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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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From the Military Times 9/2021: The future of special operations may look a lot different than the GWOT aesthetic we’ve come to know

The article is old at this point, but I've seen recent discussion about it in various Twitter/YouTube areas and while that discussion was definitely one-sided, it was very much culture war.

The days of the burly, bearded dude in Oakleys as the face of special operations might be waning. Special operations forces need a different focus, the director of strategy, plans and policy for Special Operations Command Central said Monday

...

This following section got attention interpreted as saying that SOCOM was going to prioritize diversity hiring over meritocratic hiring

The other part could reflect SOCOM’s recent commitment to diversity and inclusion, which most notably, aims to recruit more women and minorities into SOF organizations.

“... but I think it is difficult for them to promote and bring on talent that looks different than them,” Crombe said of existing leadership, who came up not only in the time of the burly, bearded operator, but in a time where combat deployments meant more than any other measure of skill or leadership.

When someone has taken time out of the deployment churn to further their education or take a position outside the prescribed pipeline, “it just, it doesn’t compute somehow in these [selection and promotion] boards,” she said.

...

Emphasis added below, has been interpreted in the context of SOCOM as meaning people dying.

To do that, SOCOM will have to put people it wouldn’t normally select into leadership positions, but also learn to be okay with the results if it doesn’t all go smoothly.

“And I think that that’s probably the biggest diverse takeaway,” Haver said. “It’s going to look different than probably a lot of people are comfortable with, and we’re going to have to be uncomfortable moving forward. The goodness and that is that it’s a team effort.”

The article does a bad job of contextualizing it, but SOCOM historically was not just direct-action combatants. US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) got their start as the eponymous "military advisors" working with and training various US friendly guerilla groups or US friendly governments dealing with US unfriendly guerillas/rebellions across Asia and South America. During GWOT (global war on terror), something like extracting/apprehending intelligence targets became much more common1 and the need for highly trained door kickers to do that work grew. In a post-GWOT environment, there could be an argument for going back to roots, deemphasizing combat experience and emphasizing ability to integrate with local forces but this is not that.

It's notable that the main thrust of the article is that what has been considered one of the more meritocratic parts of the military will need to go the DEI route and seems to try to caveat that any potential reductions in effectiveness are acceptable costs. This in the background of a looming recruitment crisis.

1: linking only as a point of reference on operational tempo, rest of that story is a whole different iceberg. The related increase in operational tempo at the bottom of the pyramid and pulling in other MOSs to meet demands is where the "basically infantry" meme comes from.

Maybe this is good (actually, hear me out).

There is definitely a place for the 6'5", 300lb psychopath with a 140IQ who can skydive into a warzone, storm a compound, and save the proverbial princess/kill Osama Bin Laden.

That is some version of "most scariest war fighter imaginable".

But there might be another version of "scariest warfighter imaginable" that looks more like a stinky overweight hacker who can build anything out of scraps and could take the bus into conflict zone and demo a bridge using materials he can find at the grocery store. Or who can build improvised drones out of things at the toystore.

I think there is a place for elite hackers in the military, too. Having known what some of the military's hackers look like, they aren't anywhere close right now. It seems like Tier1 guys get a lot of leeway in the way they want to work, so long as they provide the results that are asked of them.

I think the CIA is sortof kindof trying to fill this role right now, but unfortunately the problem is that the stinky annoying autistic genius hackers I'm talking about would never, ever, ever pass the interview.

None of this should come at the expense of the 6'5" pipe hitters. We should have both.

The overweight part and other medical issues can complicate things pretty quickly. But it's not like the military community is allergic to weird nerds. Mike Vining joined the Army to do two things, climb mountains and play with explosives and he ended up a founding member of Delta. Not the typical image of an operator operating operationally at least.

I'm sure a lot of people knew this but the bottom left picture instantly made it obvious to me that Jeffrey Donovan's character in Sicario and Soldado is based on Mike Vining.

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