Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
What I perceived (in at least one of the posts) as friction between SF and JSOC is really lost on me - I can only infer it is really inside-inside baseball.
is the basic problem. Though it's really more complex, that serves as a simple andswer.

It's just different tribes -- and different jobs. JSOC folks are shooters primarily; hard wired, multi skilled and pretty much Type A guys. The SF guys OTOH are fixers and trainer; educators, if you will primarily; most of' em are pretty laid back.

It's the battle (philosophical differences) between the SWAT eam and the EMTs in a sense.

Those are very broad generalizations and there are exceptions and nuances all over the place but that'll do for a quick and dirty broad description. Add in the fact that in the upper echelons of USSOCOM, preference has in the past been given to the slightly more glamorous (to some) but far smaller community of shooters and that the far more numerous SF guys have folks who also do the DA stuff and you have a recipe for dissension. As ODB mentioned, this is slowly changing as some high powered shooters realize the value of SF -- and become aware of the fact that one can train an Operator a lot quicker than one can train an SF Team member.

The operator takes more and expensive practice to sustain but the SF guy takes longer initially. The Rangers sort of get caught in the middle, though they serve as a farm team (Dalton Fury's words) to an extent for both JSOC and SF. All those folks cost more per bod than do conventional units; that and the selection and training time required preclude a rapid strength increase of either type.

As usual, most of the Troops on the ground work it out with little friction; the flaps occur in the States and are about dollars and spaces -- and who gets the dirty thankless jobs sort of stuff -- while in the field that stuff is not important. Usually.

SF and JSOC both run selection and assessment programs -- similar yet different and passing one does not mean automatic entry to the other (or it didn't used to...) -- and it has been said that passing that in both cases is seen as as big or a bigger bragging / unit cohesion factor than simply being there by many...

The 82d also plays farm team but they're far bigger, strength wise than the Ranger Regiment, so while the 82d grumbles about it, it doesn't impact them as badly as it does the Rangers. There are people who got to selection (both) without being in or having been in the Ranger Regiment or the 82d but from elsewhere in the Army; the numbers used to be sort of small. SF also directly recruits with the '18X' program (LINK); Uboat509 commented on that some time ago.