I'm slightly confused about Kerry's SF expansion plans

[jmowreader]

John Kerry says he is going to double the strength of the Special Forces. This is good.

There are currently six Special Forces groups:

1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Lewis, Washington, with a detachment in Korea
3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina
5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky
7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina
10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), which is split into two elements: headquarters at Fort Carson, Colorado, and a forward element in Germany
20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), which belongs to the US Army Reserve

Each group is targeted to a specific geographic area--1st SFG(A) works Asian targets, for instance. They can't make a "general" group that covers the world because SF guys are all subject-matter experts on their regions.

Additionally, US Army Special Forces Command and Special Operations Support Command are at Fort Bragg, as is the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

A Special Forces Group consists of three Special Forces battalions plus a support element. It is essentially a combat brigade.

Now! If President Kerry intends to double the size of the Special Forces, there are two conceivable ways to do it.

The first is to just add six more Special Forces groups with the same internal structure as the ones they have now. Advantages: they already know this structure. And six new groups means they need six new bird colonels, 24 new lieutenant colonels, and a whole shitpot of new majors, captains and sergeants major. Disadvantage: you'll have two groups targeting one region, which means you'll need a very high level of cooperation between the two.

The other way to go is to stay with six groups, but change them from small brigades to small divisions. (As you will remember from my Army Org lessons, a division is a group of brigades.)

The structure of a special forces division will be as follows:

Two active-duty SF Brigades consisting of three SF Battalions plus one SF Support Battalion

One reserve-component SF Battalion created by dissolving the 20th SFG(A) and aligning its troops with the regional SF divisions. For unit identification and maintenance of SF history, the reserve SF brigades will carry "20th SF" names.

One Special Operations Division Support Command consisting of maintenance and supply elements to include medical and chemical support. The medical unit will have to be exceptionally advanced--Special Forces medics and physician's assistants are basically the same thing.

A battalion from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flying MH-6, MH-47 and MH-60 airframes. Possibly a squadron of C-130J airlifters from the Air Force.

A signal battalion, a MI battalion and an engineer battalion. We are once again talking about very advanced troops--the SF A detachments have signal, intel and engineer troops in them. Here's the justification: you can't carry a bulldozer or a multichannel radio in your rucksack.

A headquarters staff

Advantage: maintains one element dealing with each region. This adds five new major general slots, ten new brigadier general slots, five more division command sergeant major slots, and a LOT more colonels and light-birds to the batch of officers I discussed in the ten-group plan. The disadvantage is it adds a lot of non-SF slots to the army.

[TWiley]

1. Very informative post.

Would it be possible to create generally trained SF teams who would be supervised by the regional experts?

Also, I believe Mr. Kerry was refering to the battle's in the Mid-east which could be defined by a region.

Obviously, you are more informed than I on this subject. What do you think?

[jmowreader]

2. It's not possible, considering what an SF team is

A Special Forces Operational Detachment A consists of twelve male soldiers:

Two Weapons Sergeants
Two Engineer Sergeants
Two Medical Sergeants
Two Communications Sergeants
Two Intelligence Sergeants
One Detachment Sergeant Major
One Detachment Commander, who is either a warrant officer or a company-grade commissioned officer--a lieutenant or a captain.

IIRC there are four of these detachments per SF company. At the company headquarters, there is always a first sergeant and a company commander, who is normally a major.

All twelve soldiers on the ODA are language-qualified and usually in at least three languages. (My drill sergeant was a snake-eater who was fluent in six.) You can't leave the schoolhouse and join an SF team until you're qualified in at least one. The language capability is important because a huge part of Special Forces' mission is nation-to-nation liaison. SF is always running live missions and very rarely do they shoot at anyone. You know that sometimes the United States government sends a team of experts to sub-saharan Africa to put in a new well so the people in a village will quit getting dysentery, or they send a team to South America to build a new hospital so the people in the village who get dysentery will have a doctor to go to. The people who conduct these missions are usually SF soldiers. (There is an old army joke with more than a shred of truth behind it: the way you pick out a Green Beret in the bar is to look for a guy with a Rolex watch on his wrist and three divorce decrees in his hip pocket. This because your average snake-eater is away from home 280 days a year when there is no Bush in the White House.)

The problem with creating a "generalist" SF team is that anyone who can master every major language in the world and several of the minor dialects in a year is NOT going to join the army.

You could create a generalist Ranger squad that could go anywhere and do anything, but that's the kind of Ranger squads we have now and there's a huge difference between Rangers and SF. (One clue as to the difference: Ranger School is 56 days long and all they do is teach you to run suicide patrols. Special Forces school can be a year long and in one of the five courses they teach you how to perform at least twelve different operations to include appendectomy and colostomy. This is no shit--the Army spent three million dollars on a new SF medical training building at Fort Bragg, and it has four surgical suites in it. Further, one month of an SF medic's training is spent in an emergency room in either New York or Miami...where they are allowed to perform many emergency surgeries on the people they bring in, under the supervision of a doctor. You know we have a surgeon general who shoots people; he got his initial medical training in the Green Berets.)