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Subject: Attrition in Special Forces Selection
Comet    8/25/2003 6:40:18 PM
Does anyone know what the attrition is now for SF Selection? Now that they are taking new recruits as 18x, I'm interested in knowing how well they're doing.
 
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raymond    RE:Attrition in Special Forces Selection   3/8/2004 1:03:47 AM
Was this major refering to selection or qualification? US Army SF uses two seperate, sequential, processes.
 
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ZealousZionist    RE:Attrition in Special Forces Selection   3/8/2004 6:58:53 PM
The major was referring to the selection and training process, in its entirety.
 
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mike_golf    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/8/2004 9:56:31 PM
joe6pack wrote: "their recruiters are as big a scoundrels as mine ;-) Good DLAB and ASVAB should get them into a nice REMF intel job ;-)" I suspect that someone who joined the Army for a shot at the Green Berets doesn't want a nice REMF intel job. Personal opinion, it's a mistake to do this. The Army used to allow you to enlist for special forces directly, back when I was a young soldier. You had to complete TWO combat arms OSUT and airborne school, then you went to Q course. We had a guy at Fort Knox with us. He had finished his 11 bang bang training and was going through armor OSUT. After that he was going to airborne school and SF Q course. There is a reason they stopped doing that, the Q course failure rate was high, and the operator quality was low. Going to the "you have to be an NCO, have a min GT and DLAB score and pass SFAS" to get into Q course solved those problems. But, we have a Secretary of Defense who is fascinated with special ops and efficiency. The military does things like this to satify our civilian bosses and some poor schmuck will pay for it down the line.
 
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raymond    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/8/2004 10:34:17 PM
Yes, and... None of this would be an issue if SF had not gone mission shopping over the past 20 years, and convinced the leadership that only they can carry out raids. They made this bed, and now they get to sleep in it.
 
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mike_golf    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/8/2004 10:54:13 PM
Yeah, well it happens all the time in the military. Army SF was an excellent outfit created to help other countries fight wars so that we wouldn't have to deploy the US Army. A couple of things in their history happened that were both good and bad for them. The first was official recognition and backing by JFK. It was needed to keep SF alive when the Airborne Mafia was very close to convincing the Army brass to get rid of them. Unfortunately it also meant that SF became legit. The next bad thing was making SF a branch of its own. Now the Army politics entered the scene, the need to justify people and budgets. Now SF found itself making the same sort of stupid decisions the Airborne Mafia was making back in the 50's and 60's. Ideally we would have the following: Commandos, raids, etc. - Army Rangers Insurgency, LRRP - Army Special Forces Counter terrorism, commandos, deep strike, etc. - Delta, SEALs (more or less equivalent to SAS and SBS respectively).
 
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raymond    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/9/2004 5:53:48 PM
SF was created from the veterans of OSS after it was disbanded, with an eye toward igniting revolutions in soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. It was not developed to help other countries fight wars, but organize and train guerillas and revolutionary bands. Training national armies is more post-Vietnam mission shopping. We actually have roughly the structure you name but the devil is in the details. 1.) SF has expanded into training armies, raids, and several other missions the military probably shouldn't even be involved in. 2.) Rangers should have been our commando force, but are saddled with cold war doctrine directing them to sieze occupied LZ's for airborne forces. 3.) Delta was originally intended to do HR, but the FBI was there first, so they have never actually done it. As a result, they too have gone mission shopping, and come up with raiding. 4.) SEALs should be combat swimmers, but gave up that role wen they joined SOCCOM. Now they are largely indistinguishable from Delta/SF. This as forced the navy to expand the EOD program to cover their old missions. The big problem is SOCCOM. Eliminate that, give these people back to their respective services, and most of the other problems will take care of themselves.
 
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mike_golf    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/9/2004 6:52:31 PM
I agree with most of what you say, with one exception. There were two sources for the Green Berets, one was the OSS and the other was the MACV in Greece. And both insurgency and counter-insurgency were part and parcel of their mission by 1960. JFK was clearly expecting to use the Green Berets to build local armies to withstand Communist insurgents when he put his political weight behind them and against the wisdom of the military. Much of the early thinking in the Green Berets supports this view as well, even prior to JFK getting involved. The other missions they have since taken on, including raids, commando type action and so forth more realistically belong with units like the Rangers or counter-terrorist/hostage rescue units like Delta. Commando action often involves incredibly high casualty rates. Do we really want to take extremely expensive (not in $ terms, but in supply and demand terms) green beret NCO's and officers and expend their lives in a one time commando raid? Pont du Hoc did not need green berets. It needed 20 year olds in fantastic condition, trained to conduct a commando raid.
 
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Horsesoldier    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/10/2004 8:40:58 AM
>>Training national armies is more post-Vietnam mission shopping.<< That's pre-Vietnam mission shopping. Foreign Internal Defense being pretty much the flip side of training guerillas, and a significant portion of SF's mission during Vietnam. FID is definitely a mission SF is well suited for, so I do not know that I would consider it one they should consider abandoning. It is also a mission that is of merit an value from both a military as well as a political perspective, so I don't know that I agree the US military should get out of that business entirely, beyond the question of SF involvement.
 
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raymond    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/10/2004 8:45:34 PM
I am not advocating we abandon training forign armies, it's one of the best tools of influence we have. Our efforts, especially at School of the Americas, have increased the professionalization and political reliability of of armies around the world. My point is that the job can and should be done by the kind of people who train our own soldiers. This would be cheaper, more realistic and provide the rest of the army with a great deal more forign relations experience. I've been re-thinking the FID issue, and agree that guerilla-trainers are probably best to train guerilla-hunters as well.
 
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mike_golf    RE:Special Forces Selection 18 Xray program   3/10/2004 9:10:23 PM
Raymond wrote: "I've been re-thinking the FID issue, and agree that guerilla-trainers are probably best to train guerilla-hunters as well" That was the theory behind it when it was adopted as a SF mission in the 1950's. Most of that was based on US MACV experience in Greece, but also on some of the "special missions" in Korea as well.
 
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