Quote:
Originally posted by QRQ 30
Specialization has its advantages. However don't get too wrapped up in Language and Area Studies. By over specializing you decrease your overall deployability. Just think if you are needed in LA tomorrow instead of where ever you are now. IIRC the only personnel on a team REQUIRED to be language qualified were the Tm Leader and a few NCO's. The main and IMHO most important trait of Special Forces is flexibility. Though it helps, believe it or not it is entirely possible to deploy with just a minimal "working Knowledge" of the host language. Kid yourself all you want but Americans will always speak foreign languages like Americans. That is the reason that the highest qualification in a language is reserved for "native speakers".
In my opinion rotating between groups helps to homoginize Special Forces. Take some good from ehere you are at and drop it off where you are going.
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I'm surprised at reading this regarding language requirements in a team. It might be absolutely correct. Nevertheless, I disagree. As a team leader, I am certainly in contact with the leadership of the indigenous forces a bit more than say, my 18F. However, it is my men who have the most "face time" with the indigenous soldiers themselves. It is my NCOs whom will be teaching critical warfighting skills to these very men. Perhaps it is one of those quirks in each detachment, but I place an extremely high priority in intercultural communication in my detachment. There are only four members of my team whom were born speaking our target language. The rest have learned on the job and in school. However, we even communicate, intra-team, on our radios in our target language. We have run whole training operations, recently in fact, to include radio and verbal communication in our target language. I believe that it is our ability to do this that makes us different from other SOF. Rangers can do raids and ambushes, SEALs can do AMOUT, Marines can even do permissive FID. But, who can go somewhere be accepted by a totally foreign culture, fight along side them and achieve our National objectives all in the same operation? Only SF can do that. Or, at least, we do it better than anyone else.
I do understand, and agree, that there are missions, particularly of the DA types and its various subsets that require little, or no cultural knowledge (other than that necessary to fullfill intelligence requirements). This is why we have seen elements of 7th, 19th and 20th Groups involved in the CENTCOM AOR (and the folks from the NG SF Groups have come from the various active component SF Groups).
Nevertheless, I believe it necessary for each group to maintain their particular focus while still sharpening the various SF skill sets that are common to all. My Operations Sergeant, for instance, is perhaps the most knowledgeable person I know in our battalion in as far as South America. Due to his years of operating, at various levels, with the indigenous forces (not to mention his attending their most demanding courses) he has access to people and information that many envy. He is a tremendous asset to the team and the group as a whole. That kind of thing is not something built, I don't believe, from "dabbing in this and that." It is my belief that it comes from years of focus in a vast cultural area that encompasses 32 countries and makes up one-sixth of the landmass of the world. That's just my opinion, of course.