Quote Originally Posted by Voodoun View Post
Now, to revisit my point, what happened in this thread is exactly what seems to be happening at SWTG, USASOC, and now USAR - two primary components of SOF, CA and PSYOP, go from being heavily discussed in the article, to virtually ignored in the discussion. Why is that? Is CA not sexy enough? Is PSYOP too much of an unknown commodity?

Or is it that SF is really the only thing people care about?
For what it's worth, I know of at least two JSOTF commanders and two Group Commanders who considered "IO" - largely to include PSYOP, CA, and a few related capabilities - to be their main effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. And their deeds backed up their words.

The remarkable thing about this is that those "IO" assets were poorly integrated until just prior to - or in some cases after - deployment. Yet they were still seen as tremendous assets and leveraged very well. The greatest shortcoming was not integrating them during training. The perception seemed to be that a commander could just say, "hey PSYOP guy, this looks like a job for something non-lethal. Throw some PSYOP at this."

Elsewhere in this thread, you mentioned something about developing a CAPEs brief. If that brief is to be of any value, it needs to be given to the commander while they are planning their collective training, way prior to deployment. Otherwise, it's too much information, too late. There is a growing consensus out there in the SOF community that the (IO/non-lethal/insert term) assets are valuable. The speed with which they've learned to leverage those assets has been, in my opinion, very slow.