[Hognose (RIP)]

In my view, you need to figure what baseline of skill you need. Downhill skiing builds skiing confidence, but is probably wasted otherwise.

You need to be able to move via skis. I was astonished to find the Canadian airborne regiment (before it was rolled up in a PC reaction to some misconduct in Somalia) didn't ski. They snowshoe because it is easier to train someone to snowshoe than to ski.

Well, of course we (SF) were on skis, and we could easily outdistance the snowshod Canucks, not to mention that over any distance they'd be smoked, where skiing is not that difficult.

I was in 10th a long time ago, and we downhilled a lot (we also had a couple of resorts in VT and NH that would spot us lift tickets, and Stowe would actually provide us a place to stay, the "stone hut" atop Mansfield). In the 11th we x-c'd more -- we had to, because we were on an annual treadmill to Norway. I have no doubt we could have skied the legs off of our 10th Group counterparts (we did it to an evaluator or two) but the Norwegian home guard instructors in turn could ski rings around us.

Ultimately. you need to practice living in the cold and snow every couple of years. You can't rely completely on where your AO is (at one time, 2/3 of the SF in Afghanistan was oriented towards Latin America and the other 1/3 towards Southeast Asia). But you don't want to go too far the other way... skiing after all is a means of travelling. It is no different from HALO, SCUBA, or, say, being able to take a sun or star sight and use a set of celestial tables to fix your location. Training in actions on the objective should take priority: bearing in mind that for most SF, cultural orientation will serve you better than stylized door-kicking skills. In two dozen years I never kicked a real live door, but I did talk to a boatload of real live foreigners.

I respectfully differ with the brother that suggested that a forgotten language can be refreshed in 30 days. Maybe: given a young (<30) troop, a very high level of initial language training (the 3/3 you come out of DLI with if you don't booze it up too much), and high-quality, preferable immersion, refresher. I've never seen those circumstances come together, but they could. Conceivably. Unfortunately many troops and leaders consider time spent on language and culture maintenance as "screwing off."

Even when the combat assignment hands you a language and culture other than what you've studied... the more languages you learn the easier the new ones come. You keep the language bits of your cerebrum from drying out.

So... if I was king, I'd stress:

1) cultural/language orientation & area studies. (Not just your area, but everyone in SF better get smart about Afghanistan, Iraq, and other possible Islamist hot spots).

2) Instructional training & preparation. Can every guy on your team teach a class? Through an interpreter? On five minutes' notice? Or, with a day's notice, but with a formal lesson plan? Do you have CDs with basic military subjects, combat subjects, leadership subjects, all ready to go? (Same as class - can everybody give a briefing, targeted to a bunch of privates, or a general staff? If not, get your guys that way).

3) Combat training. IMHO the basic benefit of things like SFAUC is exactly why Gen. Boykin launched it: to develop combat confidence in teams. If your SFAUC creates divisions rather than bonds between teammates it needs a rethink badly.

Every man on your team (ODA and ODB) needs to be able to put every US and foreign weapon he is likely to encounter into action, do immediate action, reload, and HIT with it. This means .50, DShK, mortars, Javelin. NOT just your 18Bs. You don't want your Mk-19 to go silent because the belt just ran out and your doc is looking at it like a hog looking at a wristwatch.

The other side of that is, every team member needs a much bigger subset of the doc's skills than is normally recognised. EVERY man MUST be able to: suture, tourniquet, intubate, and do a cutdown & tie-off. There's no way to build real confidence in this without you-know-what, but you don't want one of your guys to be the one that died from a survivable wound, like one SF soldier in this war, because there was no medic on the patrol, and no one understood that pneumothorax was slowly asphyxiating him.

4) Next in priority is infiltration and movement skills. Of those, I'd put IADs at the top. IADs are what bring you home. They are what gets you over the shock and leads you to regain the initiative.

5) Finally, special skills. SOTIC, ASOT, climbing, CIF type stuff, parachuting (s/l and halo), SCUBA. These are all real good skills to have as a person or on your team. But they are the tail of SF skills -- don't let them wag the dog.

When you add this all up, even before you throw in all the BS annual training requirements the Army throws at you, there's way more training to do than fits in any mortal calendar - so you prioritize, and you train the least perishable skills (static line parachuting, for instance) at longer intervals. Team skills (IADs) are less durable than individual skills, because each personnel change alters the dynamic of the team -- some a little, some a lot. Collective skills at the group level are usually exercised once every year or two; at the ODB there are some doctrinal ODB missions (Area Command for one) that very seldom get exercised. Some ODBs haven't run an isolation area in ten years. FOBs don't get exercised enough either. It's just the nature of the beast

There's no reason you can't train higher and lower priority skills at the same time, especially in an FTX environment.

This is just my opinion, and we all know what opinions are like....

-nose