PME for US Army Special Operations Forces

by Bradford Burris

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One way to educate United States Army Special Operators is by allowing organizational design and individual competencies to form the nucleus of a professional military education curriculum routinely evaluated against assessment variables such as the emerging strategic context, the requests of Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOC) or other customer units, and the feedback of deployed operators. This essay recommends an Army Special Operations Command-focused educational development process applicable to the career-long education and utilization of Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations professionals.

To make these recommendations, I consider why the organizational structure of the Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) should differ from that of their General Purpose Forces counterparts and identify the expected ARSOF mission set for the next twenty years as well as the professional competencies required to execute this expected mission set. I then offer a series of suggestions for how the recommended changes could be implemented.

Unlike the majority of academic thought papers that analyze and present data in a dry and mechanistic fashion, this essay presents several ideas for consideration utilizing the literary medium of fiction. The characters used to convey the ideas herein are figments of my imagination; any relationship to any actual former or future special operator is purely unintentional. What you take away from the following pages will depend on your desire to infer practical concepts from the nascent thoughts presented by members of the USASOC PME working group that, while it does not exist in reality, you will nonetheless find hard at work in the following paragraphs.

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Major Bradford M. Burris is an active duty Military Information Support Operations (or Psychological Operations) officer. He has served in various command and staff positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Major Burris earned a Master of Science in Defense Analysis at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. He currently serves as the Operations Officer of the 6th Military Information Support Operations Battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C.