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Well, another great question. I think the views of the conventional forces Commanders are what ever side of SF we choose to display to them. We as a force have much more exposer to the conventional side than in many years past. Pior to OEF/OIF we had very little inter-action with our bothers on the conventional house, other than what they see walking around main post and such. That has changed much in the last few years. One of the things I truly love about our job is the fact that we have such wide limits to operate within. But at times some of our fellow SF'ers take the freedom to the limits and bring unwanted attention to ourselves. During the early days of OEF, the boys from 5th did an awsome job making things happen using non-standard uniforms and what ever else it took to make it happen. Well the whole issue of non-standard uniforms came to a head because we had guys riding around in GMV's wearing jeans and flip flops. While this may look cool, it does little to effect the battlefield. We took an operational need to mislead our enemies by operations in non US uniforms into a joy ride. To top these kind of actions off some would do this in the faces of the conventional forces. It does not take a degree in astro physics to see that jeans are not a Afghan native dress or wearing them in a US vehicle is a operational need. So commanders throw the bullshit flag, and our commanders didn't have a leg to stand on to justify these actions. Well we squared away ourselves and now have fixed these small short falls. This is just an example of some of the things we do that is not the brightest. We just need to be smart about when and why we do things, just being a "quite professional" will get you by.
Back to the real question. I think that the conventional commanders see the operational need and respect what we bring to the table. I know in my three tours we have done 2 BDE, 3 BN and tons of company and below ops with conventional forces. Always had great feed back from our SF commanders AAR with the conventional CDR's. Many times we would pass off targets to the CONV guys to give them a bone.
This respect was topped off by a high level US civilian leader's visit to Afghanistan. Well we just lost some key assets to the border fight, and during his visit to one of the remote bases where the Marine were base. A marine CDR stood up and stated that SF is the only game in town and the JTF needs to provide them we what ever they need. The cool thing about this was during that visit we were doing an op and there was no SF rep at the briefing, but the conventional guys had the mindset and took up for us while we were gone. Needless to say I was floored when I heard this statement back down the CoC.
We have the responsibilty to take every oppunitity to educate not only our Key leaders but every person we meet from the lowest PVT to 4 star generals. The more they understand not only what we do, but more importantly why, all the bad feelings will be gone.
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