GETTING A READINESS BOOST AT SOCOM

An Air Force special operations pararescueman gets hoisted off a ship by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kurt Leisenring during the Emerald Warrior 2013 exercise off Florida's Gulf Coast, April 24, 2013. U.S. Special Operations Command's Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force is implementing a holistic program to promote operators' physical, psychological, spiritual and social performance to support mission readiness. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Quinton Russ

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Socom Strives to Boost Operators' Resilience, Readiness

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
TAMPA, Fla., June 14, 2013 - Maintainers across the military take pride in keeping aircraft, vehicles and weapons systems well-oiled and ready to go whenever the mission calls. A major initiative is underway at U.S. Special Operations Command here to better maintain what Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, the Socom commander, calls the most important system of all: the operator.


"Humans are more important than hardware" is the first of the "truths" McRaven espouses for the nation's special operations forces. This fundamental recognizes that what makes the "tip of the spear" so sharp is the education, rigorous training and experience of the operators themselves.

But shortly after arriving at his headquarters in 2011, McRaven received sobering confirmation that the special operations community was in trouble. An extensive study directed by the previous commander, Navy Adm. Eric T. Olson, found "the SOF force as a whole was frayed," McRaven told a forum of defense industry representatives and special operators who gathered here last month.

The study revealed that the current operational environment has been more difficult than operators and their families expected, leaving little time for them to adjust to the daily strains of perpetual absences. The study noted troubling consequences, with increases in domestic and family problems, substance abuse and self-medication, risk-taking behaviors, post-traumatic stress, and even suicides.

With continued high operational demands, the fraying continues, McRaven lamented. "I would say, in the last 20 months, the force is fraying at a rate I am not comfortable with at all," he said at the SOF Industry Conference.

So as McRaven implements his Special Operations Forces 2020 vision to posture Socom for the future, he has made "preservation of the force and family" one of the key pillars.

"That is my No. 1 mission," he told the forum. "It is a moral imperative that we do all that we can to preserve the force and care for their families."

While seeking ways to increase predictability in special operations forces' schedules, McRaven has charged what he renamed the "Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force" to come up with innovative, holistic approaches to deal with the pressure on the special operations community.

The task force is working to build performance across four interconnecting domains: human, psychological, spiritual and social, explained Navy Capt. Thomas Chaby, the task force chief.
The idea is not to duplicate programs already being provided through Defense Department and military services, he emphasized. Rather, it builds on them, filling in gaps and increasing accessibility for operators and their families.

"If there was one word you would say the [task force] is all about, it is readiness," Chaby said. "It is all about being ready for our battlefield requirements, and taking care of our people helps them be as ready as possible."

Building resilience in the force helps to set operators up for success, Chaby said, adding, "It's all about building their capacity. It is readiness, readiness, readiness."

Yet the special operations community didn't always recognize that. Chaby remembered his first visit to SEAL Team 3's fitness center in 1990 after graduating from basic underwater demolition/SEAL training. Despite requirements to work in challenging and often unforgiving environments, the SEALs had limited fitness equipment and were basically on their own to figure out the best way to physically train for it.

As a result, many SEALs were injured during missions or while training for them. Chaby has had eight operations since becoming a SEAL, and considers himself fairly representative of his contemporaries.

"Is that the best way to prepare the primary weapon system? Probably not," he said. "There was no thought, science or planning put into [physical training]. The [Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force] is changing that."

Today, Socom has a human performance program designed to meet special operations forces' unique physical needs. It includes training that aims to prevent physical injuries through strength and conditioning, nutrition and physical therapy.

The program also looks at other ways to maintain the body: teaching operators how to mitigate the effects of operational demands through everything from hydration to psychological and social support.

"Putting some thought into it, applying some science, and backing it up with resources is just common sense," Chaby said. "This is a small investment that I believe will reap itself two-, three-, four-, who-knows-how-many-fold benefits."

While paying more attention to operators' bodies, the task force is committed to boosting their psychological strength and resilience, too.

Chaby noted the mental and emotional strain of more than a decade of continuous operations, and the need to do everything possible to mitigate the stressors. So in addition to helping operators develop positive ways to cope, Socom has joined the rest of the military in working to take the stigma out of seeking help.

Gone are the days when operators had to fear getting flagged or having their security clearance revoked if they sought out psychological help.

"It is not like that any more. Now, it's not help against you if you go seek help, and leadership is setting the example," Chaby said. "It's not a negative any more, like it used to be."

Ready access to mental health experts is particularly important in light of Socom's consistently high operating tempos, he noted. "We are so dynamic in our deployment cycles and our work-up cycles that by the time [a scheduled] appointment comes up, you could well find yourself back on the battlefield or training somewhere else and have to cancel it," he said.

So to make services more available and to encourage operators to take advantage of them, the command has started embedding mental health professionals attuned to the needs of the special operations community directly into its units. "The idea is, 'Let's give [the operator] somebody he trusts and feels he can talk to, and let's give him for better accessibility,'" Chaby said.

And to ease operator's transition from the battlefield to their homes and families, Socom now typically sends them to alternate sites so they can talk to a chaplain or psychologist and "decompress" before returning home.

Meanwhile, the Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force is helping operators get in touch with their spiritual sides as well.

Chaby emphasized that what Socom calls "spiritual performance" isn't necessarily about religion. "It could be for some, but that's not what it is about," he said. "It is about spirituality," which he defined as core spiritual beliefs, values, awareness, relationships and experiences.

These elements affect how operators live, the choices and decisions they make, the quality of their relationships and their overall ability to find meaning in life, Chaby said. All ultimately affect their mission performance and their ability to deal with the challenges of serving in special operations.

So the task force has turned to chaplains and the wealth of programs they lead or support to help special operations forces members address their spiritual needs. This, Chaby said, helps to round out a holistic program while directly supporting initiatives to build physical and psychological resilience.

Meanwhile, the task force is exploring ways to boost operators' "social performance" -- the ability to establish and maintain healthy, meaningful relationships, particularly within their families.

The typical special operator is 29 years old for enlisted members and 34 for officers, and is married with two children. Chaby remembered the days not so long ago when Socom gave little thought to family needs. "The mentality was obvious: 'If it's not in your sea bag, it's not our responsibility,'" he said.

That's changed 180 degrees, he reported. Socom now understands that family members have a big say in whether a highly trained, experienced operator will remain in the military. But even more importantly, command leaders recognize that problems at home can distract operators, potentially putting them and their buddies at increased risk and directly affecting the mission.

As a result, the Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force has made a concerted effort to help build "social performance" within special operations forces families. The goal, Chaby said, is to strengthen communication skills and overall resiliency to better deal with the challenges of multiple, extended separations, many that involve sensitive, high-risk and secretive missions.

"We are looking for opportunities to bring families into the equation, because we have found that the more you do that, the stronger they become," Chaby said. "This is empowering them to be part of the team, which in turn increases and improves the readiness of that soldier, sailor, airman or Marine."

Adding up these elements -- improving operators' physical, psychological, spiritual and social performance -- can only result in a better force, Chaby said.

"If each element gives a 1 percent advantage, you end up with a 4 or 5 or 10 percent better operator, capacity-wise, resiliency-wise, readiness-wise" he said. "You start adding these things together, and it makes such a difference."

It all comes back, he said, to the special operations forces truism that people -- operators who are ready to be effective and respond to the demands of the job -- are more important than hardware.

"If you take care of your people, that is the foundation of everything we do. Without them, the hardware doesn't matter and we are going to have mission failure," he said. "You have to have your people ready to go, for whatever the battlefield calls for."

SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND PLANS FOR A GLOBAL NETWORK

As demand for special operations forces reduces in Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations Command hopes to engage more broadly across the globe while building a global special operations network. Here, an Afghan boy interacts with a coalition special operations forces member in the Arghandab district of Afghanistan's Helmand province, Aug. 30, 2012. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class James Ginther

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENE
Socom Officials Work on Plan for Global Network
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., June 3, 2013 - About 100 people are hard at work at the U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters here on a new plan that will operationalize the way the command provides manpower and capability in support of the new defense strategic guidance.

The plan, due to the Joint Staff in late August, is part of the Special Operations Command 2020 vision Navy Adm. William H. McRaven introduced shortly after taking the helm as Socom commander in 2011.

The building of a global network of special operations forces, as well as U.S. government partners and partner nations, is a major component of Socom 2020, McRaven explained during the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa, Fla., earlier this month.

McRaven's Socom 2020 vision calls for a globally networked force of special operations forces, interagency representatives, allies and partners, with aligned structures processes and authorities to enable its operations. Globally networked forces, he said, will provide geographic combatant commanders and chiefs of mission with an unprecedented unity of effort and an enhance ability to respond to regional contingencies and threats to stability.

McRaven noted his own experience working with the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan. "It has been interesting to work in a network like that, and we do that very, very well on the direct action side," he said. "We need to figure out -- and it is part of the Socom plan -- how do we take that network, and be able to extend that out to the theater special operations commands," down to special operations forward elements and forces assigned to them.

Working toward that vision, the Socom staff is hard at work on what is expected to serve as a blueprint for special operations forces activities around the globe in light of the new guidance, explained Army Col. Stuart Bradin, who is leading the operational planning team.

With a renewed focus on the Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East, the new strategy calls for military operations that more closely mirror those special operations forces have conducted since their inception, Bradin noted.

The strategy advocates smaller-scale operations and activities coordinated with not only with partner nations and militaries, but also with the U.S. interagency community. The focus will be on preventing major conflict before it happens, largely by building partner capacity.

"We are going to go out in small footprints and work with key partners to ensure that small regional issues don't become major theater operations," Bradin said. "We can't afford that in blood or treasure."

The planning effort underway here is examining what special operations missions should be conducted, and where, in support of the strategy, Bradin said.

For the past 12 years, the intensive demand for special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan left minimal capability to support other parts of the globe. Those engagements, when they occurred, typically were linked to short-term exercises and training events. But with wartime requirements expected to reduce, McRaven said, he hopes to provide better support for all of the theater special operations commanders and the geographic combatant commanders they serve.

Rather than posturing capability to counter specific threats -- a calculation that historically has rarely been accurate -- McRaven wants to posture it with the combatant commanders.

"They are the employers of [special operations forces]," Bradin said. "So he wants to give them enough special operations capability that they have it at their ready disposal and can use it in their geographic [area of responsibility].

The first step in formulating the plan was to bring the theater special operations commanders together in April 2012 to identify their top priorities for support. They reported what top three activities they wanted, at what locations, with what level of manpower and for how long, to achieve what objectives, Bradin said.

As part of the report, the theater special operations commanders ensured their recommendations were coordinated through the respective chiefs of mission and tied into the theater's country campaign plan.

"At the end of the day, this allowed us to enumerate all our operational requirements, which is huge," Bradin said.
The geographic combatant commanders validated the requirements two months later, both in writing and during a video teleconference.

The Joint Staff then gave Socom 120 days to turn the requests into a single, unified plan. That sent Bradin and his planning team back to the drawing board to come up with something never before formulated in Socom's history: a comprehensive, global special operations forces planning document that matches resources to need.

"This will be a huge plan," Bradin said. "It will synchronize the planning, the deployment and the posture of all these special operations forces in support of the geographic combatant commands. ... It demonstrates how we intend to align forces to those requirements."

Once implemented, the plan is expected to provide a framework for more comprehensive and more regular special operations forces engagements in more parts of the world, Bradin said.

"A lot of what we have done in the past, because of necessity, has been very episodic," he said, often too infrequent and short-term for operators to build strong relationships with partners. "So I think that with the plan in effect, you will see smaller groups [of operators] with more persistent engagement in those areas. By aligning the forces, you will see a lot of the same people going to the same places, so the relationships will build over time. And in the [special operations] community, everything we do is about people and trust."

The plan won't satisfy everything commanders would like to see in their areas of responsibility, Bradin conceded.

"The reality is [that] we don't have enough for everything," he said. If you do the math, we are hitting about 60 percent of what they ask for. But based on the requirements, and what we are able to resource, the plan actually will allow us to do more than we are currently doing."

Bradin said he expects the plan to change as it undergoes rigorous staffing by the Joint Staff and across the interagency spectrum. It's designed to accommodate changing events, requirements and priorities, he said, and likely will need to be updated annually once it's put into effect, he said.

"This has been a bottom-up, requirement-driven process that required making choices and prioritizing everything we have here, and all of that can change," Bradin said. "So we have to be adaptive to that. Our goal all along has been to build a plan that synchronizes [Socom's] activities and operationalizes the defense strategic guidance, while allowing the command to adapt to those changes."

THE FUTURE OF U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND

 

U.S. Special Operations Command works to ensure operators have the tools they need not only for today's missions, but also for those they will confront in the future. Here, a special operations forces member attached to Special Operations Task Force Southeast fires an AT-4 shoulder-fired rocket launcher on the heavy weapons firing range at a base in the Tarin Kowt district of Afghanistan's Uruzgan province, Aug. 22, 2012. U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class James Ginther

FROM: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Socom Strives to Meet Current, Future Operator Requirements
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

TAMPA, Fla., May 29, 2013 - Navy Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, is quick to point out what he calls one of the special operations forces' most universal truths -- that "people are more important than hardware."

But as the military's most elite commandos take on some of the most challenging missions around the globe, McRaven said, he's committed to ensuring they have everything they need to succeed.

"It is my job to provide [geographic combatant commanders and chiefs of mission] the best special operations force in the world," he told Congress earlier this year.

The broad range of special operations missions -- from dramatic raids like the one that took down Osama bin Laden to lower-profile training missions designed to build partner nation capacity -- demands the best "enabling capabilities" possible, he said.

Special operators require many of the same enablers as their conventional-force brethren: mobility, lethality, situational awareness provided by intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and survivability, McRaven said. But due to the unique nature of their missions -- often highly sensitive and conducted with little notice -- they also have unique equipment and service requirements, he added.

Congress recognized that when establishing Socom in 1987, James Cluck, the command's acquisition executive, told American Forces Press Service. So as part of the initial legislation, Congress granted the new command special acquisition authorities that enable it to respond directly -- and more quickly -- to its operators' needs.

More than 25 years later, Socom remains the only U.S. combatant command with these authorities. The others, with forces from all four services, have to work through three different service acquisition systems to satisfy their requirements.

"Here, we have it all under one system, and we have one commander vetting and deciding what we are going to field and what the priority is going to be," Cluck said. "So the benefit is immense."

Cluck was quick to note broad misconceptions about Socom's acquisition function. "We have to follow the same rules and laws as everybody else does, and we are subject to the same policies as the rest of the department," he said.

What's different, Cluck said, is that Socom typically takes the larger, big-ticket systems the military services develop -- aircraft, vehicles, vessels and weapons systems, among them -- and adapts them for its operators' needs.

One example is the new CV-22 Osprey aircraft developed by the Navy and Air Force that Socom is modifying for its uses. Socom also has contracted to modify seven additional CH-60 helicopters into special-operations-capable MH-60 models during fiscal year 2013.

"Clearly the mission for a special operator is different than that of a conventional operator," Cluck said. Stealthy infiltrations, for example, require aircraft able to fly at lower altitudes and speeds, with the necessary terrain-following radars to support those missions.

"I am not building an airplane from the ground up, and going through all the oversights and testing aspects that go into that," Cluck said. "What I do is get that aircraft from the service and then modify it to our requirements."

This process, even with the associated developmental and operational testing, significantly reduces the time it takes to field the capability, he said.

And for requirements not already in the conventional forces' inventory, Socom has authority to buy them off the shelf, or it can contact industry to develop them, he said.

For the most part, the systems Socom develops itself are lower-cost than the major systems fielded by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Despite strict oversight requirements that apply to all Defense Departments acquisitions, they aren't subject to the level of scrutiny associated with major DOD acquisition programs, thus avoiding resultant delays.

Socom currently is selecting the source for a new ground mobility vehicle that's lighter and easier to transport by helicopter than the Humvee. The command recently awarded two prototyping contracts for foreign shipyards to build a class of submersible combat vehicles, and expects delivery of the first craft by the end of fiscal 2014.

In addition, Socom recently awarded a contract to Remington to develop a new precision sniper rifle.

"What we are looking for is, 'What is the next technology to allow our folks to be able to operate even better?'" Cluck said.

But another big factor in streamlining Socom's acquisition process is access to all the key players. That includes the operators themselves, the special operations acquisition community that supports them and the decision-makers empowered to give a proposal a yea or nay.

"One of the big advantages for us is that we are all here in one place," said Cluck, who's assigned to Socom's headquarters staff and the Special Operations Research, Development, and Acquisition Center at MacDill Air Force Base here.

"You generally can't say that about the services," in which acquisition authorities and responsibilities commonly cross multiple senior-level organizations spread across multiple states, he said.

Being on one campus gives Cluck direct reach across the organization and promotes immediate responses and close interaction, he said. Everyone associated with a project -- from establishing requirements to contracting out projects and overseeing their progress -- works together under one roof.

"We can rapidly make a decision, because we have processes in the headquarters that if a [theater special operations command] or an operational component have an immediate combat or mission requirement, we can meet and make a decision on that need within days," Cluck said. "If the command validates a requirement, we are rapidly able to move through our contracting processes to satisfy that."

Members of the Acquisition Center are cautioned against "falling in love with a requirement" when it makes sense to field the "80-percent solution," Cluck said. They also understand when it's necessary to shift gears or to abandon a program altogether when priorities or requirements change.

"We need to listen to what the operational demands are and respond to the priorities the command establishes in a budgeting sense to meet those demands," Cluck said.

"The entire Acquisition Center has a focus on the operator and the requirement, ... recognizing that whatever they need us to do is what we are going to put our talents against," he said.