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Originally Posted by lksteve
a team oriented toward, say Iraq might have nine linguists...two Arabic linguists, two Spanish linguists, three German linguists and two Vietnamese linguists....the war plan might call for four Arabic linguists, two Farsi linguists, etc...while all the guys might be linguists, the languages don't fit the AOR...not always a problem, but always a consideration...
because we had four radios, someone wrote each detachment should have four jumpmasters into our planning documents...having only two jumpmasters meant team wasn't fully mission capable...
the standard unit reporting methods didn't work well for SF in 1980, so a battalion commander sought to provide more meaningful imput...it seems toward the end, we started getting a response...the tradeoff was end strength in the short term versus improved capability in the long term...the personnel folks at USAREUR worried about teams going down to eight or nine people, not realizing that twelve guys, while great, were no more effective than eight if they weren't fully qualified to work in the AOR...
the pipeline for this generation of SF is so long, (or so it seems to one who spent 17 weeks in training group) is to address some of the problems we had back in the post Vietnam era...we got guy who were fluent in Spanish, Korean, Farsi, but damned if we could get anyone qualified in Polish, Czech, Magyar, etc...
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Steve, I understand alot of that reasoning, then again, seems like the folks at USAREUR are thinking to hard again. If a Team is being sent to Iraq for instance, ideally it would be great if they ALL spoke some form of Arabic. How many different dialects are there between just Afghanistan and Iraq? Dialects that an Arab, Afghan or whatever, couldn't understand or speak? I sure don't know, but I had experience in Germany with it and was like night and day. German's couldn't understand what another German was saying, nada, nichts. Having some guys trained in the language is definately important. I'm old school and may be off base here, but anyone in SF or on an ODA is capable of learning another language and has been trained in at least one. What I'm trying to say, to me, a Team that has trained, lived, worked or even fought together, is more important than how the number of Jumpmasters correlate with the number of radios. Having as many linguists on a Team in any given country it will be deployed to is a plus. Those who can't speak the language will adapt and learn.
A ton of SF guys sent to Viet Nam, were not language trained for that country. They learned while there. I was sent to quite a few different countries when I was in. I/we always tried to learn at least some basics of thier language. Interesting how one can communicate that way and yet, not know squat.
