required/strongly recommended? just curious

[John T. Fishel]

hardly out of the box but it is appropriate. It was classic SOE and OSS training in WWII. It is the kind of thing COL Bob Shaw was doing at the Asymmetric Warfare Group for the last several years. It's a good idea and it works.

That said, appropriate civilian masters degrees have been shown to stimulate the kind of adaptive thinking that SF and other advisory type efforts call for. See some of the interviews in Security Force Assistance: the Mosul Case Study published in the SWJ Journal several months ago.

Cheers

JohnT

[oblong]

You want outside the box thinking? and I intend absolutely no sarcasm here: drop them off in the poor side of a big city with nothing but the clothes on their back , no money and a sworn pledge to make no phone calls to outside resources and tell 'em you will pick them up in 10 days at a designated location.

Let 'em rest up then drop them off on one of the Lakota Indian reservations in the upper plains for their last 10 days of thinking and living outside the box training - excellant COIN preperation as well - 2 for 1.

Why is a Masters degree required/strongly recommended? just curious

That's an interesting idea. But how bad of a bad neighborhood would you drop them off in? In today's world, I would imagine the reaction from Congress and the media would be pretty intense the first time one of these individuals is seriously injured (or killed) or injures someone in self defense if he gets mugged or assaulted during one of these exercises.