Under the Knife
Lieutenant Colonel William S. Whitesel, U.S. Army; and Major Robert F. Greene, U.S. Army
“The knives are out, and they are coming for you.”
Introduction
These were the concluding words of General Charles Flynn, Commander of the U.S. Army Pacific Command, in a conversation with the authors during his recent visit to Kathmandu, Nepal. We had just finished a meeting with the Nepali President, Prime Minister, and Army Chief, and were waiting for the start of General Flynn’s speaking engagement with a collection of retired military leaders, security sector journalists, and academics. General Flynn was reflecting on his time as the Army G357 and explaining the budget discussion taking place inside the Pentagon to the Foreign Area Officers (FAOs), Country Team members, and USARPAC Staff.
In particular, he recounted the avaricious looks from Army Staff budget wizards as they considered the extensive training pipeline afforded to FAO trainees. In addition to the high financial cost of this experience, General Flynn focused on the length of time that FAO trainees are out of employable circulation as a substantial opportunity cost.
To avoid falling under the bureaucratic knives we face in an era of constricting budgets, this article seeks to provide an alternative approach to building a FAO that retains the best features of our outstanding training while minimizing the cost. We understand that the proposals below are controversial, but if we do not change with the times, we risk the entirety of the branch. The knives, after all, are out.
The Current Situation
DA PAM 600-3 explains the competencies that should characterize FAOs: “cross-cultural capabilities, interpersonal communications, language skills, interagency integration and regional political-military expertise.” Our Army FAO training pipeline consists of three phases, each averaging one year, designed to lay the foundation for a career leveraging these skills: language training that takes an officer from zero to 2R/2L on the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) in their assigned language, an in-region immersive cultural experience, and completion of a graduate degree with a focus on the region of assignment. These three elements produce an officer with linguistic, cultural, and academic expertise in their area of concentration, ready to fill Country Team, COCOM/Component Staff, and the myriad other FAO assignments across the interagency. However, the process does take three years to complete, and incurs three PCS moves, an extended TDY (to attend satellite Intermediate Level Education -- ILE), and a shorter TDY (for JFAOC Phase 1).
When a FAO is fully qualified, there remains a substantial training bill to be paid, depending on the first assignment. Joint Military Attaché School (JMAS) for all attaché jobs, plus Defense Security Cooperation School (DSCU) training for all security cooperation jobs (or both, for SDO billets). An average first tour FAO officer requires roughly four years of training before taking a job. We all love making fun of bean counters in the Pentagon, but this is a real and substantial cost. Especially given that FAOs can, and often do, retire at either at twenty years of service (or sooner), sometimes only allowing for only one or two FAO assignments, as return on this large investment.
How can we reduce this time cost, while continuing to build the competencies of linguistic, cultural, and academic expertise that are the key skills of our branch? We will start with a proposal for adjusting the graduate school experience, and then look at possible efficiencies available in the language and culture elements.
Academic Expertise
Graduate school is both a core element of FAO expertise and credibility and a key recruiting tool for bringing bright and ambitious officers into our branch. Without it we will be ineffective and struggle to fill our ranks. However, the current system is immensely distributed and highly inefficient. Each officer follows a distinct path, and none benefit from a structured sequence of admissions that could reduce friction. Instead of allowing FAOs to choose from the entire scope of American academia, we propose that all FAOs follow in-region/language training with a PCS to Washington DC to complete a graduate degree in the National Capital Region (NCR). The NCR includes many of the best international affairs graduate schools in the country, in addition to being close enough to a satellite ILE location to allow officers to attend without incurring the full per diem costs of this three-month TDY. Officers can select from a full range of low, medium, and high-cost schools (depending on their ACS award) and focus on either regional studies or international relations (or, ideally, both) at a range of universities.
Centralizing graduate schools to the NCR has the added benefit of allowing for mentorship of this new group and opens the possibility of finding employment opportunities, slightly mitigating the concerns of Army leaders over unused human resources. Mentorship from the collective FAO expertise resident throughout the NCR – at the Pentagon, at DIA, at State – could be leveraged to provide a FAO an on-boarding process throughout the graduate school year that could replace (or at a minimum, augment) JFAOC Phase 1. Additionally, this group of FAOs could be put to work. Many civilian graduate school students are working in addition to going to school – there is no good reason that our active-duty military students could not work as well.
Such employment should be both minimal, compared to the grind of normal NCR staff work, and tailored to augment rather than distract from graduate studies. Consider them a mid-career brain trust of officers with the bandwidth to think carefully and strategically about large problems, rather than as a pool of slide editors for the Joint Staff, and you will be adding to their academic expertise and experience rather than detracting from it. Obviously, such a pool of field grades will be immensely attractive to Pentagon staffers seeking employable talent – FAO Proponent would have to carefully guard this human resource, under the authority of the Army G357. Such work should be closer to 25% than 50% employment – like the part-time work that other graduate students undertake.
Language and Culture
The easiest time savings would come from combining the Language and Cultural elements of our training: FAO trainees should conduct language training and in-region travel simultaneously. Specifically, they must move to a country in their region of assignment (either in or outside the ICASS pool, depending on country-specific considerations), contract with a language school that is sufficiently flexible to accommodate protracted periods of absence as the trainee travels throughout the region, and execute this combined program of instruction with the simultaneous goal of language proficiency and broad cultural expertise.
There are additional savings associated with such a step. This would remove the requirement for FAO involvement with the DoD’s language centers at Monterey and in Washington DC. As effective as these centers have been in training people to the established standard, we retrofitted them to our requirements, rather than building them to purpose. Under the current system, we select officers to grow into independent and self-sufficient experts in foreign lands but station them in the U.S. for 6-18 months and have them progress through an established curriculum – often alongside first-term junior enlisted personnel who will never see the inside of an embassy. There is a better way that is happily also faster.
Another consideration on language: we should modify the initial entry training standard from 2R/2L to 1+R/1+L/1+S. Such a move better reflects the reality of FAO language requirements – most of our foreign partners speak our language far better than we will ever speak theirs – and it also includes speaking as a metric. Speaking is the most important skill for all FAOs – and the fact that we do not already require demonstrated competence in this modality is an indictment of the appropriateness of our language training program.
Dealing with the Exceptional
There are many valid criticisms to this approach, some of which we attempt to deal with here. First, there are assignments where language is truly mission-essential. Mandarin-speaking posts come to mind as particularly difficult to fill with under-trained linguists. This is, however, the exception rather than the rule. As a result, we can address it on a case-by-case basis. We can provide individualized training for required languages when necessary. Rather than build our entire pipeline around the handful of assignments that require advanced language skills, it is far more efficient to tie language training to those specific assignments.
Second, there are dozens of elite graduate schools that our FAOs could attend outside the NCR. By limiting our choices to schools in and around the capital, we reduce the diversity of thought and experience provided by schools elsewhere, remove a potential recruitment tool for particularly gifted FAOs, and reduce the extent to which FAOs in such schools provide a perspective on the military from which U.S. academic communities benefit. As elsewhere, we can and should make the new FAO training pipeline sufficiently flexible that we can support exceptional students in their desire to attend top-tier schools.
However, we need to be honest about which schools truly constitute the top tier. There are a great many schools in use among current FAO graduate students that, while good schools, are chosen more for their proximity to home and family than for their academic excellence. Under the current system, there is no reason why proximity to home should not factor prominently in a FAO trainee’s decision; but in the current budgetary environment, the needs of the branch must be prioritized. Limiting out-of-NCR schools to a total of 10% of allocations and requiring FAO Proponent approval for school selection should ensure that we prioritize only the most elite schools for this selective opportunity.
Third, we have ignored the frequent IRT experiences that involve attending a partnered staff college. It is more realistic to accept that some IRT will be dominated by a staff college, which adds cost and time to the pipeline and to make the obvious cut elsewhere in the pipeline to reduce cost. That is, foreign staff college graduates should not attend Satellite ILE. FAOs are extremely unlikely to ever conduct the Military Decision Making Process on a staff; therefore it is inappropriate that many of them spend extra time learning the process twice.
Fourth, we do not touch on the other unique IRT training programs, like the Marshall Center in Germany for 48Es. We should reserve such exceptions for only our most exceptional officers, by reducing the number of participants to a competitively selected 10% of trainees.
Fifth, we complain about the regimented nature of the current language pipeline, and then call for a more-regimented graduate school process. While FAO should select for officers capable of navigating such uncertainty, it is better to do so during the foreign language/in-region training process than in the U.S.-based graduate school components of our training. After all, the uncertainty FAOs are required to navigate most often in their careers is overseas, not in the U.S.
A Final Recommendation
A final recommendation to maximize the efficiency of this approach is to require a set order to the two elements of training. First, graduate school and NCR-based experiences, followed by regional training. This front-loading of the NCR experience allows for two things of note. First, it would create a routine and regularized process that our currently scattershot approach could plan around. Assigning Satellite ILE slots, forecasting NCR graduate school admissions numbers, and planning for overseas assignments would all be simplified by a standardized process. While such a change would complicate accession into the branch, especially given the quarterly VTIP process and the biannual admissions cycle of most universities, the benefits would likely outweigh the costs.
Second, it gives senior FAOs an opportunity to assess the maturity of new FAO trainees and their fitness for service overseas. While the selection process does an excellent job of bringing high-quality candidates to the branch, we have all heard of or witnessed first-hand officers who fail to complete the training process due to lapses of judgment or maturity. It is better for the branch, and better for the Army, if our training pipeline eliminates such officers prior to them being sent overseas with reduced oversight and increased reputational and financial risks for the Army of a badly-behaved trainee.
One more exception to consider…
As we explore changes to our model, we should also consider a model that is even more forward- leaning: combining language, IRT, and graduate school into a single PCS move overseas. Beginning with Satellite ILE and an NCR-based FAO overview/introduction, trainees in this model would then PCS overseas to a country to undertake a combined language/IRT year, followed by graduate school in the target language. Such an approach to FAO training is very high reward – as it would provide an unparalleled degree of linguistic and cultural expertise with a unique academic perspective that would benefit the force. However, it is also high risk -- that us a very long time to send someone out into the wilderness without oversight. But for the right officers, and in the right regions/countries, however, it could be a very efficient and effective way to train new FAOs.
Conclusion
We have the best FAO recruitment, selection, and training process in the joint force – it is the model to which all other services rightly look for inspiration. Changing the structure should only be undertaken if necessary and with great care. Our proposal attempts to drill down to the essence of what makes our training so effective and then to build out a structure that captures that essence with the greatest efficiency possible. We recommend these changes in part because of the budgetary environment we face, but also because healthy organizations are self-critical and able to adapt to changing circumstances. As a branch, we have a long history of successfully adjusting to the needs of the Army. We think that adoption of the proposals we outline above can be one more example of such successful adaptation. It is important to recognize that the branch is under threat, and if we do not make necessary changes ourselves that they will be made on our behalf by outsiders who have far less understanding of the core elements of our FAO training pipeline.
About the Authors
Lieutenant Colonel Whitesel currently serves as the South Asia Country Director at the National Security Council, having recently returned from Nepal, where he served as the SDO/DATT. Formerly an Army Aviation officer, he is now an INDO-PACOM FAO. As a FAO, he has held assignments in Bangladesh, Nepal, and the National Capital Region. He completed his Master’s at the Elliot School of the George Washington University, and speaks Hindi and Urdu.
Major Greene currently serves as the Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Nepal. Formerly an Armor and Cavalry officer, he is now an INDO-PACOM FAO. As a FAO, MAJ Greene has held assignments in Singapore, Hawaii and Nepal. He completed his Master’s at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and speaks Indonesian and Malay.