Lessons-Learned from Assignment to the Least-Known Component of the Security-Assistance Enterprise

U. S. military forces need capable partners today and, more importantly, in tomorrow’s multinational battlespace. There is precedence for this partner ing, as the Army has joined with allies and partners for operations and train ing around the globe for more than 245 years. Most officers are familiar with the more conventional forms of security assistance as conducted through tra ditional military transition teams (MiTTs) or the recently established security-force-assistance brigades (SFABs). In addition, Special Forces de tachments have long played a role in the larger security-assistance and co operation environment. A lesser known but long-serving com ponent of the security-assistance and cooperation enterprise is the Security Assistance Training Management Organization (SATMO), headquartered at Fort Bragg, NC. SATMO has served as a force provider for more than 50 years to every combatant command (COCOM) and is the assigned brigade-level headquarters under the U. S. Army Security Assistance Command (USASAC) and the Army Materiel Command. SATMO’s mission is to help develop partner capacity and promote interop erability in every geographic combat ant command (GCC). SATMO supports, resources and manages more than 70 forward-stationed teams that provide a mixture of technical, tactical and academic assistance to partner nations based on requirements from foreign military sales (FMS) cases or GCC-gen erated security-cooperation education and training (SCET) team requests. TAFT teams Most teams are filled with senior non commissioned officers (NCOs), senior warrant officers and post-key-develop mental-billet captains or higher officers. The SATMO mission of train ing partner forces and interacting with foreign military leaders requires a high level of maturity to operate indepen dently out of an embassy with much lower levels of supervision than is common in the Army – the Army as sumes that people holding senior rank have the requisite maturity to succeed in this assignment. The most common of these teams that Army officers will serve on are the technical assistance, fielding and train ing (TAFT) teams. SATMO currently op erates more than 40 TAFTs distributed throughout every COCOM, with offi cers serving as detachment commanders or advisers in the Caribbean or in countries as varied as Colombia, Georgia, Taiwan, Estonia and Saudi Arabia. A broadening assignment to SATMO provides officers the chance to develop as leaders in unique multinational and joint operating environments while serving at the operational level. This article will provide lessons-learned on some of those challenges to help prepare officers headed to an assignment with SATMO. One of the toughest challenges in a SATMO assignment is adapting one’s leadership style to best suit the envi ronment. The size of a TAFT can vary dramatically but is generally between two and 10 Soldiers. Unlike more conventional SFABs or MiTTs, where ev eryone generally has the same occu pation specialty or background, TAFTs are composed of technical experts and are almost always tailored to support the COCOM’s desired outcomes, pri orities and objectives for that country based on the COCOM’s respective campaign plan. As an example, the Guatemala TAFT, by its approved table of organization, includes an Armor Branch major, a Special Forces captain, an automotive-maintenance warrant officer, a water craft-engineer warrant officer, alight-wheeled-vehicle mechanic sergeant, a radio operator/maintainer sergeant, an infantry sergeant and a watercraft-operator sergeant. The warrant officers are generally between chief warrant officer two and chief warrant officer four in rank, and the NCOs are all typically sergeant first class or master sergeant. The small size of the typical TAFT team and the senior ranks of all the mem bers require a different leadership style than what the typical officer uses while serving as a company command er, battalion-operations officer or executive officer. Large organizations naturally tend toward a more formal approach, but the training-meeting formats used in a conventional brigade combat team, for instance, tend to be more cumbersome when leading a small team of senior NCOs and officers. The ground TAFT in Columbia, for ex ample, consists of only two field-grade officers: one Armor Branch lieutenant colonel and an Infantry Branch major. Synchronizing training and operations for them can occur through simple conversations and does not require a battle-rhythm event with a fixed agenda or slide presentation. Finding the balance between the for mal and the informal in a small-team environment is not something the conventional officer track normally pre pares an officer for, but it is essential in a SATMO assignment. Since TAFTs are designed to work for a COCOM, this creates some natural tensions within the organization as well, as a team’s priorities in support of the campaign plan are set by the lo cal Office of Security Cooperation (OSC) or equivalent, but the team’sad ministrative priorities – such as the re quirements in Army Regulation 350-1, Army Training and Leader Development – remain under the purview of SATMO and USASAC. This can lead to situations in which a team leader has to negotiate more with his/her supe riors than is normal in the Army to help the leadership at Fort Bragg and Redstone Arsenal, AL – where USASAC is based – understand the country team’s priorities and for the country team to understand SATMO and USA SAC priorities. When conflicting prior ities and deadlines exist, it is up to the team leader to facilitate negotiations between organizations to shift dead lines and ensure that all aspects of the mission can be accomplished. Being forward-stationed on an unac companied tour in a COCOM is not the same as a deployment. TAFT team members typically live in close quar ters, with some TAFTs all living in the same house and normally without amenities, such as a post exchange, that “war on terrorism” veterans would associate with a deployment. Life support comes almost exclusively off the local economy – meaning the quantity, quality and diversity of products differs from what a service member typically expects. Soldiers will often be tempted to act out given the remoteness of both family and the immediate chain of command during a SATMO tour. There is easy access on the local economy to both potential sexual partners and alcohol. In most of the partner nations, the U. S. dollar has more purchasing power compared to what Soldiers are used to, and this tends to increase the sense of temptation. Team leaders must be aware of any risky situations and hold violators of the Army Values immediately accountable. Any senior leader not showing the required ma turity needs to be dealt with and reas signed immediately. To be successful, team leaders need to find away to maintain the right amount of professionalism while still giving subordinates and peers space to relax and be away from work, de spite literally living in the room next door. The personalities on the team will play a large role in determining what the balance looks like for each

TAFT.

Command, support relationships Another challenge for officers is ad justing to the joint and interagency environment that embassy teams are normally built from. The command relationships for a TAFT are much more complicated than the traditional line and block charts at divisional units. As an example, Figure 1 illustrates the command and support relationships for the Guatemala TAFT. Often the team’sin-country priorities will be set by the OSC for that country and based on FMS or SCET training requirements, but SATMO and USASAC re m a i n t h e o rga n i zat i o n a l Figure 1. Command and support relationships for the Guatemalan TAFT, or TAFT-G.

headquarters for awards, evaluations and other administrative requirements. Officers, particularly those serving as detachment commanders, need to be aware of the inherent frictions these command and support relationships can create and work to mitigate them to achieve mission success. They need to be able to tactfully communicate to both SATMO and OSC the effects any given policy will have on a mission. It is the SATMO team commander’s re sponsibility to explain what they can and cannot do, based on the inherent authorities of the FMS case or SCET advising mission, Army regulations and command guidance. Since SATMO is an economy-of-force mission for the Army, TAFT command ers also need to be honest brokers of when they think a mission is no longer necessary. The maturity and experi ences SATMO officers gain will help them identify when a mission should be ended or modified. That honest assessment will help convey to both the SATMO commander and the OSC com mander the organizational transitions (along with associated decisions, transitional tasks and risks) in both space and time. Although Department of Defense (DoD) assets, TAFT team members are part of the embassy staff and are re quired to follow the local State Department regulations. For example, incountry travel (both personal and of ficial) needs to be cleared through ap plicable administrative Army channels and the embassy’s regional security office (RSO). Each RSO will have slightly different procedures, but in Guatemala the RSO requires a detailed email, known as a travel locator, of the planned route, personnel traveling, hotels being used for overnight stays and similar details, provided at least 48 hours before all travel. Even though the RSO is not in the chain of command, it serves as one of the lead force-protection authorities for the U. S. government in the country and its travel restrictions cannot be ignored – even if the RSO is inherently more risk-adverse than what the DoD chain of command is willing to underwrite. Officers serving as TAFT or detachment commanders need to ensure that training plans are built and exe cuted with a specific capability in mind. The exact capability will be identified in an FMS case, funded by Title 22 dollars, and should be identified on the team’s approved SCET request. The SCET provides the team’s mission and composition, and it describes the deployment’s desired outcomes. It is important to note that an SCET is generally approved for three years at a time, meaning that detachment commanders need to think beyond a single Officer Evaluation Report cycle and look at how a capability can be gener ated or improved over the mission’s duration. There also exists an inherent tension between the execution of the SCET or FMS cases that generated the original mission and the COCOM’s campaign plan that stems from the different times at which they are written and updated. The COCOM campaign plan is a living document normally updated annually or biennually to reflect changes within the area of responsi bility. The SCET or FMS is a document that is often not updated until it is pending a renewal, which can be any where between three to five years. Mission changes Sometimes the COCOM or OSC staff deems irrelevant the capability or out come originally designated in the SCET or FMS case – or in need of modification because of changed circumstanc es. This leads to a potentially conten tious situation. The detachment commander has a document, which was originally approved through the CO COM staff and authorized at DoD lev el, that tells him or her that the mis sion is to generate a specific capability in the country. In an FMS case, that document might also represent ale gally binding contract with the partner nation. In most cases for SATMO teams, DoD has directed that the Army (support ing command) provide a team with a defined mission and capabilities to the COCOM (supported command) to sup port an approved SCET or FMS case. Even if you look only at the Army’sin ternal support relationships, there is a 50/50 chance the parent unit’s (SAT MO and USASAC) priorities are sup posed to supersede those of the sup ported unit (OSC and COCOM). While the COCOM as the “supported” command or its in-country represen tative, OSC, might be directing a change of mission, they do not inher ently have that authority per doctrine outlined in Field Manual 6-0, Commander and Staff Organization and Operations. In such cases, it is critical for the detachment commander to re member that the team exists as an en abler to U. S. government priorities within the partner nation. While a team might execute discrete tasks in support of defined effects as per the doctrine outlined in Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations, the team ultimately exists to support the COCOM’s desired outcomes and objectives, un der which the OSC’s effects and the team’s tasks are ultimately nested. Failing to recognize this dynamic can lead to significant setbacks in the larg er security-cooperation program. Therefore the detachment command er has an obligation to support the CO COM and OSC priorities where they di verge from a potentially outdated SCET or FMS case to achieve the larger security-cooperation outcomes and partner-nation capability development. Detachment commanders also have an obligation when the OSC or COCOM directs a change of mission to advise the SATMO commander at Fort Bragg about the change of mission and the extent to which his team can support the change of mission. Detachment commanders also make a recommen dation on the extent to which SATMO and USASAC should resource the mission going forward. A subtle change of mission (for exam ple, changing the primary partner-nation unit the team supports) is a rela tively low-impact change, particularly if the new partner-nation unit is ex pected to fill a similar role to the pre vious one. A more drastic change of mission that could involve changing the composi tion of the team (such as asking a lo gistician-heavy team to advise on the installation and operation of an air-defense network) requires much more coordination and ultimately re quires anew SCET or FMS case to be approved at DoD level because SATMO and USASAC can only fill billets based off those in approved SCETs and FMS cases. Detachment commanders need to be able to communicate this to OSC chiefs to help set realistic expectations about how quickly the team can change its composition to support anew mission set. Cultural, geographical considerations In addition to the constraints and am biguities imposed by working in the joint and interagency environment, detachment commanders also must work within the national and organi zational cultures of the partner nation. Each partner nation has a distinct national culture that shapes the environment in which SATMO teams operate. For example, teams in Eastern Europe and Ukraine must account for how their countries are influenced by his toric relationships with Russia, which could now shape their worldview. Teams operating in Central and South America likewise need to account for how their actions could be perceived as imperious and potentially cast the U. S. government in a negative light be cause of the history between those countries and the United States. For example, U. S. interventions in support of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet or the Nicaraguan Contras are never far from mind in the U. S. Southern Command area of responsibility. All these geopolitical considerations require that detachment commanders find an approach to partnering with the host nation that accounts for na tional sensibilities and avoids negative exposure to the U. S. government. Un like the common deployment experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, SATMO teams most often work with mature militaries that have entrenched organizational cultures. Detachment commanders must therefore learn the nu ances of those cultures to generate the social capital needed to be effec tive partners and advisers. Falling into the mental trap of “the American way of business is the best way of busi ness” will only lead to frustration and a lack of results. As an example, most Eastern Europe an, Central and South American armies are extremely officer-centric. Tasks that American military officers normally associate with NCO duties are routinely performed by lieutenants and captains. Decisions an American captain might make as a company commander are often made at lieuten ant-colonel or colonel level. Also, those armies make distinctions between enlisted soldiers that we are not used to. There are generally two broad catego ries for rank in Central and South America that Americans are familiar with: sargentos, which are NCOs, and trupos, which are the junior enlisted. There is also another category of es pecialista. Most Americans would interpret especialista as an indication of a Soldier’s military-occupation special ty (MOS) because it translates as “specialist” and is usually used in the con text of “specialist in aviation,” for ex ample. This, however, would miss two impor tant points of nuance. The first is that you cannot be an especialista unless you have committed to being a career soldier. Thus an especialista private can have an indefinite enlistment, something not possible in our Army. The second nuance is that the soldier’s specialty often falls outside his or her MOS. For example, an infantry NCO can also be an electrician. This results from the fact that these militaries need to internally source many functions our Army has grown used to out sourcing over the years such as electrical work, carpentry and duct work. Soldiers who are not especialistas are normally short-term enlistees or con scripts. In some countries, these short-term enlistees have the ability to end their own contract, which is unheard of in our Army. Another organizational difference is that most of these armies do not have the same concept of institutional training our Army does. Instead, the equivalent of initial-entry training (IET) and advanced individual training (AIT) occurs at the unit of assignment. While most units have a systemic approach to their IET equivalent, AIT equivalents are much more informal and can best be described as occurring through on-the-job training. Thus, soldiers’ formal military training might be completed in as little as 60 days of IET before they assume a full-time role as members of a unit. There is also often no equivalent to ongoing professional education such as NCO academies. This lack of formal institutional train ing poses several challenges when working to develop partner capacity. One of the biggest challenges, due to differing educational and socioeco nomic conditions, is that the baseline capacity for individual soldiers and units is subject to incredible variance across the partner nation’s military. Teams thus must have the ability to in dividually adapt the sophistication and complexity of the training, which is tailored to each unit, to keep them en gaged. It also means that training de signed to help professionalize the partner-nation military must be incorporated into other events and done in away that does not offend the partners and cause them to disengage from training. SATMO must thus tailor presentation and training methodologies for each country with its own unique nuances based on its history. In Guatemala, there is little public trust in the mili tary after the 1960-1996 civil war – a war ripe with human-rights violations. Accordingly the military has more restrictions placed on it. For example, the Guatemalan military may only pur chase repair parts from Guatemalan manufacturers and may never have a budget that projects further out than one year. The ability to spend that money is also heavily restricted by mandatory congressional notifica tions, making it exceedingly difficult to reallocate money to address emergent circumstances. The military must also document ev ery action it undertakes (personnel re assignments, trainings, operations, etc.), and this has led to a cumber some process known as oficios. An ofi cio is more than just an operations or der or equivalent. It is the authoriza tion to conduct any event with the partner nation and is often granted only at general-officer level. All partner training in Guatemala is authorized by the country’s Chief of Defense, Guatemala’s equivalent of the United States’ Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This means that train ing requests need to be submitted for coordination 30-45 days ahead of time to give the process time to work. Each country will have its own nuanc es like this that detachment commanders must be aware of and work within local concerns. After accounting for the various forms of friction inherent in the environ ment, the bottom line is that the desired capabilities for the partner na tion outlined in the SCET or FMS case need to be developed in a sustainable manner. The detachment commander should ensure that training is designed to develop a cadre of qualified train ers and that the advising component of the mission is focused on improving the host-nation systems. Success means that the team’s pres ence is no longer required by the part ner nation. This requires the detach ment commander to value qualitative measures more so than in a tradition al unit. It does not matter how many soldiers you train. It matters that you trained the right people who have the correct rank and position in the part ner military to subsequently train their own replacements. This is the best way to develop interoperability and sustained capabilities for future coalition operations. A great example of this is driver’straining for motorized counternarcot ics units in Guatemala. Initially the SATMO team focused on training the actual drivers; however, the team quickly noticed a trend in the partner nation’s requests to train more and more drivers. Upon closer investigation, the team learned that the drivers were all short-term enlistees who could essentially walk off the job; soldiers leveraged their newly learned driving skills for commercial driving jobs, creating an immediate shortage of trained drivers in the unit. The team adapted to this by creating a master driver’s program focused on training career NCOs how to safely conduct basic and advanced driver’straining courses. This placed the onus on training end-level users in the Gua temalan military while reducing the training audience to a smaller, more mature cadre. This allowed American advisers to focus on the quality of the training rather than quantitative tar gets. Takeaway An assignment to SATMO is inherently different from the typical experiences an officer acquires on a conventional track, but it is a valuable broadening assignment. It forces officers to work in an environment they might not nor mally be comfortable in and learn to operate with less supervision than they might be used to. It provides an experience in the joint and interagency environment and helps officers better see how the embassy team supports a holistic whole-of-government approach in a situation where DoD is not the lead agency. It provides the opportunity for officers to serve their country and make a dif ference in ways they previously never imagined. MAJ Mike Kiser is the operations officer for 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, Fort Riley, KS. Previous assign ments include detachment command er, Security Assistance Team Guatemala, Guatemala City, Guatemala; assistant professor, U. S. Military Academy, West Point, NY; troop commander, 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, Fort Hood, TX; and platoon leader, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, Republic of Korea. MAJ Kiser’s military schools include the Armor Officer Basic Course, Scout-Platoon Leader’s Course, Maneuver Captain’s Career Course, Cavalry Leader’s Course and Command and General Staff College. He has a bachelor’s of arts degree in political science and religion from Gettysburg College and a master’s of arts degree in history from Boston College. Figure 2. U. S. SATMO team members train host-nation NCOs how to safely conduct basic and advanced driver’straining courses. (U. S. Army photo by MAJ Mike Kiser) Acronym Quick-Scan AIT – advanced individual training COCOM – combatant command DoD – Department of Defense FMS – foreign military sales GCC – geographic combatant command IET – initial-entry training MiTT – military transition team MOS – military-occupation specialty NCO – noncommissioned officer OSC – Office of Security Cooperation RSO – regional security office SATMO – Security Assistance Training Management Organization SCET – security-cooperation education and training SFAB – security-force-assistance brigade TAFT – technical assistance, fielding and training USASAC – U. S. Army Security Assistance Command