Who Gets a Brown Beret? Rethinking Assignments to the Security Force Assistance Brigades
Jon Tishman | June 29, 2020
During planning for what became Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti in 1994, a prescient conversation occurred between planners from United States Atlantic Command and members of the Department of Justice. Despite establishing the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program under the Department of Justice to train a new Haitian police force, when told of how the political-military plan envisioned the department’s execution of the operation, the Justice representative stated that the department “could not handle the mission.†At the last minute, an Army infantry battalion was handed the responsibility to train, advise, and assist a newly created Haitian police force. This foreshadowed what would become the standard during America’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—infantry and other combat arms units converted to advisors in an ad hoc fashion.
That would begin to change with the US Army’s new security force assistance brigades (SFABs), which are designed to provide conventional force training, advice, and assistance to foreign security forces. To that end, SFAB advisors are formed into twelve-soldier teams, designed to parallel the skills of a battalion and higher staff, with specialists in combat operations and support functions. This diverse team is designed to survive on its own, working in full partnership with a foreign battalion or brigade’s leadership dispersed throughout the battlefield without US support while providing critical linkage back to the joint force for partner-nation battle tracking, combat employment, allocation of supporting artillery and aircraft. The team also conducts assessments of the partner force’s capability to adjust US policy goals in the region.
https://mwi.usma.edu/gets-brown-beret-rethinking-assignments-security-force-assistance-brigades/
