Or almost ready to go. As previously noted, one of SF's problems was that many of the generation that emerged from Vietnam, or who came into the force after Vietnam, failed to attain the high levels of professionalism expected of men who make up a force that calls itself elite. In Vietnam, they'd operated out on the end of a string without much supervision. Others — recruited after the Army drawdown in the '70s — were not the best group of men to begin with. Some of them had simply been looking for greater freedom and intrigue than they could get in conventional units, and had found their way into SF. Meanwhile, back then SF did not give a strong enough professional orientation to its younger officers. As a consequence, some of them picked up 'outsider' attitudes, simply because that was what was in the air.
On the other side of the coin, it was hard for them to get promoted, and that also didn't help their attitude any. Normally, if you were good, you moved through key positions in a variety of conventional units. Your performance and potential were recognized by people who counted, and in due course you were selected for promotion and for attendance at Leavenworth and later the War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or one of the other high-level service schools. Promotion and selection boards were composed exclusively of officers with conventional backgrounds.
Back in the '70s and the early '80s, however, most officers were dead-ended in Special Forces. The personnel assignment people in Washington were content to drop them there and 'forget' about them. In many ways, assignment to SF was career suicide, and so it was small wonder that some officers just figured: To hell with it. Such people simply reinforced the perception that special operators were not 'real' Army.
All of this came to a head soon after the passage of Nunn-Cohen, during Jim Guest's tenure as head of the Special Warfare Center and School. The four-star TRADOC commander sent Guest the following message: 'I'm tired of having to apologize for Special Forces,' he announced in no uncertain terms. 'I am tired of their reputation. I am tired of having to deal with their lack of professionalism. Are they in the Army or not?
'If you don't do something about this, I am going to relieve you. I will run you out of the Army.'
Jim Guest says:
So that caught my attention. That's when I realized that we couldn't let things go on the old way, and that's when we started saying, 'Hey, we can't mess around any longer outside the Army system; we've got to do things inside it. We've got to make ourselves more knowledgeable of it. That means, first of all, that we've got to convince the senior generals that we are professionals, that we are capable of doing special missions, and that we're not just a camp of thugs.'
At the same time, we started retiring the soldiers who did not or could not meet the new standards, or who refused to meet them. Some looked at the future and decided that they did not want to be in a more structured force.
After that, we raised the standards. We wanted smarter people, so we established an IQ level — a high one. If you wanted to come into Special Forces, you had to have an IQ of at least 120.
Then we had to do something about training.
In those days, when someone volunteered for Special Forces and was chosen to take the Q Course, he received a permanent change of station to Fort Bragg. In other words, he was ours. If he dropped out, something had to be found for him at Fort Bragg. This caused problems: We had more washouts than people who made the grade, and we had to find places for all those people at Bragg. Second, we had a lot of money invested in these folks. We needed to find a way to reduce the initial investment while making sure we let the good ones come through. Finally, we were being used by a lot of people who simply wanted a ticket into the 82nd Airborne Division or somewhere else at Bragg, so they would volunteer for Special Forces and then immediately drop out of the training, some by voluntarily terminating themselves, some by just flunking it somewhere along the line. That had to stop.
What we did was persuade General Vuono, the Army Chief of Staff, to institute a new selection and assessment program that would come in before the Q Course. We'd recruit the new people, then they'd sign up and come to Bragg TDY (temporarily, not permanently) and go through a two-meek selection drill that would pinpoint those men who could operate on their own but could also subject themselves to a team for a mission. 'Our idea,' as we explained to the Chief of Staff, 'is to give them zero training — absolutely none. We want to get them out there and make them as uncomfortable as we can, put them through situations that are as ambivalent as we can make them, and stress them as much as they can bear. Then we want them to make a choice. Do I really want to be Special Forces or not?'
The course we came up with was designed by one of the men who had put together the selection course for our top special missions units. The volunteers were always in unbalanced situations. They never knew what to expect. They never knew what was going to happen to them. They'd think they were stopping for a meal break, and would get a mission two minutes before they were going to eat. 'Move. Report here,'which might mean five miles of hard marching with heavy rucksacks.
We never told them where or why or how far they were going. We never said, 'You're going from here, and you'll end up over here. 'Only, 'You start here and go in that direction.' Then they'd march until they met somebody else, who'd send them on another leg of the journey.
People who can't deal with ambiguous situations will fall out when they're out there alone and confused in the country, particularly when we've got them under physical stress.
We didn't harass them, the way they do at places like Jump School. We didn't have to. Sure, one morning we gave them push-ups and things like that, just to show them, 'yes, we can do that to you if we want to. But that's not how we're going to do it. We're going to tell you what we want you to do and then see if you attempt to do it.'
At the end of the course, we had a thirty-mile forced march, and that pretty well tested them out. We had people who quit just doing that — both officers and NCOs.
Some men we flunked. Some of them could do everything we asked for physically, but we took them, out for psychological reasons. Some men were loners and could not handle the stress of operating in a team.
We were looking for solid men of character and integrity, motivated for all the right reasons — men of maturity and sound judgment, with the inner strength to do whatever was required under all conditions and circumstances, and who did not have to be 'stroked' to do their best.
It worked. We truly began to get the very best men. On top of that, we'd begun indoctrinating them into Special Forces right up front. They were paying a price to be in Special Forces. They'd made a real investment, and it was going to mean something to them. The result was that we were able to fill our slots with quality replacements, who were soon recognized by the Army by receiving promotions faster than their peers in the conventional Army did.
Next, we rebuilt and upgraded our training facilities at Camp MacKall (adjacent to Fort Bragg), where we did the Q Course and some of the other courses. During World War II, the Army had trained nearly all of their airborne units there, but everything was left over from then — Navy Quonset huts, an old mess hall, and a latrine. We needed a new sewage and water system, new buildings, and new training facilities; and General Thurman made sure we got all this when he was TRADOC commander.
As for integrating an awareness of special operations into the service schools, such as the infantry school at Benning or the armor school at Knox, and at the advanced courses at Leavenworth or the War College, not as much has been done there. I don't see in their curriculum any focus on Special Forces, Civil Affairs,
