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Originally Posted by rubberneck
The public has been told over and over again how modern wars are increasingly being waged by the Special Operations community. If that is the case why isn't more of an effort being made to integrating mother Army into what you guys do.
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This would take a book to answer but I will try and be concise. First of all there has been and always will be a turf battle to protect that which is your bread and butter. You can see it now with everyone yelling about the death of armor as a practical system for use in urban combat-which of course is not correct but it is being waged at the highest levels in the pentagon. There is more awareness today of what SOF does than ever before, however there are also those within SOF that do not understand the total breadth of SOF missions nor how to integrate with the non-SOF Army to acheive the synergistic effects that both bring to the battle. There are also those that see their role in life becoming something other than what they have been trained to do over their entire career. To see yourself and your chosen branch becoming less relevant in the operations of the future makes you do stupid things to protect your relevancy. Then there is just pure jealousy-that has always been the case when SF can operate without having to ask for permission using just broad mission guidance and accomplish the task at hand with less resources folks get upset. Then there is the reality of what it takes just to be an infantry, armor, engineer, artillery, medical service, quartermaster, signal, aviation, ordnance, transportation, medical corps, military police, military intelligence, etc officer. Your focus for your formative years are binocular in scope and you are bred to become a platoon leader and company commander of a pure force of other like branch folks with the requirements and standards of that branch. It becomes incestuous if you expect to succeed. A Special Forces Team is a combined arms team from the outset and has the capability of a combined arms team in that it has built into it. It has its own operations, intelligence, engineer, reconnaissance, infantry, artillery, medical, civil affairs, psyop, and communications skills capable of organizing and running a combined arms battalion sized organization. No conventional Lieutenant Colonel wants to hear that some no-necked Captain with his merry band of guerrilla leaders has the capability of accomplishing what has taken him 15 or so years of training to be able to do the same thing. There is also an officer-non-commissioned officer mindset in the regular army that makes them incapable of understanding that SF NCOs are trained and capable of leading and/or advising companies, battalions and brigades and that given a chance to do so they will out perform those officer "commanders" in the field because they will lead from the front, know their men, and are working under a stituation of mutual respect and understanding that just never seems to get established in like conventional organizations. While you can conduct a relief in place with any old infantry unit replacing another of like size, SF teams are not interchangeable in many situations because of the personal interactions required between them and the indig that takes time and effort to establish. Now I have only marred the surface here and each mission area that SF performs has different tipping points that seperates them and defies understanding by the conventional force folk and I won't even talk about the personality differences. On a personal note I have a son who is a Medical Service Corps major and while he is going great guns in his branch the only thing we really have in common as far as the military is concerned is that we both jump out of aircraft, and we are in the same family and you expect mother army to understand what SF does.