Fitness

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.6.2017

An ugly day outdoors if you live on the East Coast, so a good way to begin Tuesday is head to the gym for Leg Day. Begin with pull-ups and towel pullups for those who don’t have access to climbing ropes. Then squats, lunges and the sled followed by a three-mile run

Training:

Continue to prep for the UBRR

3 x Pull-ups 10 reps

3 x Towel pull-ups 10 reps

3 x Front Squat 20-15-12 reps (lighter weight)

3 x Goblet Squats 20-15-12 reps (lighter weight)

4 x Sled push heavier weight

3 x 10 reps Dumbbell lunges

3 x 20 Side Planks

3-Mile run

Stretch well after completion

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.5.2017

Let’s start off Monday and the week with a good workout. Start off with the basics of pushups, sit-ups, and crunches, then to the bar for V-ups, pull-ups, and dips before a 5-mile run in a mini UBRR test again. Remember to stay hydrated and mark your progress in your workout log book.

Training:

More preparation for the UBRR

1 x 1-minute Pushups

1 x 1-minute Sit-ups

1 x 1-minute, Crunches

1 x 1-minute, V-ups

1 x Dips as many as possible to muscle failure

1 x Pullups as many as possible or to muscle failure

5-mile run

Stretch well after completion

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.4.2017

It is time for our Sunday morning Rucksack march. Do a quick warm up of pushups and sit-ups before heading out. Head out over varied terrain and go as fast as you can without running. It will help work off all the food from those graduation parties this weekend.

Stretch well both before and after the event. Remember to drink plenty of water and stay hydrated out there. With the heat of the warm weather months here, it’s easy to get dehydrated.

Training:

Warm up

2 x 20 Pushups

2 x 20 Sit ups

8-mile Rucksack march over varied terrain with a 45-pound minimum. And mark your times in your workout log book.

Stretch well after completion

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.3.2017

Back in the gym this Saturday morning for a Shoulder and Back workout. Towel pullups if you have no access to ropes or climbing ropes if they are available. Followed by a four-mile run. Log your numbers down in the workout notebook

Training:

More Preparation for the UBRR:

3 x 10 Lat Pull downs, rear

3 x 10 Barbell Dead Lift

3 x 10 Wide Grip Pullups

3 x 10 Towel Pullups

3 x 10 Dumbbell Side Raises

3 x 10 Seated Bent-Over Delt Raise

3 x 10 Dumbbell Shoulder Press

3 x 10 Arnold Dumbbell Press

4-mile run

Stretch well after completion

“The Jungle Will Eat You Up” Ghana Jungle Warfare School

United States soldiers recently got the opportunity to visit Africa and attend the Jungle Warfare School in at the Ghanaat Achiase military base in Akim Oda, Ghana.

The small group of soldiers from the 1^st Battalion, 506^th Infantry went thru a 10-day course in late May to hone their jungle skills from their Ghana allies. The training incorporates counter-insurgency training in their curriculum.

More than 55 U.S. soldiers were challenged to survive in the harsh Ghanaian jungle during the ten-day course. The Ghanaian instructors equipped the students with practical knowledge specific to the local terrain and environment.
“How to adapt to jungle training is very difficult for them because their type of jungle in the U.S. is very different from the type of jungle that we have,” Codjoe said. “We have taught patrolling, which is a key to jungle training … [we] also taught them how to fight insurgents in the jungle terrain, how to combat guerilla[s] in jungle terrain, raid operations and attack on enemy camp operations.”
The American soldiers, performing the various squad and platoon level tactics, quickly realized the difficulty in navigating through the jungle and adjusting to the harsh, humid climate.
“We’ve always been prepared for Iraq and Afghanistan and desert environments, and even the mountainous environments, so this is like nothing we’ve dealt with before,” said U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Hugh Smith, Delta Company’s platoon leader.
According to Ghanaian Sgt. Michael Agyemang, the school’s noncommissioned officer-in-charge, the U.S. soldiers, were determined to soak up knowledge from the expert jungle instructors. “It’s been a fast learning experience between me and the students; they are just fast. Anything you tell them, they just grab it at once,” he said.
A sign at the school reading: The Jungle is Neutral, was explained as the jungle takes no sides; it treats everyone within it the same way. Smith said the jungle training is beneficial.
“I think it’s definitely enhanced readiness,” he said. “I think coming to a different environment — a different terrain — that we’ve never really dealt with before and learning the tactics, learning how to move, learning how to navigate through the jungle has very much helped us in our readiness.”
U.S. soldiers assigned to the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment provide security during United Accord 2017 at the Jungle Warfare School at Achiase military base in Akim Oda, Ghana, May 26, 2017. Army photo by Sgt. Brian Chaney
Navigating the dense vegetation and uneven ground, as well as traversing waist-deep ponds and crossing unstable improvised bridges while watching for hidden dangerous wildlife challenged the American soldiers.

With US troops facing desert and mountainous conditions in the on-going wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, this training was a step in a different direction from the norm. It opened their eyes to another kind of fighting where the combat is much closer and the conditions very different.

To read the entire article from DOD, click here:

Photo courtesy US Army

Selecting a Better Green Beret, Interview with Brian Decker, Pt. 2

In the first segment of SpecialOperations.com interview with Brian Decker, we talked about the problem with the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) and the issues that arose from the Special Forces Selection and Assessment Course (SFAS). Brian Decker (‘the smartest guy in Training Group”) was tasked to fix the issues and get the Selection course revamped.

Decker identified that most of the problems that the course was having were social in nature. He realized that the internal drive to succeed is the best indicator for success in SF operators. He learned that each successful candidate responded to stress in their lives with a heightened sense of motivation.

He revamped the third week of SFAS (Team Week) and rather than have a candidate be evaluated as either a patrol leader or as an assistant patrol leader one time during the week, he went to a “leaderless group” exercise, where candidates were given a task as a group and the cadre, would watch and evaluate on how they self-organized around the task and requirement.

He had this to say about the events and assessment of Week 3.

During the events of Week 3, we select the future leaders of the Regiment based on their ability to lead or contribute to the performance of a team in a dynamic and complex environment.

Under Decker’s watch, while the success rate of candidates being selected from SFAS plummeted from around 50 percent to under 30, the candidates that were selected were much more successful in the SFQC with the pass rate rising from 50 percent to closer to 80 percent, which is what the command was looking for.

In the earlier segment of the interview, Decker mentioned the six attributes that the cadre of the SFAS course would look for. Special Forces training in the Special Warfare Center, SWC (referred to as “Swick”) utilized the “Whole Man” Selection Process and the six main attributes that every successful SF Operator should possess include:

Intelligence
Trainability
Physical Fitness
Motivation
Influence
Judgement

So, we’ll pick up where we left off in the interview and talk some more about the changes within the SFAS course. And that was where we had discussed the pass rate for the SFQC had risen to around 80 percent when he left and moved on to his next assignment.

Special Ops: Wow, that is incredibly high, were you surprised?

Decker: It was surprising, and at the time, we thought it might be artificially high by a bit but it reaffirmed to us, that we were doing the right thing in the course. And we felt like, if I had another year to spend at Selection, we’d have taken a lot of the attrition at Selection and put it into a screening method done at home station before they come. So you could greatly reduce it.

But, it ultimately came back to, we had really lost our way. The course had become something where it wasn’t even trying to be a predictor of success. It became just a Rite of Passage, and I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be that, but it must be a validation of the self-worth of the Regiment.

Spec Ops: I think this is a great point going back to the changes in Team Week. Back in the day, like you said a candidate may only get one turn in the barrel as a leader if that event was the second one on the fourth day of Team Week, was he getting a fair shake? I wonder what those percentage of fails were back in our era.

Decker: Right, I think you try to create the course where it is very mentally and physically demanding to want smart, physically capable people. And what makes an excellent Ranger, or CAG operator or SEAL Team Six guy is probably not the same guy who is going to do a great job in an unconventional warfare environment.

It is going to favor different traits, (laughs) Hey, I love shooting too. But that is a much more linear task than setting up the intelligence network or leading an indigenous force to a target in its area of operations.

Spec Ops: The Direct Action (DA) missions will always be big within the Command (SOCOM) because those are more tangible, or are we being too simplistic?

Decker: Yes, look the DA missions are…they’re very easy to measure, they’re very easy to tie results and you know what I’m saying?… It’s very hard in an unconventional warfare environment to capture the quality of the training that you’re doing or measure the impact of the operations.

One of the things I remember when we were in Iraq, we were trying to gauge the impact that the different ODAs (SF A-teams) were having in different areas and people started looking at “who’s doing the most missions? Who’s captured the most weapons?”

And I looked at that and said, you know, the most successful ODA may be where the least amount of stuff is happening. It may just be where that ODA achieved a level of stability in their area and the truth is, we can’t kill our way out of this problem.

Special Ops: How difficult was it to put together a matrix to track all of these guys when they were going thru training and keep track of the pass/fails and why?

Decker: For SFAS? No, it wasn’t difficult at all. We had a software program we called the “Whole Man Program”, that captured all the data and we had the students do their peers in the classroom and that was added. The cadre all had their evaluations that could be done on I-pads, on smartphones and all of that would be captured on a database. And that would spit out a summary.

And how we’d make a decision, in the end, it was interesting, that once you have all that data at the end, it is so much easier to make a decision. It goes back to the 80-20 rule; 80 percent of your success will be attributable to 20 percent of your people. And conversely, 80 percent of your struggles will also be attributable to 20 percent of your people.

And you really saw that. These guys, when you see all four cadre members see that this one guy is the #1, #2, #3 guy on a team, and the peer support are slam dunks. But on the other side, you would also see there was a lot of alignment on who did the poorest.

The question then became, it was a little more difficult to discern on the guys in the middle. And that’s the way most models are. Most models are best at explaining the extremes. And it the way it worked was much easier. We could go thru a Selection Board on about 50 soldiers in a couple of hours. It was very streamlined.

Spec Ops: We tried to write as many assessments for each event and watch not only the leaders but the team members and how well or poorly they supported the leaders.

Decker: One of the interesting things we saw when we changed the Team Week events to the “Leaderless” environment was that the stress level went up significantly. There was no “I got my time in the chute, so all I gotta do is get under this weight.”

We had a couple of guys who had gone thru both systems and they said the leaderless system was exponentially harder because they knew they were always being evaluated. This made it easier on the cadre members.

Spec Ops: How so?

Decker: When we’d finish for the day, you’d have to rank your team, first to last. Then you had to rate their attributes and we rated only four attributes during Team Week, this is a “3”, this is a “1”, this is a “5”.

And if you had a guy in the bottom four of your group, you would have to recommend that he not continue on with the course. And you’d have to write a narrative on that…it was very, very quick.

And instead of looking for everything, we’d break down the events like “Between point A and B you’re looking for this attribute.” We designed those events to specifically bring out those behaviors. And it made it easier to evaluate the events.

We also videotaped events and you’d have to watch that and learn to evaluate what we were looking for to get good quality information.

Spec Ops: These were some significant changes, was there any push-back from the Chain of Command on these changes or were they behind on this. I know Ashton (Col. Naylor) had said that he was totally behind this. What about the rest?

Decker: When General (Ed) Reeder came back on board, to SWC, I went thru it all and explained it to him and he said, “Look I don’t get it.” He said, “I’m going to have to see it because I don’t like the idea of the leaderless group, I think someone has to be in charge.”

But once he came out and watched the training, it was only half-way thru the day, he said, “I got it.” He said, “this is brilliant and we should have been doing this a long time ago. This brings out leadership that we’re looking for in the Regiment.”

And that is what it is all about right? We don’t need people who just tell people what to do. We need people that can coach and pull people together.

Spec Ops: This is why I wanted to talk to you. And the cadre were behind it?

Decker: Not at first, they were against it. But once they got used to the changes, it puts the power back in the cadre’s hands. It is a good, balanced, fair process. We would break down the committees and would reassign the committees from one SFAS class to the next.

And we got extremely creative in how we would design the events to bring out the behaviors that we were looking for. We were throwing curveballs at the candidates all the time… By the long-range movement, the guys who were window shopping and thought they may want to be SF are long gone.

If your motivations weren’t in the right place, if you didn’t understand that being successful was a process, then it was going to be difficult for you to be a select. And the difference was if a guy quit on you in say Log PT, it was because he was hurt. But if a guy quits during Team Week it was because he was overwhelmed.

It was much more mental and the ability to handle and manage the complexity of it under duress. I like the physical aspect of this as much as everybody else but what really defines us as a Regiment is what is above our shoulders.

Spec Ops: And the ideal SF operator, he’s adaptable to other lines?

Decker: Yes, well at that time, we’d get 20-25 VIP visits during the course of a year. And many of them were interested in how we selected our operators, especially the methodology. Of course, they were interested in the mental toughness aspect but the traits and attributes that we’re looking for is what many other industries look for as well.

Look, the physical talent of an individual will only take them so far, but what ultimately makes an operator successful is their character, their makeup, their approach. So, what would stop an SF soldier from reaching his full potential comes down to the way they approach their craft.

Having been in the Regiment and served in combat, I understood what constitutes a good Special Forces operator and that was invaluable because you have to know your own line of work.

The most successful people in any profession all have the same attributes. They all have grit, they all have extremely good work habits. They all have the mental toughness, the confidence which comes from practice and preparation and the optimism and belief that they can achieve. They are extremely intelligent. What makes a good operator…there is a lot of similarities with other professions.

A good SF operator, as with other professions, approaches their craft in the same way. Very much with a growth mindset, they’re more intrinsically motivated by internal factors and view success as a process. They tend to internalize feedback rather than externalize it to their environment. They all tend to be smart specifically to what they do.

SF guys can make decisions in a high-stakes environment so rapidly without having the time to think through every outcome which allows them to make sense of their environment.
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Any questions or comments can be emailed to me [email protected] or at my Twitter account @SteveB7SFG

Photo courtesy of US Army

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.2.2017

Friday morning gym day and what better way to prepare for graduation weekend than to kick it off with Leg Day. Starting with Squats – front, dumbbell goblet, and barbell, then some lunges and after the weighted sled push. And we’ll finish the workout off with a five-mile run

Training:

Continue to prep for the UBRR.

3 x Front Squat 20-15-12 reps (lighter weight)

3 x Goblet Dumbbell Squats 20-15-12 reps (lighter weight)

3 x 10 Barbell Squats

3 x 10 Dumbbell Lunges

3 x 10 Romanian Lunges

3 x Weighted sled push

5-mile run

Stretch well after completion

Selecting a Better Green Beret: Interview with Brian Decker Pt. 1

The Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) was in a bit of a crisis mode back in 2011. Candidates were failing at about a 50 percent rate which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the reasons why they were failing was a big concern with the powers in the Special Warfare Center (SWC). The issue was the Special Forces Selection and Assessment Course (SFAS) wasn’t identifying nor culling candidates that weren’t properly prepared to pass SFQC.

There was a disconnect inside SFAS, which hadn’t really changed since its inception in 1988. The John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center Commander (JFKSWC) Gen. Ben Sacolick approached the SWC Training Group about the issue. The SWC Group Commander Col. Ashton Naylor knew exactly who to task to identify and fix the problem. He picked Major Brian Decker, “the smartest guy I knew in Training Group,” Naylor said.

I’ve known Naylor for 25 years and he’s not one to heap praise on those who are undeserving. I first met Naylor when he was a candidate at Selection and Assessment and later went through the Special Forces Officers Course with him. I knew him as an outstanding Detachment Commander of an SF A-team in the 7^th Special Forces Group. He later commanded a battalion of the 5^th Special Forces Group in Afghanistan and then risen to command the SWC’s Training Group.

With SFAS selecting at about a 50 percent rate at that time, the same percentage of candidates failing the SFQC was unacceptable. Decker was told, to fix it, in the SF way,… just get it done. And did he ever. He made sweeping changes to the way the SFAS course was run and while the selection rates of SFAS plummeted to 30 percent or below, the successful completion of the SFQC from candidates selected from Decker’s SFAS classes skyrocketed to 80 percent. That’s exactly what the command was looking for.

How did he do it? Did he just use smoke and mirrors? Nope.

He showed the confidence of Sacolick and Naylor had in him was justified. He quickly learned that one of the best attributes of a successful SF operator, the ability to think quickly and clearly while the stress level is pegged out to the max was missing in the course failures. Worse, many showed that they were incapable of functioning on a small team and not completely devoted to the teamwork necessary on an A-Team.

Every candidate wants to graduate the course, Decker set out to find out who wanted to walk the walk and live the life of an outstanding SF operator. The internal drive, the will to succeed is either there or it isn’t. But how to identify it?

He put together an information-driven program where he identified 1200 data points on each candidate. He could identify a successful SF operator as a guy in his early 30s, with a high I.Q., who came from suburbia. But the one factor that stood out was, each successful candidate responded to stress in their lives with a heightened sense of motivation.

So, who IS Brian Decker? How did he make the changes that made SFAS a much better indicator of success than the one that hadn’t changed in over 20 years? Having been a cadre member of SFAS, I was intrigued…no fascinated by what I’ve read. The SWC and school would frequently have high-level visitors and it wasn’t long before people from all walks of life wanted to talk to Decker. Would his system of identifying successful traits in SF operators work in the corporate world?

The NFL came calling, first the Cleveland Browns and then the Indianapolis Colts who hired him to identify what will make a successful NFL player. But more to that later. I reached out to Naylor and asked him about Decker. “You need to talk to Brian,” he said. “I guarantee that you’ll come away very impressed.” He put us in touch with each other and being a busy man with the NFL offseason workouts in full swing, he arranged a time to talk in the evening.

After quick introductions, I could tell right away that Naylor’s comment about Decker being an extremely smart man was dead on. But I’ve been around smart people before and many spend all their time trying to impress upon you how smart they are. Decker wasn’t like this at all. He was talking about these sweeping changes of his as if he were talking about carrying the groceries into the house. Which made it even more intriguing.

So, here’s part one of the interview I did with Decker as we discussed SFAS, the Q-Course (SFQC), and problems facing the SF guys in combat. Later we just touched on his new career in the NFL and the ground he’s breaking there, but that is mostly proprietary information, and we were there to talk SF.

Spec Ops: We’ll not waste any time here. So how did these changes come about?

Decker: I met with Gen. Sacolick and he said, “we have to restore the image of Selection in the Regiment.” We had only around 50 percent of the soldiers being selected at SFAS completing the qualification course. He told me to spend some time and figure it out.

I had just finished the Naval Postgraduate School and wanted to use that education so I immediately went looking for the data. And what I tried to do was tie that data to outcomes. Passes and fails and find out where we weren’t doing well.

I met a Ph.D. student from UNC whose husband is a Green Beret, she was in the Air Force and I asked that if we took all of the data that we had, how well would we be doing, what would our batting average be?

The organizational efficiency could be maxed out at about 58 percent, so that told me that the answers were probably not quantitative and were probably more qualitative.

Spec Ops: And how did this information get analyzed?

Decker: I took the information from 500-600 course failures, and the data that the school gives about that student gives a short narrative as to the reasons why. We then turned that into a language, passes and fails into something that we can select for. What we really found out was that the failures were really more social in nature.

So, we went back to the leadership assessment during Selection and Assessment and a candidate was getting one patrol during team phase as a patrol leader or as an assistant patrol leader for one of the four days.

As you remember being a cadre member there, those events were taken straight out of the British SAS Selection. We’re going to give them a really difficult task to do and we’re going to punish them for several hours and see how well they can function in a very demanding environment. But demanding in only a very narrow sense. But based upon that one grade, we had to make a determination on whether you were a select in the course. And I saw tons of flaws with that. First, we were basing the entire selection criteria off of the one report of one SFAS Cadre member. On one day, in one event.

I looked at those leadership evals and found that they were negatively correlated to success later in the qualification course.

Creating an evaluation using a “Leaderless Group”:

Spec Ops: So that was a big indicator right there?

Decker: Well we looked at that and said, ‘What is the nature of Special Operations?’ It is complex, it is dynamic. And the biggest thing is we don’t lead from what I tell you to do. We lead from within. We went to what I called a “leaderless group” so the leaderless is a misnomer what we did was, we stopped grading a candidate on the patrols and began grading on attributes.

(Editor’s note: the attributes he mentioned above was a three-year data collection program that Gen. Sacolick implemented at the SWC to identify what were the core attributes that were needed for a successful Special Operations soldier)

So, in the leaderless environment, instead of getting graded on one day during team events, you were getting graded all four days. How it worked is, you’d go to the group and drop this problem in the middle of it and you watch and evaluate on how they self-organize around the task and requirement.

Within five or ten minutes you can tell who the leaders are. And you can tell within those first few minutes based on ability who are going to struggle and the rest of the time you are going to figure out where these other guys in the middle, fit in.

So, now you’ll get four cadre evaluations, peer evaluations and then the candidates grade themselves during this time and everyone gets the same evaluations and you can put together a good 360-degree assessment.

Spec Ops: Those are some interesting changes, so how does that change in the evaluation process?

Decker: Well, we looked at it like, in Week 1 we adjusted the levels where the data was predictive, right? We screened out those who were not smart enough, who weren’t fit enough and weren’t prepared and knocked those out.

In Week 2, we evaluated the candidates’ performance on the Star Exam, (Land Navigation) where the intelligence and physical fitness are highly correlated. Week 2 is more of a practical application of your abilities and we’d screen those out and then the selection decision comes down to Week 3 in Team week.

During the events of Week 3, we select the future leaders of the Regiment based on their ability to lead or contribute to the performance of a team in a dynamic and complex environment.

What we’re looking for is a candidate that isn’t looking for external solutions, you look internally and you look to the group for solutions. And it was at this point that we moved away from the two-event day (during Team Week). Because the solution to any problem in Selection is stability. Because during those events, all you are doing is measuring a candidate’s ability to persevere.

So, we would have days where we’d have 10 events. It may not look like 10 events but you remember the tires and poles right?

Spec Ops: Oh yeah, that was always a tough event.

Decker: What we’d do is, they’d start out where all they have is poles and lashings. And after carrying that for 5ks and after that, we may add three logs and you go another 3-4Ks and then you get tires. So every time you give them something, it forces them to reassess the problem, reorganize and solve it.

We do what we’d call progressive builds and we’d stop them at times during the event and break them into small groups to do construction exercises where they do different things to break them into small groups. And all that while giving that soldier an opportunity.

What we found, with that data-rich environment is that our Selection rate went way down. We went from a little over 50 percent when I got there to ….where we were trending, when I left to just under 30 percent.

But on the inverse side, the selects that we were pushing through at Selection were on track to graduate at about an 80 percent rate in the qualification course when I was leaving.
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Tomorrow we’ll continue our interview with Decker and discuss further changes that the Selection and Assessment Course brought and what other attributes the cadre looks for in the successful Special Forces candidate.

Any questions or comments can be emailed to me [email protected] or at my Twitter account @SteveB7SFG

Photo courtesy of ESPN

SOF Selection PT Preparation 6.1.2017

Chest and Triceps workout at the gym today before a 5-mile ruck march with 45-pounds minimum. Remember to stretch well before and after and to stay hydrated. Mark your progress down in your workout log book.

Training:

More Preparation for the UBRR:

3 x 12 Bench Press

3 x 10 Dumbbell Flies

3 x 10 Dumbbell Incline Press

3 x 20 Pushups (alternate sets with wide, narrow and shoulder width)

3 x 10 Kip Ups

3 x 20 Sit ups

3 x 20 Cable Push Downs (rope)

3 x 20 Dips or until muscle failure

5-mile rucksack march (45-pound minimum) over varied terrain, note your time

Stretch well after completion

Preparing the Special Forces Operator for the Unconventional Warfare Environment

The task of the Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) course is identifying the candidates who are suitable for Special Forces training. And two of the primary functions of Special Forces are UW (Unconventional Warfare) and FID (Foreign Internal Defense). It is important the schools don’t lose sight of that fact as SF and SOF (Special Operations Forces) have been heavy into Direct Action (DA)/Counter-Terrorist (CT) missions for some time in the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria among other hot spots.

The basic ten operating activities that Special Operations Forces operate in are spelled out in Section 167 of Title 10 of the US Code. Special Forces were created in 1952 specifically for the role in the UW environment after the OSS were disbanded in 1945 after World War II. The OSS’ Operational Groups and Jedburgh Teams were the forerunners of both Special Forces and the CIA.

But first, to properly prepare prospective SF operators for the UW environment, we have to know what it is. And this has been a frequent complaint from the SF community that the conventional (Big Army) doesn’t understand UW and what it entails. And part of that issue has resided in the SF community itself.

The SF hierarchy has been debating the actual definition of what UW is since 1955 and has had ten different definitions since the original manual was written in that year. There have been tweaks in the definition for 65 years and the current “approved” definition of UW published in 2009 is as follows:

Activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla force in a denied area.

Many of the activities and operations that the US SOF are undertaking today could be characterized as UW. And the distinction between UW and FID are now described as being the opposite of one another.

UW is characterized by the use of irregular forces to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power while FID is the use of a nation’s recognized security forces to protect a government.

So how do the schools prepare the future SF operators for operating in the austere environments of the UW arena? They must identify the core attributes that the Special Forces operator must have to be successful in the realm of SF operations. The school used the “Whole Man” approach and identified six attributes necessary for success.

Intelligence
Trainability
Physical Fitness
Motivation
Influence
Judgement

SF operators must have the physical, emotional, and mental stamina to succeed in the UW environment. They have to be able to prepare to conduct the missions assigned. And that doesn’t just mean physically but mentally as well. The amount of time spent studying all the aspects of the target area (history, politics, religious leaders and beliefs, terrain, infrastructure, and local economy etc). The mental aspect is just as if not more important than the physical.

The school must identify the potential operators who have the creativity and mindset to think outside the box and do it without prompting or leadership from above. The ability to problem solve while under tremendous stress is a key indicator of success or failure for an SF operator. To quote a line from a Clint Eastwood film, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.”

One key area to highlight for success in the UW/FID environment is the ability for the SF operator to not just give orders but to get the host nation to follow their lead. So, language training and cross-cultural communication are very important. The key to UW is to convince the target audience that the relationship between them and the US SF operators is mutually beneficial. That requires a great deal of tact, diplomacy, and empathy.

And the bread and butter for SF operators in the UW environment are being in the role of a teacher and instructor. That’s what SF has prided itself on for 65 years and the school must identify the type of individuals that can not only do their job and do it well but have the knowledge to teach it to others, in their language. Ask any SF operator and they’ll tell you the first time you teach a course in the host nation’s language is a daunting task.

When the JFKSWC (John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center) started the SFAS course back in 1988 they identified the core attributes that we were looking for in successful Special Forces candidates. Many years later the candidates that were passing the Selection and Assessment course were failing the SFQC (Special Forces Qualification Course) in high numbers.

The Training Group targeted an SF officer Brian Decker to revamp the Selection Course as to identify those soldiers that were going to have a better chance at having success in the SFQC and in the operational SF Groups after being assigned.

SpecialOperations.com had the opportunity to sit down with him and discuss the changes made to the Selection and Assessment course and how it impacted the candidates’ performance moving forward. Look for that interview in the next few days.

Featured photo: DOD