Army News Service, 29 Mar 07: NCOs Sought for Human Intelligence
..."Our goal is to quickly infuse 100 staff sergeants and sergeants first class to our HUMINT force from all other career fields," said Sgt. Maj. Fernando Martinez-Irizarry, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2.

"They will be provided accelerated training on basic and advanced HUMINT skills and be assigned to units deploying in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom," he said....
Piss poor post-Cold War reductions led directly to current critical supply and demand problems with tac HUMINT, which - as this additional measure illustrates - continue to be addressed by knee-jerk quantity over quality short term solutions.

You can't shake and bake a senior HUMINT NCO in 24-27 weeks, then immediately deploy him to Iraq or Afghanistan and expect him to effectively manage HUMINT collection ops or conduct any of a myriad of other HUMINT missions, let alone that most critical task of any senior NCO - mentor and train junior soldiers.

The 97E field has already suffered in quality of NCO leadership recently by too-rapid promotion of soldiers as the previously-tiny field has expanded so quickly. So now the Army is fixing the problem of filling mid-to-senior NCO positions by inexperienced personnel within the MOS by filling them with NCOs from outside the field with zero experience....