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By Root 1793 0

operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Foreign internal defense and counterinsurgency, or COIN, are closely related. It is the business of working with other nations and other cultures to defeat insurgency. In my opinion, it is the single most important skill set of Army Special Forces. This unique ability to work “by, with, and through” another culture in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations is what makes the Green Beret the most essential warrior in our military today. The U.S. Army is the service component tasked with counterinsurgency, but that capability is a function of big Army’s ability to find and kill insurgents—a near-impossible task if the insurgents find refuge in the local population. Patrolling neighborhoods in Humvees and cordon-and-search tactics are not effective in defeating an insurgency. Perhaps this sells our conventional military presence a little short, but one thing is clear: The difficult business of rooting out a well-organized and well-financed insurgency cannot be done without the help of the local population. Orchestrating this help is the stock in trade of Special Forces.

The foreign-internal-defense module begins with lectures on the mechanics and infrastructure of an insurgency, and the role of the adviser in working with the local military and police forces in a foreign country. As with most Phase III officer training, the scenario is built around a planning exercise. In FID training, the exercise is to plan a Special Forces ODA deployment called JCET—joint/combined exchange training. In this scenario, the country is Ecuador and the insurgents are the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The same principles apply for a similar FID deployment to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Indonesia, or just about anywhere else when a friendly government is threatened by insurgents.

The first several days of the FID exercise are classroom intensive and focus on the specifics of planning and coordinating a JCET deployment. It begins with tasking and funding—who wants the training done and who pays for it. If the training is requested by the host nation, then the request for U.S. assistance is handled by the Department of State and the money comes through State from Title 22 funding. If the JCET was initiated by Special Forces with the objective of training a Special Forces ODA team, and was approved by the U.S. Special Operations Command, then the funds are taken from the military budget in the form of Title 10 funds. No matter where the money comes from, the ODA will deploy with the idea of training the host nation’s military or constabulary in military skills they can use to defend themselves against the insurgents. In the school planning scenario, the opposition is the FARC, one of the few remaining insurgencies with a Communist ideology, which has a narco-terrorist history. They are still active, with tentacles reaching into several South American nations, including Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.

“I was the assist detachment commander for the FID problem,” says Miguel Santos. “But we all work the problem as a team. The process is the same as for a strategic-reconnaissance or a direct-action mission. We get the tasking and begin to game out various courses of action. Each of these alternatives is examined for how it’ll work in practice and how it addresses the commander’s intent—his vision of the mission and the desired end state. We get pretty far down in the weeds of each one, building a task organization, analyzing the host nation’s requirements, planning logistics, building training plans, building timelines—that kind of thing. Once we work up several alternative plans, we decide as a team which course of action we think is best and run it by Major James, just like we would present it to our battalion commander.”

“OK, I’ll go with your course of action,” James tells OD 912 and the designated team leader, Captain Jim Toohey. Toohey is a tall, intelligent officer who came to the Q-Course from the Army Corps of Engineers. He and the rest of 912 are assembled in their team room at