The United States Army Special Forces faces a growing crisis that threatens the effectiveness of America’s elite military units. The drive to maintain special operations forces (SOF) numbers through direct recruitment programs has led to concerning patterns of casualties and reduced operational effectiveness, highlighting the dangers of shortcuts in developing elite warriors. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of generalization in the numbers that follow, because of the classified nature of Special Operations in general, but the trend is there.
The Traditional Path
Historically, becoming a Special Forces operator involved a carefully structured progression. Candidates typically served 3-5 years in conventional military units before applying to Special Forces training. This traditional pathway provided several crucial elements.
Older candidates tended to have developed their own knowledge of what physical training and development strategies worked best for them, more formulaic Army methods aside. This enabled them to understand how their bodies reacted to physical stress, which usually lowered the possibility of physical injuries. It also allowed a “leveling-off” in a soldier’s physical maturation, which also helped reduce injuries.
This also allowed the SF candidate to gain valuable experience in stress management, leadership, and technical skills. Likewise, the experience gained as a “regular” soldier provided a deeper understanding of military psychology and culture, providing valuable experience in how operations are typically run, with a “bottom-up” view that would offer the candidate vital experience in understanding the challenges they would face when isolated on operations.
The resulting teams of “Operators” were very well situated to a wide array of “unconventional” tasks, ranging from “deep” reconnaissance, to what is now termed “direct action missions”, to embedding as liaison teams with Coalition units during Operation Desert Storm, to acting in their original mission, by training “partner nation” forces, either from scratch or by refining their existing training.
In this older model, the candidate with three to five years of experience before entering Special Forces also allowed the members of the “Operational Detachment Alpha” (ODA) teams (the famous “A-Teams”) to have both a primary Military Occupational Specialty coming in through the door, but would also allow for them having acquired “side” experience, through which they could obtain secondary or “alternate” specialty training in diverse and unrelated field, meaning that a 12-man ODA actually had up to twenty-four (or more) technical specialties at hand, including backups, within their team.
The Rush to Fill Ranks
Following the 9/11 attacks, the demands on special operations units throughout the United States military structure led to a serious manpower shortage, as – despite (if not “because of”) battlefield successes – the existing special forces units quickly began to experience manning shortages, as casualties mounted and operational teams were exhausted by the rapid pace of operations. This would lead to the creation of programs to rapidly bring in fresh recruits to fill the gaps.
In the US Army’s case, this became the “18X (Special Forces Candidate)” program, allowing civilians to directly enlist into Special Forces training. The idea was that a candidate who met all the basic educational and fitness requirements for Army Special Forces could be enlisted and “fast-tracked” to SF training, running through Army Basic Training, A.I.T., then on to parachute training, before being sent to the actual Special Forces training. The result was physcally fit, highly motivated operators, who had “checked off” all the requisite boxes, but who lacked the depth of experience of those who had come before them. The result was something more akin to “elite assault infantry”, something more akin to the US Army Rangers, rather than “Special Forces”.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of the Rangers – but that concept is not the same thing as Army Special Forces…What follows is by no means an indictment of the candidates themselves, but of the wider Army command structure, who should have known better.
While the 18X program helped meet the immediate personnel needs for Army Special Forces, they have revealed some serious problems:
- Physical Casualties
– Higher rates of training injuries
– Increased long-term physical damage
– More frequent stress fractures
– Earlier career-ending injuries - Psychological Impact
– Elevated PTSD rates
– Higher frequency of “burnout”
– Reduced stress tolerance
– Shorter operational careers - Operational Limitations
– Decreased mission flexibility
– Limited tactical understanding
– Reduced cross-unit coordination
– Compromised team effectiveness
The Experience Gap
As noted above, veterans of conventional units brought crucial life experiences into their Special Forces careers that direct-enlistment recruits simply lack, because they have not had the time to learn and experience those life lessons that their predecessors had.
Going straight from training to high-intensity “operational” status is functionally sending out people who know how to pull a trigger, not someone who understands the nuances of how to react to their surroundings, nor how to deal with the stresses of everything going completely wrong at the first shots. Special Forces have to be able to switch instantly from shooting people, to working with survivors in the immediate area, as well as how to calmly and rationally coordinate with foreign military and police units in the aftermath, whether those are from the country the SF team is operating in, or from allied nations. These functions require both maturity and humility, which can only be developed over time – time that the 18X program cannot impart.
The Historical Record
The 77th Infantry Division’s World War 2 experience provides a damning historical precedent that the Army seemingly ignored when creating the 18X program. The 77th’s success – with its higher average age of 35 and consequently more mature decision-making abilities – demonstrated clear advantages in the complex, high-intensity combat of the Pacific theater. Despite facing some of the war’s most challenging battlefield conditions, the division’s older, more experienced from civilian life soldiers generally suffered lower casualty rates than younger-aged units in the same actions.
This historical data – especially in light of the history of Special Forces operations from the 1950’s to the 1990’s – should have served as a clear warning against the 18X program’s entire premise. If older, more experienced soldiers performed better in conventional warfare, it follows that rushing young, inexperienced recruits directly into the even more complex and demanding world of special operations would be problematic, at the very least. The Army had empirical evidence from the 77th, reinforced from Vietnam to Desert Storm, that maturity and life experience were crucial force multipliers in challenging combat environments, especially for Special Forces, yet chose to disregard these lessons when designing the 18X program. The resulting higher casualty rates among direct-entry special operations personnel represent a preventable tragedy.
Statistical Reality
Recent studies indicate troubling trends among direct-entry special operators. Over 75% of musculoskeletal injuries among Special Forces are preventable. Unfortunately, the reality is that data collection for these kinds of statistical studies is extremely hazy in quality.
The real story lies in the fact that the 18X program is still in force as an active recruitment tool, indicating that either the US Army is having serious problems attracting applicants to one of its premier “Tier 1” formations (which would not be surprising, given the Army’s well known recruiting woes), or that the 18X program still needs to run, in order to keep the numbers flowing in.
Neither offers a comforting picture.
The Cost of Shortcuts
The financial and operational costs of these programs are significant: Higher washout rates – whether from medical, emotional or psychological reasons – waste contentious budget monies, and make teams harder to form, train and deploy.
This also makes operational deployments much more expensive, overall, while limiting the capabilities of the units deployed, due a general lack of experience, and an increase in the requirements for already heavily strained support operations.
The whole combines into a toxic soup that lowers morale, degrades mission capabilities, and results in frantic attempts by inexperienced political leadership to find workaround solutions that, frankly, aren’t.
Conclusion
The United States desperately needs an effective special operations establishment. While highly capable at their missions, the Rangers are not suited to replace Army Special Forces. But Army SF is locked into a vicious cycle, where they need to maintain numbers for operations, but have serious problems (not all of their own making) with bringing in fresh candidates. That may change in the next few years, but there is little light in this tunnel.
The effectiveness of America’s special operations forces depends on finding the right balance between meeting personnel needs and maintaining the high standards that make these units elite…but, much more telling, is the need for coherent leadership at the top of both the military and civilian establishments.
The reality of history is that the regular military services have long detested the very idea of “elite” formations, despite their demonstrated capabilities. In the civilian quarter, the highly toxic nature of civilian politics in the United States means that few serious veterans want anything to do with the civilian leadership establishment in any way, leading to an increasingly wide divergence in understanding of what military forces require to operate, nor of their true capabilities.
There are no easy answers to this last problem, but something needs to be done to fix it, because there is an ogre lurking in the background, that no one wants to see come back into reality.
