Lethality, audacity and creativity. That’s the culture of the Special Forces Regiment and the values each Special Operator is expected to live by. They’re also the foundation of what it takes to be the premier partnered irregular warfare force in the arsenal of the United States Military.
Our nation’s Green Berets, Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations soldiers are led by Major General Gil Ferguson; the Commanding General of 1st Special Forces Command. Or known more doctrinally as the Operational Force. He commands the tactical units that fight and win America’s most complex battles in every corner of the world.
For the final interview of our Fort Liberty series, Fran Racioppi sat down with General Ferguson from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum for a conversation on what it takes to man, train and equip our Special Forces units.
They dug into his goal to enhance the culture of the Regiment, how the Special Forces Groups are preparing for regional conflicts with unknown enemies, at unknown times; and just how Green Berets are solidifying themselves as the go-to option in the deep sensor fight against our peer adversaries.
General Ferguson also explains the SOF-Space-Cyber Triad, where he sees Special Forces in a decade, and as our units evolve, what needs to stay the same.
Take a listen, watch, or read our conversation with America’s top Green Beret, then head over to our YouTube channel to watch General Ferguson share the lineage of America’s first Special Forces in the Jedburgh Media Channel’s first documentary, Unknown Heroes, Behind Enemy Lines at D-Day, the story of Operation Jedburgh.
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General Ferguson, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Your role is the Commander of First Special Forces Command. You are responsible for our Special Forces group or what we call the Operational Force. We’ve had a lot of conversations about the training. We brought in that piece of history before we were speaking here. We were talking about the Jedburghs.
That’s the lineage. It’s the lineage of creating an organization that there’s a word that is very critical to the Special Forces regimen, both in our legacy, in our history, back to the OSS, the operational groups, and the Jedburghs. It’s the word partnered. The vision for the First Special Forces Command is very simple. We are the premier partnered irregular warfare force. What is that?
You hit on the critical word there. I talk to the formation. We can get into some other specifics about some of the other words that I use. Specifically, what’s coming to my mind is the word generalist. We can probably come back to that. Hardly any element in the Military does not partner. You can go to the Navy, the surface fleet, and they’re going to go do maneuvers with some other Navy somewhere. They’re going to get together and have whatever they call that, shore leave or whatever it is. They’ll get together. They’ll have functions. They’ll build coalitions.
That’s how we fight. We fight coalition warfare. The United States fights coalition warfare. We don’t ever want to fight by ourselves. We’re walking around this museum here where there’s going to be some continental Army history in this facility. We all know. We had the French on our side. The relationship with the French to gain our independence was tremendously important. That is in our DNA. It’s in a lot of other countries’ DNA too.
When you start there at the strategic and operational level, we fight coalition. We fight joint. When you bring that down to our level, the big difference between what the US Army Special Forces does and all the other SOF units in SOCOM that partner as well is, for us, it’s not just a way to get to the X or a means to an end but an end in itself.
The big difference between what special forces does and all the other forces is that it’s not just a way to get to the X, it’s not just a means to an end, it’s an end in itself.
We are fundamentally a small formation. We’re a twelve-man detachment if we’re at full strength, which most of ours aren’t. You’re not going to go do a raid with twelve people. It’s not feasible unless it’s something that’s probably not worth spending your time on. Our mission is to not just operate in that twelve-man element. It’s to go to other places or other countries to tie in with the indigenous population there and the indigenous elements there.
Whether they’re irregular or conventional SOF or even conventional forces, we tie in with them and benefit from their expertise, their understanding of the culture, their understanding of the nuances of living there, and their understanding of the way people fight there and serve as a force multiplier. We’re going to bring capabilities that the United States brings to the fight that they’re not necessarily going to have. We’re going to empower them and enable them with the capabilities that the US brings to bear.
That’s how we talk about it. When I say premier, that’s important because I want people to understand when joint task force commanders, when 3-star corps commanders, or when 4-star commanders see a problem and they’re like, “I need to know what’s going on in the extended deep where the integrated fire command is and where all the long-range shooters are,” that’s a Green Beret problem. I need some Green Berets to get in there with a partner force and figure out what’s going on, whether it’s a resistance or a partnered force, or what’s even better, the partner of a partner.
Let’s talk about that. There’s another piece here to this. We are talking about the mission of the regiment. You have this man, train, equip, validate, and deploy special operations forces globally to conduct special operations to support theater and national objectives. It goes on as masters of the indigenous approach.
We’re culturally astute, regionally oriented, globally networked, and forward posture. We build generational relationships, critically, if you want to expand on that, with allies and partner risk to extend influence while developing a deep understanding of our environment. That is a lot of what you mentioned. We live in a very complex world.
The regimen is structured very appropriately with a regional focus. We have every group that says, “I got this region.” How do you man, train, equip, validate, and deploy a force that has to be centralized but has to be culturally astute, regionally oriented, and globally networked to fight very differently in different regions of the world? The 7th group in South America is not the 5th group in the Middle East or the 1st group in the Pacific.
That’s what we focus on every single day. I’m going to zoom out a little bit and talk about what our focus is at SF Command. There’s so much in there. I’ll let you tease it out. To your point, my job is not to constantly be specifying, “5th Group, you need to be focused on this. 7th Group, you need to be focused on that,” because we have raised up generations of senior leaders that are in charge of those formations who have grown up in those formations or at least have spent time in those formations.
Some of the leaders didn’t grow up in those formations. I had no time in 10th Group other than going to pre-SCUBA at 10th Group, which was a bad life choice, but it built a lot of character. I had no time at 10th Group before I got out there. Everybody who worked for me grew up in the 10th Group almost exclusively. Those formations are designed to grow up with that to over time learn through OGAT, frankly, the regional expertise and all of the nuances that you’re talking about to understand, “This is the difference.”
The Baltic States don’t like being called the Baltic States, for example. They don’t view themselves as this homogenous block. They view themselves very differently. When you get to the 10th Group, you find out that that’s how they feel whereas everybody in the US government talks about the Baltics like the South. Georgia is not Texas. The differences over there, there are probably way more differences between Estonians and Lithuanians than are between Georgians and Texans, frankly.
Those organizations grow up because they’re immersed in the culture. They’re immersed in the language. The NCOs and the officers in those formations, I’m not worried about them learning about their culture, their countries, and their regions because their operational cycle, their deployment cycle, and their training are all geared toward building that expertise over time. What we talk about at our level is primarily culture.
I gave a one-page culture statement when I came in. That’s it. The Army’s job has not changed. It is to fight and win the nation’s wars. Our job within that construct is to do that as the premier partnered special operations irregular warfare formation. What we talk about is who we are as First Special Forces Command. Our culture is one of lethality, audacity, and creativity.
I usually lay it out as I want creative people. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be a new thing. Maybe it’s an old thing used in a new way, but I need them to be creative, and they are. That’s how we hire them. We recruit, assess, select, and train people to be creative. I want them to be creative. I want them to be audacious. By that, I mean understanding how to view, assess, and mitigate risk.
There’s a difference between recklessness and audacity. Audacity is understanding what the risks are, what the trades are, and what your formation’s capabilities are and saying, “We’re going to take this move.” It’s scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, to use that great ranger analogy. It’s putting Virginia Hall into France for months on end. It’s jumping the Jeds in the night before. It’s jumping the 82nd and the 101st on the night before the D-Day invasion. That’s audacity.
I want them to be creative, audacious, and then lethal. All three of those are the fundamental training underpinning for all of our formations, whether it’s the SF groups, our civil affairs folks, our PSYOPs folks, or our sustainment brigade. All of those folks, I want them to all think that way. They’re going to focus differently on each one of those based on what they do. I don’t need the fuelers in the 528th to be going out and doing fire and maneuvering all the time, but I want them to know how to employ their weapon systems to be confident and comfortable that if they get in a pickle somewhere, they can fight their way out of it. That’s what we do at our headquarters.
It’s a sacred duty. I love what I do because I know that I’m responsible. If something goes sideways or forward, they’re going to come asking me. The two gentlemen that were here before, the CSM and the command chief foreign officer, are going to be like, “You guys said these guys were ready. What happened?” I take that very seriously.
I owe it to our formation, their families, the Army, and the nation to make sure that we’re giving them the time, the tools, and the resources to prepare so that they’ve got the foundation of fighting and winning our nation’s wars wherever they go. The group is responsible for continuing to refine and tailor their capabilities for specific AOR.
I don’t need 7th Group learning how to drive snow machines. I don’t need the 10th Group focused on the jungle. When the time comes and we end up going and fighting for twenty years in the desert, I’m going to need a cadre from that group that has got experience there. It would be 3rd Group and 5th Group. 7th Group too. They spend a lot of time in Afghanistan. It is so that we can spread that knowledge very quickly. That’s where you get back to the culture of creativity and audacity. If we’ve got those folks in our formation, then they’re going to be able to adjust and adapt to the theater-specific requirements if we do have to start weighing our effort toward one specific theater if that makes sense.
The culture piece is important. I believe, and I’ve had conversations with a number of senior leaders across the command and in the Army writ large, that there’s a misperception that SOF’s capability is in two places. One is in the counter-terrorism fight fully. Number two, potentially only left up conflict pre-competition.
Those contradictions of those discussions are deposing because you’re saying, “You’re saying we can only be employed because, for twenty years of the global war on terror, we were seen through the lens and the media lens primarily through only a small number of the groups who are engaged in this counter-terrorism fight.” Historically, that’s not where we make our best work.
The regiment had everybody rotated through but, at the end of the day, the entire regiment wasn’t committed to the counterterrorism fight. There were a lot of the regiments that were focused on their traditional, “Go out and partner with organizations and be prepared for the next fight.” Much of the country never saw it.
What we have is an environment in which we’re not in the news every day, for better or worse. There’s also a lack of seeing US soldiers deployed. We’ll talk about conventional forces and what that means. What are we doing to overcome that misperception that SOF is a CT capability and we don’t need them to be employed until that CT fight?
I would disagree somewhat that there is a misperception about us only being involved in CT. Rightfully so, we were concerned about that. There were certainly very clear messages coming from different aspects of the government, whether that’s on the policy side or not, regarding CT focus. There was a lot of conversation about that, especially as the war in Syria was drawing to a close.
Here’s what I would tell you. It’s good news. The Army is specifically looking to Special Forces to do things on the periphery and in the extended deep that they don’t have the capability to do. That’s not a knock on the Army. That’s the Army saying, “I don’t have sensors that can get into the extended deep to see where these things that will kill me are. I don’t have the long-range fires to affect those things in the extended deep.”
We’ll come back to the CTCs in a minute because it’s a very critical component of this. What I see when I’m having conversations with the guys that will be JTF commanders, whether that’s General Donahue, the XVIII Airborne Corps Commander, or General Bernabe, the III Corps Commander, is that when we go out to the CTCs and talk to these division and corps commanders, they know what the limits of their capability are. They know how far their stuff can go. They know that our adversaries have highly proficient killing capabilities way beyond their ability to sense an effect, so they are asking us to do those things. That is good news.
When we were talking before the camera started rolling about how we’re back to our roots, we’re back to the pre-9/11 days. The advantage we offer, the joint force, and the value that we offer them is our ability primarily through partners and potentially through resistance elements that are being contacted over the horizon and don’t even necessarily have face-to-face or physical contact.
That is what we’re offering them. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for us to get deep into the enemy’s rear area to find their most potent weapon systems. Classification-wise, you can see some of that going on in Ukraine. Some of the things that are being done over there, some of the targets that are being struck have a whole lot to do with SOF’s ability or Special Operations Forces, which is a generic term, ability to sense and locate.
That’s our operating concept for the first SF command. We’re going to operate in the extended deep primarily through partners. It’s back to that conversation about the risk level in a denied environment primarily through partners of resistance. We’re then going to operate on the periphery to impose costs, create doubt, and cause confusion on the periphery as well as change up the battlefield geometry.
In the same way, going back to where we started, before D-Day, we weren’t necessarily killing a whole lot of elements in the rear that then couldn’t go fight, but we were forcing what the OSS and the SOE were doing. They were forcing the Germans to dedicate combat power to those areas that could have been dedicated to the front. Does that make sense?
That’s critically important. That brings up that second piece that I was talking about while opening this walk. You have that CT focus but also where SOF is critical. SOF’s critical prior to the event but also during the event. During the event, we can open those 2nd and 3rd fronts. For example, think about the 10th Group’s mission in the invasion of Iraq. Everybody was focused on Kuwait. The invasion of conventional force and tanks was coming up from the south. What we did is we put the 10th Group into Kurdistan. They are with Peshmerga with 18,000 or 16,000 fighters. Seventeen divisions of the Iraqi army could not move out in that invasion.
This is another example. General Braga and I have talked about this before. The YPG, now known as the SDF, was arguably the most effective partnered force that we’ve ever fought with at scale. If you ask yourself how would the war against ISIS have gone had we not been able to establish an effective relationship and partnership with the YPG or the SDF in northern Syria, they were the maneuver element. They were the hammer that began to drive ISIS back.
It’s a classic example of by, with, and through and employing an indigenous force that seized terrain and frankly vanquished an occupying terrorist Army that, at one point, ruled everything across Northern, Central, and Eastern Syria all the way well into Iraq. We have tremendous opportunities. I am not worried that the Army is trying to pigeonhole us at all. It’s important for us to continue to be involved.
When we go around and travel, I’m like, “Where does the Army learn to fight?” The answer is the CTCs. That’s where the Army learns to fight. When you look at what Curt Taylor is doing out at NTC or what Dave Gardner is doing out at JRTC, they are transforming those training centers more rapidly than they’ve ever been transformed in the past. They are pouring their heart and soul into turning those into world-class training venues that bring in all of these 21st-century capabilities. We have to be there.
We’ve got the 7th Group down there doing a SOF-only rotation. It is the first time certainly since I’ve been in the Army that we’ve had a full CJSOTF involved in JRTC. That’s where we can partner with the Army. We can all learn together. We don’t know where the next fight’s going to be. We don’t know who it’s going to be with. We don’t know when it’s going to start. What we’ve got to do is focus on the things that we can control, and we can do that at the CTCs.
What you’re bringing up is this thing that we’re hearing a lot in the media. I know our senior leaders talk about it too, what they’re classifying as the 1939 moment.
We’re in the interwar years. That’s where we are.
You even got the FBI director sitting in front of Congress saying, “The red lights are blinking.” We’ve all almost come to the conclusion that although every agency and every organization is doing everything they can and they’re redlined in a lot of places, it almost becomes a matter of when and not if the event happens. When the event happens, will we be prepared to respond? I would argue yes. You would argue yes. I know that.
SOF is successful when we prevent the peer-to-peer fight, nation-state on nation-state, and superpower versus superpower. We don’t have to go back too long. We can go back to the Cold War and the Russians and the efforts that have been made there. 10th Group’s counter-Russian efforts have been going on for decades and still continue to this day.
That war between superpowers has to be fought through process and surrogates. We’ve seen this with Hezbollah. We’ve seen this with Hamas, which has taken away from us putting boots on the ground in Iran. How do you see SOF’s involvement as we look to this peer-to-peer fight and whether we have these regional responsibilities or these regional actors? Where is SOF’s involvement in this?
There’s a lot there in that question that I can answer. Let me try to break it down into chunks. First of all, every group recognizes that they have a role in competition. That’s no secret. There are Russian Private Military Contractors or PMCs running all over Africa. There are Chinese elements. Economically, China owns Africa. I remember driving on a highway in Malawi in 2013. The Chinese had built that highway. You’re driving up and down that highway and every storefront has Chinese lettering on it.
The airports, too.
Exactly.
It involves all the people.
That’s right. 3rd Group is primarily focused on a counter-violent extremist mission in Africa, whether that’s in the Horn of Africa or Northwest Africa. You’re familiar with that because you got involved in that while you were still in active service. They also see what’s going on everywhere else. They have a mandate to try to compete. There’s a whole bunch of policy issues there or concerns. There are policy decisions there to be made that are going to drive authorities, etc.
I’m picking on the 3rd Group because of Africa, but what all of the groups are doing, irrespective of their region is they’re creative and audacious. They’re looking for opportunities to try to compete within the existing authorities and within the policy that the national decision-makers have proliferated. That flows down through the GCCs. They are constantly looking for opportunities to compete. You mentioned the word generational partnerships earlier. That’s what they’re trying to maintain.
We went into Kurdistan in the early ‘90s before Desert Storm. The 10th Group maintained those relationships over time. We dumped some nitrous oxide in there in 2003 when 10th Group and some other organizations went in. Even after we left in 2011 when the war with ISIS kicked off again, those generational partnerships were still there. When folks went into Kurdistan, it started everything right back up. It was off to the races.
The relationship with the YPG started through a generational relationship with other Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan who were affiliated with those guys. It’s that long burn. Colombia is another great example. The guys that are running the Colombian Military were all folks who were captains with me when I was a 7th Group commander. That’s what we would call the competition space left of crisis. We’re building those capabilities and those generational partnerships so that wars can be fought successfully through proxies. The 10th group and the Ukrainians are a great example. The war kicked off in February 2022, but the 10th Group had been in Ukraine since 2014, working with Ukrainian SOF and transforming Ukrainian SOF.
All of that stuff is being done below the water line before conflict. To your point, when we’re going into these high-stakes conflicts with peer adversaries like the Russians, if you’re not fighting through proxies, then we’re at the risk of a thermonuclear conflict. None of us know where those red lines are. It’s some high-risk poker. SOF needs to continue to be able to provide those options to decision-makers.
If you’re not fighting through proxies, then we’re at the risk of a thorough nuclear conflict.
General Tovo was here when you came in. He and I spent a lot of time together. His role is the Chairman of the Green Beret Foundation. Our partnership with Green Beret Foundation with the show and everything. We talk a lot about this concept that the Navy and the Air Force man the arms.
They’re platform-centric.
They train people to operate systems. The Army arms the man. There’s a reliance on technology, whether you’re in the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force, but at the end of the day, the man or the people are taking hold of the ground. You see that. It’s like Washington’s agency with Gaza. We put a lot of effects on the battlefield very quickly, but they still have to commit forces to close within and destroy the enemy in very different terrain. As we talk about change, evolution, and this reliance on technology, how is SOF still putting the person operator, the Green Beret, at the center of everything that they do so that we use technology and leverage it, but it’s not the primary means by which we fight?
One of the things that I talk to folks about all the time is technology is not going to win the next fight. The side that most effectively and audaciously employs technology is going to win. We’re at a disadvantage technologically with some of our adversaries. We expected some Russian capability to be better than it is, but they’ve still got some pretty capable tech. Whether the Chinese stuff is as good as we think it is remains to be seen. We don’t want to find out the hard way. Our focus is you as the individual are what matters. Technology isn’t going to solve the problem.
I saw a Wall Street Journal article. In Japan, the government is starting to issue some warnings about, “We need to slow the roll on artificial intelligence.” Specifically, they’re talking about social media and that type of thing. We’re a long way from an autonomous vehicle that can weave its way through a forest and determine what the appropriate route is. We’re a long way from there.
I was talking to some folks. We were out at a range. It was about, “If I get on a four-wheeler right now and start making my way through the woods, there are going to be some points where I’m going to be looking over the handlebars and be like, “Should I go that way?” We don’t have anything like that in the AI sense. What is important is the establishment of those relationships, building the foundational capabilities with our partners that we would come to call on were we to have to fight a proxy fight through them, and then embracing all of the technology that we can.
Maybe I’ll answer your question this way. We are thinking very deeply about whether we need to not take away from all the MOSs that exist, and I’m being very ODA-specific here. All the MOSs that exist on an ODA are hugely important. I won’t get into any specifics. I’ve got some good specific examples that I won’t get into for a variety of reasons.
We’re also asking ourselves, with the level of complexity of the technology that we’re employing, are we asking too much of our folks to say, ‘I need you. You’re an 18 Bravo. I’m going to send you to this robotics training,” which we’re doing, and they’re doing great. Do we need to give that guy one more thing to do or do we need to have a robotics MOS?
An 18 series guy on a detachment, not in lieu of, but as an addition whose sole job is to work with unmanned systems, whether they’re in the air, on the ground, on subterranean, or underwater. He’s the guy. He’s like, “I’m the robotics guy. I know how to fix these things. I know how to hot wire these things. I know how to employ various different types of systems. I know how to work the loitering, munitions, etc.” We’re thinking the same thing about fires. When did you come to SF?
In 2008.
In the SOTACC program, the Special Forces JTAC program started. We stood that up while I was still a detachment commander. That was in the early 2000s, like 2000 or 2001. I remember at the time thinking, “This is an entire MOS in the Air Force. We’re going to make this an additional duty for guys on an ODA.” I lived it as a group commander.
Maintaining the certifications alone is a tremendous task. Frankly, we’re always behind. Add on to that shooting long-range, air-launched precision effects from 500 or 600 kilometers away from a B2 that in-flight has got a track of some sort of surface vessel. Track quality, have you ever heard of that? That’s a big deal in the Indo-Pacific theater.
If you don’t have a certain track quality, then whatever the munition you’ve launched, it’s not going to get to where it’s supposed to get and hit the thing it’s supposed to hit. Not to mention how many of those do you need to create an effect on that kind of target, etc. The complexity of the task of controlling fires and being an expert in fires is too much at this point to be an additional duty. We are looking at those two specific things.
Back to your original question, how do you keep the man or woman at this point, the individual soldier or the Special Forces soldier, at the center? It’s by adjusting and thinking the way we are, which is, “I need you to be good at your job. I’ve given you too many tasks.” There’s a reason that some airplanes have more than two people in the cockpit. It’s a lot for one guy to do. That’s a specific example of how we’re thinking in a little bit of a transformative way or a creative way, back to the Who We Are document about what we can do in the future to keep the individual in the center of what we’re doing.
That would be a big thing. Are you talking about the transition of the MTO?
Yes. That will have to be part of it. When we go around and talk to team sergeants, one thing every single one of them asks for is more time. Without getting into specifics here, we are decisively engaged in transforming our operational cycle because the things that we’re asking our people to do are too complicated and too complex. They require time. You know the deal. You can build the house a little bit faster, but there’s only so fast you can go to build it right. That’s where we are. We’re re-looking all of that. We want to get that codified all the way up through SOCOM and get that set into concrete so that our team sergeants have the time to do all of that.
The big topic that comes along with this transformation is the integration of cyberspace and SOF. Can you talk for a second about how the regimen is looking at that integration and why SOF is concerned with cyber and space?
Yeah. The SOF space cyber triad is General Braga’s term. That’s the one that we use all the time. You’ve probably heard it. He picks that because of the nuclear triad. The three apexes of the triangle or the corners of the triangle are all dependent on each other. When he was out in the Indo-Pacific, he started to realize we have SOF everywhere at any given time. We’ve got roughly 2,500 people deployed to 70 to 80 different countries. There is adversary capability all over the globe that we have people doing JCETs within very close proximity.
The space and the cyber folks have got all of these great capabilities and these great skills. What they don’t have is placement and access. They don’t have a presence. They don’t have partnerships. We have people that drive by some of these things every single day. Maybe they’re partners or maybe they’re partners of partners. That gives us placement. That gives us access. That gives us a presence.
All we’re trying to get our folks to understand is how they, through their placement, access presence and partnerships. Also, how they can provide capability to anyone with space capabilities and cyber capabilities to employ what they have either over the horizon or at the physical site. We’re not trying to turn our folks into space and cyber experts.
That’s what we’re looking at next. Do we need an 18-series cyber MOS? Do we need an 18-series spaced MOS? We’re looking at a lot of these capabilities going into the future because the information environment is becoming so critical, especially when you get into technology, to everything we’re doing. We’re looking at those farther down the road as far as potential additional MOS too. That’s how we’re linking it together.
The thing I try to tell everybody is, “50 years ago, you looked at the enemy through a pair of binos. Now, you’re looking at the enemy with a bunch of different sensors on some sort of platform. Whether it’s ground-based, air-launched, or space-based, it’s still surveillance, it’s still reconnaissance. You’re just using a different tool.” Likewise, we went to a lock-picking course to figure out how to get into the front door. Those are still valuable, but you don’t even have to pick the lock. You can unlock the lock through cyber means over the horizon, etc.
You look forward. You craft your vision. You had them see the legend they could be in 5, 10, or 15 years. What’s the biggest challenge you see?
I hit it already. It’s not having enough time. I’ll go back to what I said earlier. The three of us take very seriously the responsibility to organize, train, and equip. It’s not a boring job. It is a sacred duty. When you see the way the Army takes that responsibility, I feel the same way. At this point, we’ve lost a lot of teammates. My wife and I have held a lot of hands at funerals and in events beyond that.
We have long-lasting relationships with families that are dealing with a loss from which they’ll never recover, whether that’s parents, spouses, or children. We take that seriously. That is why I’m laser-focused for the next fifteen months that I have in command to set in concrete an operational cycle that allows our team sergeants to get the training time they need.
I’ll tell a little bit of backstory on that. We are a much younger formation than we were when you came in in 2008. The 18 X-Ray program is a fantastic program. 18 X-Rays make up more than 50% of our force, and that is a good thing. They are keeping us healthy. They are keeping us moving forward. They are super fit. They’re super smart. They’re super motivated.
The attrition rate is when someone raises their hand and says, “I want to be an X-Ray,” and then shows up to Army basic training and quits on day two. The attrition rate is high. The ones that we get are tremendously capable individuals, but they’re inexperienced. Having come from the Army before the war, experience was no guarantor of being a good Green Beret necessarily, so that’s not the argument.
My point is I owe them time. I owe them time to get reps to be a really solid junior Bravo or junior Charlie before they start having to figure out, “This is what it means to be a junior Charlie in my theater. This is what it means to be a junior Charlie employing my language, understanding this culture in my theater, and layering on the different technologies, risks, and challenges within my theater.” They can’t do that if they don’t have time. That’s my biggest concern.
What’s the biggest opportunity?
It’s the same one. Every challenge and every risk is an opportunity. We have an opportunity in the next fifteen months to codify an operational schedule that is going to be transformational for our formation. We have never done this. We have never forced ourselves to stick to a 24-month operational cycle where you have a full 18-month workup.
Every challenge and every risk is an opportunity.
You have six months of the individual to go to all your PME, get your HALO jumpmaster, get your tandem certification, go down and be a dive sup, go to the DMT course, and then go to all the different Army PME. It’s then another twelve months of collective training where you are going to the range where you’re learning the new tech. It’s like, “Congratulations. We’ve given you a new radio, a new computer, a new this, and a new that.” We have to learn all of that stuff and then, frankly, hold ourselves to a standard.
This is going to be a cultural shift where team sergeants have to say, “Ferguson, I got it. You’re ready to go on this deployment,” but you showed up and we’re deploying in whatever that time window is. We draw a line, and if you show up after that date, maybe you go to the B team or you go work at the SOTF. You can’t go to the ODA because we’re not going to say that you’re certified to go forward because you haven’t gone through the workup with the team. We don’t have it all figured out yet. There will be challenges with all of that, but that’s a tremendous opportunity.
Bear with me. I’m going to give you a war story on that one. The first guys coming out of that cycle are going to say, “Wow.” They will because I lived through it. In my other life down on the other side of the post when I was a squadron commander, we’d grown the organization to four squadrons. We went to a longer cycle so that we had a full twelve months in between.
I had highly experienced folks who had been out in that formation for years. They were like, “I have never felt more ready to go back on a deployment.” It was not like, “I’m sick of this,” but more ready as in, “We’ve done this.” It allowed folks to train the way they had before the war started and we were churning. We will see that same experience with ODAs when they start coming out of the backside of this new operational cycle.
Performance will be higher.
100%.
One of the things we haven’t hit that is critically important is the PSYOPs and the CA piece of things, the Psychological Operations and the Civil Affairs. We spoke with General Beaurpere and Major Lee Strong about the establishment of these psychological operations in the center and how they’re going to build the school.
If you think about that, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, those units or those formations are also under your command. We spent a lot of time bringing down the Green Beret. These are critical components of the SOF fight. Can you talk for a second about how the psychological operations and the civil affairs formations fit into the vision and how they’re supplementing the core mission of the Green Beret?
Yeah. I’ll start with your last comment there because we’ve got missions where the civil affairs and the PSYOPs folks are straight up in the lead. When I was a 10th Group commander, one of the most irregular warfare-oriented missions that we had going in Ukraine was a PSYOP mission. It was hands down the most effective. There are places where they’re the main effort. I’m not just talking about MISTS. There are places in Africa where the civil affairs mission is way more valuable than having 18 series folks there because of the conditions on the ground.
Those two are both small formations. There is a CA or Civil Affairs and a PSYOP capability within the reserve component. It’s the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command. We own the bulk of all of the active duty civil affairs and psychological operations capabilities. Everywhere we go, some missions are more heavily SF-weighted. In some, it’s more heavily CA-weighted, etc.
What we typically try to do is go as a composite formation of sorts. I don’t know if you talked, but we’ve made some transformational changes with respect to the way the CA and PSYOP formations are organized. We’ve done a full reorganization there to get ourselves better aligned. It’s de facto in effect. This summer of 2024, it will become de jour in effect when we change the rating schemes.
We created two PSYOP groups and then one civil affairs brigade that has existed outside the groups. I’ve struggled with that since I was a young captain. It didn’t make any sense to me because when you go into an infantry battalion or infantry division, they don’t have a separate intel battalion. Everyone doesn’t work back through a separate chain of command because they’re forward with an infantry battalion and working for somebody back at Fort wherever answering their requirements. It doesn’t make any sense.
If you look at the way that we’ve used the DIVARTY over the years, the Army is changing it because the BCT is no longer the unit of action, the vision is. When the BCT was the unit of action, which the group is the unit of action, the group level, the brigade size formation is the unit of action. The artillery battalions worked. They worked for that brigade commander. That BCT commander was that artillery battalion’s raider. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve made the CA and PSYOP battalions raiders the group commanders. We all know the way you get unity of effort is through unity of command. That’s the number one way to achieve it.
Are they co-located too?
No. We haven’t been able to co-locate everybody because that’s congressional involvement. That’s re-stationing and everything. I wish we had started it over a decade ago because we probably would have it done. I had a PSYOP battalion commander come up to my office to talk to me about some of the things that she’s seeing that have benefited.
I already talked about the information environment. I need people. We need people working with those partners. The partners understand the language and the culture. We don’t need to try to create products for them because we’re going to miss the joke. That’s how you know you’re good at speaking a language. It’s when somebody tells a joke and you get it. They get their own jokes. We don’t need to go try and reinvent. We did that a lot in the Middle East for years. We came up with our own products.
That’s how you know you’re really good at speaking the language when somebody tells a joke and you actually get it.
The best way to do CA and PSYOP is through your partner. Without getting into specific areas, both of those formations have access to partners that, on the PSYOP side, understand the culture, understand how to message, and understand who to message. As an OEA brings joint capabilities that the partner force isn’t necessarily going to have, our PSYOP-ers bring capabilities that they own, tech that they own, and an understanding of how social media is networked together that maybe the partners don’t understand. They can teach them, train them, give them a little bit of kit, and work together. They’re like, “We should message this,” and then the partner is like, “Okay.” They start working together. The partner comes up with the message, the means, the audience, etc., and then we help them generate it.
It’s the same thing on the CA side. Civil Affairs have access to networks that 18 series folks don’t because they have different authorities. One of the things that we’d forgotten for twenty years was if we go loud with a tier-one adversary like China or Russia, that is going to be a whole society effort. The Role 2 and Role 3 hospitals are not going to get it done. They’re going to be insufficient for the number of wounded that we’re going to have. Having relationships with emergency services in partner countries can help us in consolidation areas, wide area security, and those kinds of things.
What I’m trying to get the CA folks to focus on is governance and stability. Left of conflict is building relationships with all of these different networks, whether they’re benevolent organizations, philanthropic groups, non-governmental organizations of any type, or emergency services like the fire departments, police departments, and sheriff departments, to help in the rear area with the handling of displaced persons, handling of security, and handling of casualties. That’s left of conflict.
If you think about it, if we could drop some of our SOF civil affairs folks into areas that the Ukrainians have run the Russians out of, they’d have five years of meaningful work helping rebuild societies over there. That’s what we have them focused on. This ARSOF integration where we’ve reorganized everything, we have been too separate for too long and we’ve never had the integration. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what everybody’s capabilities are. That’s the main focus of why we did this.
I barely remember interacting.
When you did, you were like, “What are you guys doing here?” They were working for some other major who was probably back at Fort Bragg. I’ve seen that through my whole career.
They have this powerful capability.
They’re tremendously capable. The other thing they do is they identify people like, “There’s way more to that guy than we thought there is. He’s connected to this person.” What do they do? We’re back to the 4th Battalions. They go find the Jeds or the ASOT Level III on a detachment. They go find the people who understand sensitive activities and say, “You need to meet this guy,” and they connect. You’ve got a whole other network that you’re starting to build out that has additional capabilities that the Special Forces team never would’ve identified because they’re not interacting with those people.
We talked a lot about transformation and change. Where are we going? I also talk a lot about history and where you come from. As you look back on your career and create your vision for the future, what has to stay the same?
The culture. I will tell you this. When we talk about culture, I say, “If we get our assessment and selection right and we get our culture right, everything else will follow.” I believe that fully. That’s what I’ve seen through my whole career. There’s a lot that goes into culture. History is a huge part of culture. Understanding where you came from helps you figure out why you’re where you are, who you are, and that type of thing.
If we get our culture right, everything else will follow.
Why do we value the things that we do? Why does the Army have the key attribute, the LDRSHIP acronym, on the NCOER? Why does the Army value those things? The only way to understand that is to go back and look at what the Army has been asked to do. If personal courage isn’t an attribute of a soldier, then we’re going to lose the next fight. If selfless service isn’t an attribute of an American soldier, we’re going to lose the next fight. We’ve got to have an understanding of who we are and why our values exist. Why do we value our values? Why are they important? We have to understand that.
We have to continue to recruit, assess, select, train, and retain people who are creative and understand the importance of audacity and lethality. It can’t just be about being creative. If they’re like, “We’re spending all our time on tech,” are you going to be able to put that in the hands of a partner or use that in support of a partner to go fight and win the nation’s wars, which frankly involves killing our enemies? Can you do that?
PSYOP-ers, when you’re creating wazoo AI messages, I’ve got one of them hanging on the wall in my office because this kid did it. I say kid, but he’s not a kid. He’s an E-8. They’re all kids to me because I’m so old. We were doing an exercise in INDOPACOM. He came up with this thing and then he walked me through the whole story of why he made it, how it fit in the culture, where we were, and how it would resonate with the society. I was like, “That is why we hired you.”
If we keep hiring those people and keep giving them opportunities like that to feel valued for their contribution, some of that is getting them off of Fort Liberty and getting them out to some exciting place to train. That’s why they joined up. As long as we keep doing that, we’ll be in a good spot, but we’ve got to maintain our standards. That means MOS proficiency and soldier proficiency. Both of those require a lot of time.
That’s where my head is going into the future as far as what we’ve got to maintain. I’m not worried about it. We’ve got all the talent we need. SWC has given us great products. When I go out and talk to these kids, they look like we created them in some sort of laboratory. You’re in the gym with them and you’re like, “You got another 600 on the ACFT.”
Making a 300 on the APFT when I was a captain and a lieutenant was no big deal, man. You run fast and do some pushups. The ACFT is no joke. If you’re maxing that thing, you’re the real deal. We’ve got all the raw materials we need. We just got to continue to maintain our standards for bringing folks in, and then I’ve got to give them time to train.
You mentioned proficiency for basic soldiers. Last question. Test question. This is the real question. I think about habits. I think about the baseline foundation. I talk to a lot of groups they bring in and they’re like, “You were an SF guy and Green Beret. Tell us how to be special.” The very first thing I tell them is there’s nothing special about being in the Special Forces. The difference between Special Forces operating and everybody else is they need basics. With everybody else, you could find a standard without compromise.
I think about the Jedburghs. They’re our predecessors and our warfighters. They have core foundational tasks, three of them. They’re to shoot, move, and communicate. If you can shoot, move, and communicate to a high degree of proficiency, those are your habits. We know from preparation that if we don’t have to think about our habits, then we can apply our mental and cognitive focus to more complex challenges.
It’s muscle memory.
What are the three things that you do every day you’re shooting, moving, and communicating to be successful in your life?
The first two that come right off are easy. I focus on getting enough sleep. That’s the first one. I’d say sleep and then fitness. That involves nutrition and getting into the Human Performance Training Center to do whatever it is I’m doing. I’ve got the BridgeAthletic app that our THOR guys use for all of our folks. We’ve all got access to it. They custom build you a training program based on your strengths and weaknesses in the areas you want to improve. It’s all tailorable and scalable to how much anaerobic and how much aerobic you need, etc. It’s all functional and fitness-oriented.
I try to get enough sleep because I’ve worked for plenty of folks who didn’t and you see what happens. I know how disagreeable I get and how I don’t make good decisions. All of that translates down. That all rolls downhill. The best example was I spent a year, almost 13 months, as the J3 at CJTF-OIR 2122. We were getting into the leading edge of all the Iranian one-way attacks on our installations everywhere all over Iraq-Syria.
I was getting woken up 3 or 4 nights a week and I’d be awake for 2 or 3 hours. Right in the middle of that cycle, that midnight to 2:00 AM, it’s the witching hour. That’s when the moves are going to get busy. It crushed me. I had a great aide and a great administrative NCO that I told them upfront, “I need you guys to be the sensor.”
They got very good at how when I would walk in, they could tell. They’d be like, “Go in your office and close the door. Take 30 minutes and get yourself sorted out.” I’m not an introvert. I don’t like my door closed. I like people to feel like they can pop in and that kind of thing. That was difficult for me, but they were like, “Get in there. Close the door.” It’s sleep and fitness.
The other thing that I would say is I am energized by interacting with our people or when I go out and see our folks, whether they’re struggling with a problem or they’re crushing a problem. I’ll give you a great example. General Braga is doing his capability exercise. Saturday and Sunday were the congressional staffers.
The construct on Saturday was that they were going to fly 2 of the C-27s that USASOC owns, fly up to DC, pick up the staffers with the two C-27s, and bring them back down. They start off with, “Welcome to USASOC. You’re on USASOC airplanes. We use these airplanes to train our Military free fall force and sustain all our airborne operations here at Fort Liberty,” etc.
We went up with a team from 3rd Group and we were split into both planes. When we came back, we flew over St. Myer and we jumped out with them in the plane. We didn’t tandem with anybody. They’re all in the plane, so they get to see us jocking up on the plane and be like, “See you,” and we jump out. It was very cool and fun.
The best part of it was being with the team. It was great being with the team before the jump, on the plane, and chit-chatting with them while we were flying back. The most rewarding part of the whole thing was being under a canopy with these guys and watching how good they were. They were highly proficient. They’ve clearly spent a good bit of time doing it. That’s super energizing for me.
Those are the things. I’m trying to take care of myself. My wife is the driving force behind all of that, making sure that I’m in a good spot health-wise. My staff understands that I don’t want to spend time in my office. That is not where I’m effective. There are times that I get on the phone maybe with group commanders, battalion commanders, and that type of thing. That’s effective, but I need to be out touching the formation and interacting with them because that’s how I get direct feedback. The team sergeants are not shy about saying, “What are you doing? Why are we doing this?”
We all don’t want to be shy.
Exactly. Everybody wants candor right up until somebody’s candid with them. If you take umbrage and go, “What’s wrong with you?” They’ll never be candid with you again. You can go call the force on whether they think I value candor or not. I hope I do. I think I do. They’ll be a better judge of it than me because ultimately, they’re the judge of that.
Everybody wants candor right up until somebody’s candid with them.
They agree with you. I’ve done my homework.
You got your network out there. I know. That’s good.
This has been an insightful discussion on where we are as a regiment. We talked about this 1939 moment. I do believe personally that that’s very true. That’s where we as a regiment do our best work. It is incumbent upon all of us as a nation to truly understand, embrace that, and put the full way of our support behind what you and the rest of USASOC are doing. This is the time. The time is here. This is it. We need this capability to be out there. We need to be out there for it, and that has to be all supported and well-resourced. We need to get the job done. I thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule.
That’s great. I’m happy to be here. I appreciate what you’re doing. Thanks for having me. Let me know if and when you want to do it again.
We got to have the sergeant major on. We got to have the command chief. I got to sit down and talk to them.
That’s a great idea. The command chief warrant officer grew up as a 1st Group guy. He’s got a very deep sensitive activities background and he’s a CIF guy. He’s the all-around generalist. We didn’t even get into that word, but I like that word a lot. I want us to be multisport athletes. I’ve never played lacrosse, but if I have a stick to throw the ball and I have to run fast to smash somebody, then I can figure this out. The next day, you’re playing football, soccer, or whatever. You’re not going to be great necessarily on any island, but you’re going to be good enough that people are like, “That guy is quite an athlete.” That’s what people say about multi-sport athletes. That’s Lalo. He’s got that background.
DW will proudly tell you about his time in Geronimo down there at JRTC. He went to 1st Group for a brief stint and then went to a lot of the special mission units up north and spent most of his career there. He also spent time at a training group as a battalion CSM over there. He’s got great insights into that and loved his time there. I am humbled and blessed every day working with those guys. You rarely see us not together, and that’s a gift.
I’ll give you something else because you mentioned lacrosse. I’m going to put it out there. In September 2024, we are planning the first Green Beret versus Navy SEAL.
General Tovo mentioned that to me.
We got to have you there. It’s going to be in September 2024. The plan is subject to change because it’s going to be at Gillette Stadium. It’s going to be nuts. It will be supported by the Premier Lacrosse League. It’s going to be on the semi-final weekend because they were in three games during the day. In the interim, in one of the games, we are going to get out there and a bunch of us are playing. I’ll be making sure that we’ll be sending you the information about it.
That sounds good. I like it.
We’ll look forward to the next one. We’ll keep talking down there at the 5th Group.
He’s got a great one to tell because the 5th Group is in a very unique position. It’s a challenging environment for them. He’s doing a great job managing it all down there. He’s got a great leadership team too.
Thank you.
Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much.
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