Rob,

Good thread, as we all know education/training is the keystone of success in both the military and civilian world.

I have been lucky enough to serve in the AUS, ARNG, USAR, & civil service (Army & Navy) as well as having worked a few years in the private sector prior to joining the USG. This experience has shown me that trained individuals (completing training is a mark of the individuals motivation and suitability for the task) who are adequately resourced (and understand the difference between need and want) and who have good leadership are in general more successful at accomplishing the work mission than those who lack these things. Gear is good, but good people are better than good gear.

The US Military, in my opinion, does a good job of balancing societal needs and the requirements of necessary expertise to accomplish its mission of defending the Nation. Teams/Nations benefit from having members/inhabitants with shared experiences and shared education/training. One of the missions of the US military is to provide this training/education to our citizens. On the flip-side of training/educating all-comers our organization still needs experts who can guide the organization to success. To use the bell curve analogy the bulk of a population will always end up in the middle and those at the upper and lower ends of the bell curve are small in number. Adequately educating a population for a required task is a function of limited time and resources and always will be.

Conventional Forces need to accept that full-spectrum operations are the required skill set and ensure that their teams/units are continually and heavily trained. Since the bulk of the Conventional Force will not stay for more than 4 years training time and thus skill developing time is limited. Good NCOs, many CTC rotations, extensive military schooling which teaches full-spectrum operations, and of course operational experience are the keys to training success. The bulk of the US Military can accomplish this. Conventional Forces are more generalists than specialists and need to be assigned missions with this in mind.

SOF needs to accept that the population of participants is limited and true joint operations allow us to maximize our effectiveness. SOF work requires specialized professional civilian skills, advanced infantry skills, language capabilities, and extensive in-country experiences in order to accomplish specialized missions. To acquire these skills requires more time and resources in order to vet and educate appropriate people who are suited to the task. Limited time and resources mean that only a small population will be able to get this type of training and experience. SOF are more specialists than generalists and need to be assigned missions with this in mind.

'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' and 'Diplomacy is the art of gaining strategic advantage through negotiation' are two truisms that always apply and ones that we as a Nation need to revisit regularly. DOS/USAID/Peace Corps needs to be beefed up and placed upon an equal to or better resource footing than the US Military.

DOS/USAID/Peace Corps, SOF, and Conventional Forces all need to refocus and redouble their efforts on training the team/squad, since teams/squads are the building blocks of successful organizations. This means that team/squads must have extensive shared educational and 'real-world' experiences so that they can gel and excel. Both generalists and specialists are necessary to the Nations success. Bottom line? All of us need more training to excel and this requires steady resource streams, extensive planning, and most importantly good people.