Originally posted by i am herdman:
Originally posted by dave:
Originally posted by i am herdman:
Not unusual to see a Seal Team, Army Special Forces team, Army Ranger team, etc. with an embedded Air Force combat controllers, PJ's etc.
Where do green beret's fit into the mix now in the military. I know that seal teams and the elite teams all have their specialties. I read the book "Horse Soldiers" and it was a good story about green berets in the early days of the Afghan war weeks after 9-11.
Green Berets are Army special forces. Delta(the street name for the group)is the elite of the Green Berets. Unconventional warfare is their specialty.
Green Berets are very highly trained and can do a lot of things. Everything from counter terrorism, counter insurgency, go behind enemy lines to train local forces(they are the best at this), and they can do small team infantry tactics, Very highly trained. Language experts, medical experts, explosive experts, communication experts make up each Alpha team.
IMO, probably the best well rounded troops as they are pretty much good at everything. You have to be an E5 or above to be on a A team. So these guys have already been in other units for awhile. Their tab is above the Ranger tab if that tells you how good these guys are.
Put it this way I am friends with a guy that wears that cap and he was D1 college wrestler, also played college football. Has a degree in English, can speak Arabic well enough, is an explosives expert, and spent several deployments in the sand box knocking on doors. He has been assigned several times to help train seals with infantry tactics. That's what they do.
This post was edited on 12/31 5:08 PM by i am herdman
To add on - Green Berets main mission is Irregular Warfare, not unconventional, although the lines blur easily. Irregular warfare is the act of building an army to overthrow a government or dictator or simply creating a sympathetic/friendly force in a hostile area/country. An ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha, a 12 man team), will live and work in a denied area or semi-permissive area. Denied areas would be something like Iran or N. Korea, someplace we are absolutely not supposed to be. An ODA wouldn't have a trace of America on it. The clothes would be local, weapons and ammo would be Russian or Israeli, local language would be used... The nearest support element would be in the semi-permissive area where they can send food, supplies, whatever, through rat lines to the ODA. Rat lines would be a chain of locals who are sympathetic to our cause or willing to look the other way for some cash. The chain would start with us putting money, guns, meds, in a few giant bags of rice (for example). One guy would load it into a car and drive it to a parking lot somewhere and walk away. Another guy would grab the car and drive it to a farm. The farmer would load the rice onto a couple donkeys and walk them to the ODA. A rat line will cross physical borders in order to get items to the ODA. Rat lines are only limited to your imagination and used because we can't air drop into a denied area.
Inside that denied area the ODA will link up with a guerrilla force (G-force), that opposes the local government or dictator and try to befriend it. Like Herdman says, every member of an ODA has a specially so the medics will offer to treat the G's and their family, the weapons sergeants will give guns to the Gs and teach them SUTs, Small Unit Tactics, and how to set up a protective perimeter, stuff like that. The team leader tries to earn the trust of the G Chief, the leader of the Gs. It takes allot of money, time and effort to create this relationship but eventually the team leader will convince the G chief to let us train his group because we want the same thing he does, only we can make it happen. Long story short a 12 man ODA trains 100 Gs. Those 100 train a thousand...pretty soon you have an army. That's the very basics of IR.
In the recent wars IR got put on the back burner for UW. There was more need for door kickers than anything else. Every ODA has a specialty. One is direct action, meaning door kickers/room clearing. One is HALO, one is mountain warfare, one is scuba, one is mobility which is vehicle heavy. In the two wars all Army SF became direct action, basically hunting high value targets which is mostly CAGs job. ODAs, besides CAG is the only SF that has language requirements. That and their overall mission is what makes Green Berets the most rounded as Herdman stated.
CAG (Delta), isn't Green Berets although their ranks are filled with former GB's. CAG has it's own selection process that is near impossible. A point of pride for some of you is that that selection is done right here in WV. You don't have to be a Ranger or SF to try out for CAG, that's a common misconception. You can be a mechanic as long as you have certain test and language scores. CAG is pure death, the selection process and follow on Operator Course has around a 70% fail rate, each. CAG, also referred to as JSOC, is amazing. It was said once that if a CAG operator wasn't a CAG operator he would be an Astronaut. They are very special types of people and their mission is bad ass. At Bragg they have an underground area that can load up a C130. A team and it's equipment can load underground and the bird can taxi right from there. No satellite will pick it up so there's less chance of a comprised mission. They'll have a Blackhawk rotating is blades on a shooting range so they can practice firing and make notes and corrections about how the rotating winds effect a round shot down range. Their equipment is light years ahead of any other SF group. If a GB has a SATCOM unit the size of half a shoe box, CAG will have one smaller than a cell phone. And it works better, too. They just do, practice and think of ways to make themselves beyond deadly. These are the guys who usually do the missions SEALs get creating for.
MARSOC had a short life. The Marines didn't have a foot in the USASOC door so they created MARSOC as their special forces. Recon, Force Recon, MEU have SF capabilities but aren't considered SF, kinda like Rangers. The weird thing about MARSOC was that it's teams were made up of a combination of Recon/Force Recon Marines and regular infantry Marines. There wasn't a selection process or operator course, they were just thrown together and told they were now SF and fell under USASOC. The Recon and Force Recon guys have a grueling training regimen to be fully implemented into those units, I believe it's a two year process and I know they can't go the jump school before they complete that process. Anyway, MARSOC mixed these guys together and they till did a great job. I think very highly of Marines, not just the elite ones. MARSOC is getting the ax due to the cutbacks. USASOC units maintain a high level of training and readiness so their budget is extremely high compared to conventional units. MARSOC was just too new and not fully equipped yet. It was just a bad time to implement something that large when the military as a whole is taking huge cuts.
I'm pretty hard on SEALs. I've just seen them F up too much. They are some tough guys but their training is crap. I think it stems from being Navy to begin with, meaning they don't know the infantry basics even an Army cook knows. They didn't have that during their basic training. They are great at the UW thing. Their snipers are shit hot, their door kickers are sheer precision, but not every mission or every aspect of a mission is unconventional. That door kicking team needs to drive through a hostile city to get to its objective. If they run into an ambush along that route it's straight up, loud, out in the open conventional fighting from that point on. That's where SEALs get bogged down if they're out on their own. SEALs operate in very small teams so they're not built to react to an ambush, or use any basic infantry techniques to begin with. In training (on foot), they practice a backwards leap frog tactic if they come in contact with an enemy force. One guy will unleash a barrage or bullets and fall back so many meters, the next guy will do the same and fall back. So on and so forth. This gives a show of force to the enemy, making the team look like a larger element than it is, while the team falls back to a rally point and can un-ass the area. This doesn't work too well in a city or with vehicles so SEALs had to learn and adjust their doctrine which was a painfully slow process. I think SEALs mission should have been more recon oriented instead of direct action but every commander in USASOC is fighting for their piece of the cool guy pie so it is what it is.
This post was edited on 1/2 7:29 PM by HerdFan76
