Sorry folks can't find the original source link for this, but hey, interesting stuff
USASFC Command Reorganisation
By Sean D. Naylor
snaylor@militarytimes.com
Special Forces Command is drastically changing its plan to add a fourth battalion of A-teams to each of the five active Special Forces groups and will now con¬vert all five of those battalions to “special troops battalions” by 2015.
The creation of the special troops battalions will provide an organizational home for SF sol¬diers who have acquired “high¬end, niche skills,” Maj. Gen. Michael Repass, head of SF Com¬mand, said in a Jan. 16 interview. In 2001, the Army’s five active¬duty Special Forces groups each had three line battalions, each comprising three line companies of six 12-man operational detach¬ment alphas, or A-teams. But the extraordinary demand for Special Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines in the wake the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq persuaded the Defense Department to add a fourth line battalion to each active-duty group.
Under SF Command’s new plan, the additional battalions — two of which have stood up — will still be created, with the last one complet¬ed by the end of 2012. But in 2014, the new battalions will be “realigned.” The three companies of A-teams will be redistributed across the other three battalions, one company per line battalion.
Meanwhile, the fourth battalion will convert to a special troops battalion. This will include ele¬ments previously in the group support company, such as the Spe¬cial Forces advanced skills compa¬ny, the signals detachment and the regional support detachment. New organizations will be added, including a military intelligence company, an unmanned aerial systems platoon, two human intelligence sections, a signals intelligence section and other ele¬ments, according to a slide brief¬ing Repass provided to Army Times.
Repass said he decided to con¬vert the fourth battalions into special troops battalions in order to capture and retain the skills gained by those SF soldiers who attend highly specialized schools, such as the special operations tar¬get interdiction course (essential¬ly a sniper school) and the Special Forces advanced reconnaissance target analysis and exploitation course.
“You send a guy to a school and he uses it for a period of time and then he walks away from it, because he’s changed his job or he’s changed the focus of what he’s doing, and so you only have a short period of time where there’s that expertise in the organiza¬tion,” Repass said.
As Repass envisions it, in the future an SF sergeant attends one of the schools and would return to his A-team after graduation, but his next assignment might move him to the special troops battal¬ion, where he would join a unit filled with others who share his “niche” skill set. That unit would then be used to augment the A¬teams and B-teams (SF compa¬nies) for specific missions, and to train soldiers in the line units.
“We’ve got to take the best of the best and put them in these cadre formations that are in the redesig-nated fourth battalion because that’s our high-end skill set,” Repass said. “That’s how we grow these guys long term and turn them into the masters of their trade.” The special troops battalions will have the added advantage of providing a way for SF soldiers who have been worn down physi¬cally by multiple combat tours to remain productive, Repass said.
“This is a place for veteran oper¬ators to go and still contribute,” he said. “We’ve got lots of guys that want to be on teams, but they’re physically not able anymore. What do we do? We can’t just cast these guys away, they’re at the height — potentially — of their professional contribution in some skill level. And this is a place to put those guys ... [where] they don’t have to operate at the same op tempo as a regular ODA guy would.” Grouping most of the specially trained soldiers in one battalion will not lower the experience level in the line battalions, Repass said. “We haven’t altered the rank structure at all down at the detachments [i.e. the A- and B-teams],” he said. “It’s not like I’m taking an E-7 off of a team and taking that slot for that E-7 and moving it to the fourth battal¬ion. There’s still an E-7 slot on that team.” But that statement is “disingen¬uous at best,” said a field grade SF officer. “Clearly that doesn’t jive. The experience or the training that you desire in the special troops battalion is not due to rank, it’s due to the additional schooling and the additional training. … Rank has nothing to do with this. You have guys that are E-6s that have these skills. … Yeah, there will be experienced people at the ODA level and in the line battal¬ions, but you are going to have either none or at least far fewer of these soldiers who have received this extra specialized training.
“Each ODA has one or two of these guys who have been special¬ly trained,” the field grade officer said. “But if you pull them all together, yeah, you’ve got a really high-end group of guys who can do that stuff, but … to isolate it is going to reduce the capability of the ODAs.” The prospect of creating elite organizations within a communi¬ty that already regards itself as elite was also causing unrest, he said. “What you’re doing is you’re creating special units within SF and that is pissing off a lot of peo¬ple,” he said.
Doing away with the fourth line battalion will also reduce the abil¬ity of a Special Forces group to provide battalion-level special operations task forces (SOTFs) to combat theaters, the field grade SF officer said.
“The whole point of doing this fourth battalion is you give the group some flexibility,” he said. “If you had a two SOTF requirement [in a combat theater], then you can have two in and two out. Now if you go to three [battalions], you’re losing an entire deployable SOTF headquarters.” But Repass said it is at the A- and B-team level that Special Forces is experiencing a deploy¬ment strain. “We’re not having that issue at the SOTF level,” he said. “We don’t count noses at the battalion level, we count them at the ODA level.” The redesigned SF group would still contain almost a battalion’s worth of A¬and B-teams more available for deployment than it had prior to the expansion, he said. (As part of the redesign, each group will lose one A-team as “a manpower bill.”)
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