“Staff with indigenous forces with US NCO/O’s from conventional (not SOF) forces...” is a great idea on paper. When was this last tried? The SFAB. As someone

“Staff with indigenous forces with US NCO/O’s from conventional (not SOF) forces...” is a great idea on paper. When was this last tried? The SFAB. As someone who helped train the SFAB, which is basically what the author is cribbing the idea from, it was a joke in application and reeked of the hot idea from whatever O6 was gunning for O7. Of 8-9 SFAB companies supposed to do this out in the bush in AFG with local forces, only 1 ended up doing it. This was an Army-wide initiative mind you that dragged in multiple other units to help train, changed deployment schedules, changed funding, and so on. The institutional willpower to put the 5-10 years of culture change behind conventional army who just wants to shoot artillery just isn’t there at the moment. And perhaps the regular army should do just that and stay good at it. Past efforts at conventional -> SFAB transition efforts, i.e. “everyone deploys as the infantry” rotted the skill sets of the NCO corps in high skill branches like artillery. Military thinkers keep advocating for conventional army to be anything and everything, and end up just reinventing SF units and jobs the state department needs to be doing. Then, those same thinkers get confused why gunnery certifications get failed en masse by line units who have to train back and forth across these conflicting priorities.