Originally Posted by
sullygoarmy
Jon,
The latest rumors we hear involve creating an Advisor Identifier...something that goes on your records which says you have advisor experience and can be used again in the future. It doesn't pull you from your basic track (armor, infantry, aviation, etc) but serves as a marker for the records guys to track and find people of an advisor gig comes up again.
Personally, I'm all for an Advisor Functional Area. I believe the Foreign Area Officers fit a specific bill: area specific, more political than working with foreign security forces. My concept would be to create an advisor selection process, develop an Advisor Functional area and have the promotion "gates" fit the jobs of an advisor. You can train advisor skills, generic rapport building skills, conduct "Robin Sage" like training events, etc. Once you have a block of trained advisors, the cultural training and language can be an in-depth "isolation" type train up to get them ready for a specific mission. However, if you pick the right people, they will adapt regardless of the culture or initial language barriers.
What do you do with the Advisor Functional Area guys in peace time? Have them work with foreign militaries under FID! This keeps their advisor skills sharp, rotate them in and out of FID missions and get civilian (anthropolgy, psychology, history,etc) schooling. We could also rotate them through some inter-agency jobs to get a better understanding of how (or how it doesn't...ask Jimbo) the process works. Rotate them into police schools, police training, border patrol, customs jobs, etc. All the missions we are asking our transistion teams to do know, without the benefit of years of training...only about 60 days worth. Then back into the advisor mode. We can implement this training at CTCs, work the advisors in with standard BCT rotations, and keep a cadre of well trained advisors ready to go for the next time we have to help rebuild foreign security forces.
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