PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the "Functional Area Assessment" that General Meyer had inspired was beginning to produce results.
The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) had been tasked to conduct an in-depth analysis of how SF should be organized, manned, equipped, and trained. It was to answer the questions: "Where are we now? What is broken? How do we fix it? Where do we need to go in the future?"
General Maxwell Thurman, the vice chief of staff of the army, was the overseer of the analysis; the TRADOC commander, General Bill Richardson, supervised it personally; and other outside generals — Mike Spigelmire, Tom Fields, Fred Franks, and Ed Burba — headed the panels. The study was conducted by the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.
Thurman's leadership gave the analysis particular force. Everyone involved reported to him, and everything they reported was put on the front burner. He listened to everybody, heard every problem and every solution, and put a time clock on it. This was not some committee report to be filed away somewhere and forgotten. At the end of the process, there would be an implementation plan — approved by Generals Thurman, Richardson, and Lindsay, and then done: no complaining, no foot-dragging.
When it was all over, the analysis proposed the following:
First, Army Special Forces could no longer exist in the wilderness; there would be a separate SF branch (like Infantry, Armor, or Aviation) and an NCO career-management field. That meant that SF troops and officers could have a career path within Special Forces itself; previously, they'd had to rotate among other parts of the military if they expected to get ahead. This goal was accomplished in April 1987; the commandant at the Special War Center and School became the chief of branch, just as the commandant at Fort Benning was the chief of branch for the infantry. "At this point," Jim Guest remarks, "we went from being looked at as something kept in the dark and under the covers to sitting up at the head table with the rest of the big shots."
Second, the Green Berets needed to become a major, three-star (lieutenant general) command. This allowed Special Forces to become masters of their own destiny, and to oversee and execute their own training and readiness programs. When a three-star commander sat down at a table with other three- and four-star commanders, he carried weight that one- and two-star commanders didn't. Army Special Forces became a major command in 1989.
Third, the academic center, schools, and training facilities were upgraded, and the selection, assessment, and training made more professional and tough.
And, fourth, an equipment-acquisition plan was instituted to upgrade all of the SF communications, weapons, aircraft, and training facilities in order to meet mission requirements.
The modern Special Operations force was now ready to go.
MAKING PROFESSIONALS
Or almost ready to go. As previously noted, one of SF's problems was that many of the generation that emerged from Vietnam, or who came into the force after Vietnam, failed to attain the high levels of professionalism expected of men who make up a force that calls itself elite. In Vietnam, they'd operated out on the end of a string without much supervision. Others — recruited after the Army drawdown in the '70s — were not the best group of men to begin with. Some of them had simply been looking for greater freedom and intrigue than they could get in conventional units, and had found their way into SF. Meanwhile, back then SF did not give a strong enough professional orientation to its younger officers. As a consequence, some of them picked up "outsider" attitudes, simply because that was what was in the air.
On the other side of the coin, it was hard for them to get promoted, and that also didn't help their attitude any. Normally, if you were good, you moved through key positions in a variety of conventional units. Your performance and potential were recognized by people who counted, and in due course you were selected for promotion and for attendance at Leavenworth and later the War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or one of the other high-level service schools. Promotion and selection boards were composed exclusively of officers with conventional backgrounds.
Back in the '70s and the early '80s, however, most officers were dead-ended in Special Forces. The personnel assignment people in Washington were content to drop them there and "forget" about them. In many ways, assignment to SF was career suicide, and so it was small wonder that some officers just figured: To hell with it. Such people simply reinforced the perception that special operators were not "real" Army.
All of this came to a head soon after the passage of Nunn-Cohen, during Jim Guest's tenure as head of the Special Warfare Center and School. The four-star TRADOC commander sent Guest the following message: "I'm tired of having to apologize for Special Forces," he announced in no uncertain terms. "I am tired of their reputation. I am tired of having to deal with their lack of professionalism. Are they in the Army or not?
"If you don't do something about this, I am going to relieve you. I will run you out of the Army."
Jim Guest says:
So that caught my attention. That's when I realized that we couldn't let things go on the old way, and that's when we started saying, "Hey, we can't mess around any longer outside the Army system; we've got to do things inside it. We've got to make ourselves more knowledgeable of it. That means, first of all, that we've got to convince the senior generals that we are professionals, that we are capable of doing special missions, and that we're not just a camp of thugs."
At the same time, we started retiring the soldiers who did not or could not meet the new standards, or who refused to meet them. Some looked at the future and decided that they did not want to be in a more structured force.
After that, we raised the standards. We wanted smarter people, so we established an IQ level — a high one. If you wanted to come into Special Forces, you had to have an IQ of at least 120.
Then we had to do something about training.
In those days, when someone volunteered for Special Forces and was chosen to take the Q Course, he received a permanent change of station to Fort Bragg. In other words, he was ours. If he dropped out, something had to be found for him at Fort Bragg. This caused problems: We had more washouts than people who made the grade, and we had to find places for all those people at Bragg. Second, we had a lot of money invested in these folks. We needed to find a way to reduce the initial investment while making sure we let the good ones come through. Finally, we were being used by a lot of people who simply wanted a ticket into the 82nd Airborne Division or somewhere else at Bragg, so they would volunteer for Special Forces and then immediately drop out of the training, some by voluntarily terminating themselves, some by just flunking it somewhere along the line. That had to stop.
What we did was persuade General Vuono, the Army Chief of Staff, to institute a new selection and assessment program that would come in before the Q Course. We'd recruit the new people, then they'd sign up and come to Bragg TDY (temporarily, not permanently) and go through a two-meek selection drill that would pinpoint those men who could operate on their own but could also subject themselves to a team for a mission. "Our idea," as we explained to the Chief of Staff, "is to give them zero training — absolutely none. We want to get them out there and make them as uncomfortable as we can, put them through situations that are as ambivalent as we can make them, and stress them as much as they can bear. Then we want them to make a choice. Do I really want to be Special Forces or not?"