Right now, the advising mission for the Marine Corps is very ad-hoc. Both MARSOC and MCTAG are very new organizations. I believe it is intended that MARSOC will train foreign Special Forces and MCTAG will train foreign conventional forces. The advisors going to Iraq on Military Transition Teams and to Afghanistan on Embedded Training Teams are pulled out of normal units to do fill that role. Maybe it will change, but there is no opportunity to be a "career advisor" at this point.All of that said, while I am focusing on excelling at my short term goals, I am very interested in ways an aspiring officer might later pursue a career in FID work. A MARSOC PAO recommended that I shoot for either the 0302 or 0203 MOS... though anyone familiar with the Corps will tell you that MOS designation is much more dependent upon the 'needs of the Corps' than personal preference. With all of this in mind, I was just curious to see if any members might be able/willing to afford insight and direction that might help guide me toward this specialization over coming years.
As for MOS, 0302 will always open more doors to you than any other job, but I worked with about quite a few 0302 advisors in Iraq and not a single one came even close to being worth a damn. As hard as it is for me to say, I met more Army infantry officers that were good to go than I did Marine infantry officers in Iraq that were. Any combat MOS, intel MOS, and loggies get pulled for them. Most of them have a 0302 team leader and an 0302 Operations advisor who advise the foreign national CO and S3, and then an 0802 who stands behind both of them and face palms whenever they open their mouth.
Since the justification has already been covered, I would like to see the Marine Corps FID capabilities as an option between SOF and "Big Army". SOF can go in when there is no political will or visibility (like Yemen in the last couple of years), the Marine Corps can go in when things get heated but before the internal regime collapses and there is some justification (like Yemen right now), the Big Army Super Footprint, Super Expensive COIN jobs can be reserved for the Big Dookie-storms, like post-invasion Afghanistan, Iraq, and if Pakistan were to go under.I would like to hear thoughts on how they feel about the Marine Corps pursuing the FID/Advisor mission?
And if the SOF guys whine about us stepping on their turf, we can remind them that we have a long history of doing FID long before any of them were in diapers.
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