Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact.
You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind.
These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; either they will form a resistance movement to whoever is in charge and become a proxy force for some other power, or they will simply replace politics with profit and convert to organised crime. Either way, the new government is faced with an ungovernable mess.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
These things sound like catalysts, but not as the fundamental reasons things were happening. Just look at history to see that violence was there before training, equipment and logistics were available.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible.
It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point.
>It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point.
You're making his by ignoring the fact that the Afghans were trained and armed by US to fight the Soviets. That training remains, just who they're fighting has changed.
The vast majority of Mujahedeen never underwent US training. Most of their small arms (those that didn't originally float in the always militant tribes) were provided by Pakistan and China.
Also, becoming a half competent combatant is not like getting a PhD, more a function of you surviving your first few encounters.
The world does not revolve around America, people were able to fight and kill each other well before the CIA was formed.
Is all the combat training the US military gives its own grunts and leaders not effective at making the US military more formidable?
Didn’t these mujahadeen stick around to train the next generation of soldiers? Aren’t there consistent conflict in the Middle East to harden that kind of training (eg Chechnya)? Aren’t there mercenary opportunities to deploy and evolve that training?
Whether they would have developed it on their own is unclear but the US didn’t develop that knowledge on their own either, instead synthesizing it from experience of Allies during WWII and likely observing other insurgencies and criminal enterprises they helped back.
To me the playbook is the same “drug” but way more potent and mass produced and perhaps the first to market in this distributable form.
Mujahideen force was never near the level of the U.S. military in basic training, and they suffered heavy losses even against the conscript Soviet army. Still that gets you rather far if you are motivated and fighting a war of ambushes on home turf.
If the US training was all it is hyped to be, surely the US-trained ANA could have rooted the Taliban by now, even without American help.
It's a delusion of Western blamelessness to think that any supposed relationship between the actions of Islamic fundamentalists, their strategies and growth, implies that "Islamic fundamentalism owes its existence to a transient American action".
Islamic fundamentalism was around before American involvement and it'll be around after. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
The origin of Afghan resistance was Soviet invasion. It was the 120,000 troops of Soviet mechanised infantry over 10 years that made Mujahedeen who they are, not a dozen CIA instructors showing them jumping jacks in Pakistan.
Not so irrelevant, because at USD 40k per, they were a bit more than teaching jumping jacks. I mentioned them specifically because they seem to have been the least-deniable part of the package.
The author of the lines «Горы стреляют, Стингер взлетает /
Если нарваться, то парни второй раз умрут» also seems to have accorded them more respect than you do...
I've heard the Chechens were able to manufacture their own small arms. Afghanis certainly had that capability; did they have it at the scale provided? Would they have been able to source their own MANPADs?
[Edit] In fact I think I'm right in saying that the last person to successfully invade Afghanistan was Alexander the Great, and even he had to stop campaigning when his army mutinied rather than continue ops in the Indian subcontinent.
The Sikh General Hari Singh Nalwa also uprooted & defeated Afghan Leaders like Dost Mohammad & others, & ruled Afghanistan Throne & build forts around there, even died in his last battle, but did not let the news of his death come out making sure his side wins, in around 1830s. [0]
Perhaps a better example would be America's operation TPAJAX, that removed Iran's democracy and delivered its modern day Islamic theocracy. America certainly did not invent Islamic fundamentalism, but it had no issue using it to further its own cause.
This does happen but is not necessary. Cases in point: Norway, France, Eastern Europe, Germany after WW2. The crucial difference seems to be that the winner must immediately invest in nation building or the defeated must be crushed.
Cynically put, the impending Cold War gave more of an impetus for nation building mid-century than existed by the turn-of-the-century.
Hitler in his bunker doesn't seem so crazy if he'd had cause (such as foreign intelligence reports, or incidents of separate negotiations?) to believe the Allies would have fallen out much sooner than they actually did, and of course someone in his position might've believed that Nazi Germany had been worth more as a wholesale bargain, than (as actually happened) picked up individual by individual at retail.
Indeed: Kadyrov (the current Marcher Lord) ought to know a thing or two, having been supported by both anti-Kremlin and pro-Kremlin regimes at varying times.
Assume that most of us haven't read that book, or even if we have that we don't recall it perfectly. What specific information in it would lead us to agree with the blanket statement "this is just plain false"?
You can start with the US and Britain intervening in Iran in the the late 1940s to protect oil interests and work your way forward from there. You could arguably go back to post-WWI with Britain, France and Russia arguing over the remains of the Ottoman empire (Sykes–Picot Agreement). The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East:
So to say that "most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event" (the US training the Mujahideen) ignores many significant events over the past hundred years:
I can highly recommend Alexander Burnes' non-fiction Travels into Bokhara and Rudyard Kipling's fictional Kim, which in fact coined the term "The Great Game".
OK, we all agree that USA's military-capitalism policy has been enacted in many places for many years. Thread parent's actual point, that this is very harmful to human people, seems confirmed rather than contradicted.
It is so obnoxious to tell someone that they should read an entire book to know what is wrong with a single statement. At least throw a couple points out from the book.
>Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
I disagree, but with some context. If you just go back to the cold war, you would be correct, but in a longer time-frame context, I would posit instead it was mostly at the British backing of the Saud's that created the later environment exploited in the 80s and then again later. I recently read a book, sorry I can't remember the name right now, written by an AQ guy turned intel-asset who actually spent time inside the Afghan camps. He mentioned enough times for it to stick in my mind how the funding came from SA, and how the more powerful people in the groups (trainers, etc) were either from SA or Wahhabists. That sent me on a journey of reading up on SA that left me really feeling a lot of it was due to Britain wanting to maintain the tendrils of Empire, not taking into account the possibility of blowback later, or rather, finding it an acceptable price to pay.
Mark Curtis wrote a book that I found most illuminating on the subject, "Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam":
"As Britain withdrew its military forces from the Middle East in the late 1960s, Islamist forces such as the Saudi regime and, once again, the Muslim Brotherhood, were often seen as proxies to maintain British interests in the region, to continue to destabilise communist or nationalist regimes or as ‘muscle’ to bolster pro-British, right-wing governments. By the 1970s, Arab nationalism had been virtually defeated as a political force, partly thanks to Anglo–American opposition; it was largely replaced by the rising force of radical Islam, which London again often saw as a handy weapon to counter the remnants of secular nationalism and communism in key states such as Egypt and Jordan."..." Britain continued to see some of these groups as useful, principally as proxy guerilla forces in places as diverse as Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Libya; there,they were used either to help break up the Soviet Union and secure major oil interests or to fight nationalist regimes," ... "Whitehall not only tolerated but encouraged the development of ‘Londonistan’–the capital acting as a base and organising centre for numerous jihadist groups –even as this provided a de facto ‘green light’to that terrorism.I suggest that some elements, at least, in the British establishment may have allowed some Islamist groups to operate from London not only because they provided information to the security services but also because they were seen as useful to British foreign policy, notably in maintaining a politically divided Middle East –a long-standing goal of imperial and postwar planners –and as a lever to influence foreign governments’ policies."... "Churchill later wrote that 'my admiration for him [Ibn Saud] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us'"
Yes, as another commenter said, I can also recommend Ghost Wars as one of my favorite books on Afghanistan, and Steve Colls more recent work Directorate S is also extremely well written in the same vein.
As such other wonderful outposts of peace as northern ireland, cyprus, israel, etc. show, back when it was Britannia who ruled the waves, they were fond of playing "let's you and him fight". To my eyes, the long-term drawbacks of these initially-attractive conflicts probably support the ancestor's thesis.
(any oceanic power will likely find making a mess of potential eurasian overland trade routes to be a feature, not a bug.)
Quite. Funnily enough, in older history, I find Venice at the center of similar intriques. Also interesting to me is some of the references to the 18th century England political class as the "Venetian party" (such as in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil).
Dutch and British East India company history is something I really need to find a good book on.
You are far too kind to the US military. Afghanistan was too tough a nut for the British long before the Americans showed up. Pastoralist herders with a country that’s mostly mountain is practically perfect for making ungovernable people. See the Caucasus, Balkans and upland Indochina for further examples. All the more so when they were swimming with guns already.
Would be interesting to know more, but as far as I know Switzerland (or the area) was never especially like this. I mean it was always mountainous, obviously, but the people were not so different from their neighbors. Cheese-makers who worried about having enough hay for the winter, not cattle-rustlers.
The obvious west-european example would be Scotland. And the "solution" was more or less to deport the people to Ireland & replace them with sheep.
I think it was the people of the ungovernable borderlands between England and Scotland (both sides) that ended up being deported to Northern Ireland, (and of course the Scots originally came from Northern Ireland anyway).
The Hapsburgs indeed tried to take over Switzerland. It didn’t go well. The Holy Roman Empire copied the tactics of the Swiss and incorporated it into the Landsknechts of Germany.
It has more to do with ethnic divisions within afghanistan and being near major powers russia, china, india, iran, etc and now the US. Japan is mountainous but eminently governable.
"Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible."
No, the soviet had a simple rational.
1. Can we win the war? no
2. Can we stay forever? Yes
3. How much will it cost? Every year X Billion Rubles and X russian lifes.
The US has the same outcome.
I would also be careful label it a "soviet invasion".
"The Amin government, having secured a treaty in December 1978 that allowed them to call on Soviet forces, repeatedly requested the introduction of troops in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1979. They requested Soviet troops to provide security and to assist in the fight against the mujaheddin rebels. After the killing of Soviet technicians in Herat by rioting mobs, the Soviet government sold several Mi-24 helicopters to the Afghan military, and increased the number of military advisers in the country to 3,000.[137] On April 14, 1979, the Afghan government requested that the USSR send 15 to 20 helicopters with their crews to Afghanistan, and on June 16, the Soviet government responded and sent a detachment of tanks, BMPs, and crews to guard the government in Kabul and to secure the Bagram and Shindand airfields. In response to this request, an airborne battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A. Lomakin, arrived at the Bagram Air Base on July 7. They arrived without their combat gear, disguised as technical specialists. They were the personal bodyguards for General Secretary Taraki. The paratroopers were directly subordinate to the senior Soviet military advisor and did not interfere in Afghan politics. Several leading politicians at the time such as Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko were against intervention."
> Per 10 U.S. Code Section 127e, the Pentagon can spend up to $100 million annually on support to foreign forces for counter-terrorism operations. In these programs foreign units conduct combat operations with US operational guidance. However, unlike 127e programs the Special Night Squads and the Gideon Force in Ethiopia were directly led by conventional British officers and non-commissioned officers embedded in those units.
...
> Two insights appear to have particular salience still today. First, the use of irregular forces largely made up of foreigners with a backbone of British officers and non-commissioned officers was a force multiplier that had dramatic impacts in multiple theaters for the British.
The article seems to argue that the US should emulate the British use of troops made up of colonial subjects commanded by the titular "British masters". But unlike the British colonial empire, the American sphere of influence is mostly comprised of sovereign countries whose governments might object to foreign-controlled guerillas operating in their territory primarily to protect American interests. So I'm not sure whether that's really an "insight of particular salience still today".
>But unlike the British colonial empire, the American sphere of influence is mostly comprised of sovereign countries whose governments might object to foreign-controlled guerillas operating in their territory primarily to protect American interests.
I think their use of "foreigners" there just refers to non-British, as both of their examples largely used locals for that role. Countries are often quite willing to allow US officers in train and assist their army.
A more recent example would be the book "The Utility of Force" by General Rupert Smith. He argues that conventional militaries and tactics revolve around a concept of war that was made obsolete by nuclear weapons, and goes in depth regarding recent failings of NATO and the Iraq invasion, and how the conflicts should be handled in the age of instant global communication and media coverage.
“Staff with indigenous forces with US NCO/O’s from conventional (not SOF) forces...” is a great idea on paper.
When was this last tried? The SFAB.
As someone who helped train the SFAB, which is basically what the author is cribbing the idea from, it was a joke in application and reeked of the hot idea from whatever O6 was gunning for O7.
Of 8-9 SFAB companies supposed to do this out in the bush in AFG with local forces, only 1 ended up doing it. This was an Army-wide initiative mind you that dragged in multiple other units to help train, changed deployment schedules, changed funding, and so on.
The institutional willpower to put the 5-10 years of culture change behind conventional army who just wants to shoot artillery just isn’t there at the moment.
And perhaps the regular army should do just that and stay good at it. Past efforts at conventional -> SFAB transition efforts, i.e. “everyone deploys as the infantry” rotted the skill sets of the NCO corps in high skill branches like artillery.
Military thinkers keep advocating for conventional army to be anything and everything, and end up just reinventing SF units and jobs the state department needs to be doing. Then, those same thinkers get confused why gunnery certifications get failed en masse by line units who have to train back and forth across these conflicting priorities.
EDIT: less cynical, i guess my point is that your comment is so full of jargon that it's near impossible to follow for me, and likely many other readers. In fact I googled SFAB but the wikipedia article doesn't really tell me what it is either (other than "a group of soldiers doing soldiery stuff")
The Pathans managed to boot out the Brits with bloody noses whenever they invaded Afghanistan. In between, Pathan tribes on the then India side of the Durand Line kept the Brits out of their lands except for punitive expeditions. The Brits solved the problem of depredations against ruled populations by garrisoning forts guarding against tribe X with recruits from tribe Y. In fact there was a dozen or so tribes. This policy also provided gainful employment for young men who otherwise would have resorted to brigandage against agricultural populations under the Raj.
I don't understand, this is one of the main jobs of the U.S. Army's Special Forces (also known as Green Berets). Their whole thing is learning how to train and fight alongside indigenous forces.
The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was just that, where literally a handful of SF operators joined the Northern Alliance and helped them capture several cities from the Taliban (in the process becoming the first US soldiers to do battle on horseback since 1942)
The Italian occupation of Ethiopia was largely ended by conventionally organized forces. Likewise the the Japanese occupation of Burma. The British fondness for irregular warfare in WW II largely came from the need to do something, combined with the inability to do anything much. Blowing up stuff in Norway did make some contributions, but the war in Europe was won largely by the Red Army overwhelming the Wehrmacht. Wingate played a useful role in Burma, but Slim got the job done.
61 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadYou go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind.
These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; either they will form a resistance movement to whoever is in charge and become a proxy force for some other power, or they will simply replace politics with profit and convert to organised crime. Either way, the new government is faced with an ungovernable mess.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas#Foundation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_James#Quantrill's_Raider...
American exceptionalism but from the Left.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible.
You're making his by ignoring the fact that the Afghans were trained and armed by US to fight the Soviets. That training remains, just who they're fighting has changed.
Also, becoming a half competent combatant is not like getting a PhD, more a function of you surviving your first few encounters.
The world does not revolve around America, people were able to fight and kill each other well before the CIA was formed.
Didn’t these mujahadeen stick around to train the next generation of soldiers? Aren’t there consistent conflict in the Middle East to harden that kind of training (eg Chechnya)? Aren’t there mercenary opportunities to deploy and evolve that training?
Whether they would have developed it on their own is unclear but the US didn’t develop that knowledge on their own either, instead synthesizing it from experience of Allies during WWII and likely observing other insurgencies and criminal enterprises they helped back.
To me the playbook is the same “drug” but way more potent and mass produced and perhaps the first to market in this distributable form.
If the US training was all it is hyped to be, surely the US-trained ANA could have rooted the Taliban by now, even without American help.
Islamic fundamentalism was around before American involvement and it'll be around after. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Soviet_War_in_A...
Anyway MANPAD handling skills are irrelevant to what we discuss here.
The author of the lines «Горы стреляют, Стингер взлетает / Если нарваться, то парни второй раз умрут» also seems to have accorded them more respect than you do...
I've heard the Chechens were able to manufacture their own small arms. Afghanis certainly had that capability; did they have it at the scale provided? Would they have been able to source their own MANPADs?
This is however not what we discuss here. How much US attrition was due to Islamic fundamentalist MANPAD use, during the whole War of Terror?
See, it's irrelevant.
They also resisted the British quite well in 1842 [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul
[Edit] In fact I think I'm right in saying that the last person to successfully invade Afghanistan was Alexander the Great, and even he had to stop campaigning when his army mutinied rather than continue ops in the Indian subcontinent.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Singh_Nalwa
Hitler in his bunker doesn't seem so crazy if he'd had cause (such as foreign intelligence reports, or incidents of separate negotiations?) to believe the Allies would have fallen out much sooner than they actually did, and of course someone in his position might've believed that Nazi Germany had been worth more as a wholesale bargain, than (as actually happened) picked up individual by individual at retail.
As to commitment to nation building, the (premature?) end of it in the former CSA came relatively rapidly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
Even supporters of Bush's Folly have to admit Rumsfield and crew biffed the execution.
This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
So to say that "most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event" (the US training the Mujahideen) ignores many significant events over the past hundred years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...
At best, it's an overly broad claim.
The last two centuries, the interference was so common in the 19th century it inspired the name "The Great Game."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
I disagree, but with some context. If you just go back to the cold war, you would be correct, but in a longer time-frame context, I would posit instead it was mostly at the British backing of the Saud's that created the later environment exploited in the 80s and then again later. I recently read a book, sorry I can't remember the name right now, written by an AQ guy turned intel-asset who actually spent time inside the Afghan camps. He mentioned enough times for it to stick in my mind how the funding came from SA, and how the more powerful people in the groups (trainers, etc) were either from SA or Wahhabists. That sent me on a journey of reading up on SA that left me really feeling a lot of it was due to Britain wanting to maintain the tendrils of Empire, not taking into account the possibility of blowback later, or rather, finding it an acceptable price to pay.
Mark Curtis wrote a book that I found most illuminating on the subject, "Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam":
"As Britain withdrew its military forces from the Middle East in the late 1960s, Islamist forces such as the Saudi regime and, once again, the Muslim Brotherhood, were often seen as proxies to maintain British interests in the region, to continue to destabilise communist or nationalist regimes or as ‘muscle’ to bolster pro-British, right-wing governments. By the 1970s, Arab nationalism had been virtually defeated as a political force, partly thanks to Anglo–American opposition; it was largely replaced by the rising force of radical Islam, which London again often saw as a handy weapon to counter the remnants of secular nationalism and communism in key states such as Egypt and Jordan."..." Britain continued to see some of these groups as useful, principally as proxy guerilla forces in places as diverse as Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Libya; there,they were used either to help break up the Soviet Union and secure major oil interests or to fight nationalist regimes," ... "Whitehall not only tolerated but encouraged the development of ‘Londonistan’–the capital acting as a base and organising centre for numerous jihadist groups –even as this provided a de facto ‘green light’to that terrorism.I suggest that some elements, at least, in the British establishment may have allowed some Islamist groups to operate from London not only because they provided information to the security services but also because they were seen as useful to British foreign policy, notably in maintaining a politically divided Middle East –a long-standing goal of imperial and postwar planners –and as a lever to influence foreign governments’ policies."... "Churchill later wrote that 'my admiration for him [Ibn Saud] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us'"
Yes, as another commenter said, I can also recommend Ghost Wars as one of my favorite books on Afghanistan, and Steve Colls more recent work Directorate S is also extremely well written in the same vein.
(any oceanic power will likely find making a mess of potential eurasian overland trade routes to be a feature, not a bug.)
Dutch and British East India company history is something I really need to find a good book on.
Ditto Switzerland?
IIRC, Hitler didn't invade for similar reasons. A well armed citizenry. (And a convenient fence for all the spoils of war.)
Historically, was Switzerland it's own thing? Did Napoleon, the Hapsburgs, misc Papacies, Franks and Normans, etc, march around those mountains?
The obvious west-european example would be Scotland. And the "solution" was more or less to deport the people to Ireland & replace them with sheep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debatable_Lands
Most just did what they used to do before the war: teachers, mechanics, drivers, engineers, nurses, students and so on...
Same thing happened in many European countries after WW2 was over.
No, the soviet had a simple rational.
1. Can we win the war? no
2. Can we stay forever? Yes
3. How much will it cost? Every year X Billion Rubles and X russian lifes.
The US has the same outcome.
I would also be careful label it a "soviet invasion".
"The Amin government, having secured a treaty in December 1978 that allowed them to call on Soviet forces, repeatedly requested the introduction of troops in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1979. They requested Soviet troops to provide security and to assist in the fight against the mujaheddin rebels. After the killing of Soviet technicians in Herat by rioting mobs, the Soviet government sold several Mi-24 helicopters to the Afghan military, and increased the number of military advisers in the country to 3,000.[137] On April 14, 1979, the Afghan government requested that the USSR send 15 to 20 helicopters with their crews to Afghanistan, and on June 16, the Soviet government responded and sent a detachment of tanks, BMPs, and crews to guard the government in Kabul and to secure the Bagram and Shindand airfields. In response to this request, an airborne battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A. Lomakin, arrived at the Bagram Air Base on July 7. They arrived without their combat gear, disguised as technical specialists. They were the personal bodyguards for General Secretary Taraki. The paratroopers were directly subordinate to the senior Soviet military advisor and did not interfere in Afghan politics. Several leading politicians at the time such as Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko were against intervention."
...
> Two insights appear to have particular salience still today. First, the use of irregular forces largely made up of foreigners with a backbone of British officers and non-commissioned officers was a force multiplier that had dramatic impacts in multiple theaters for the British.
The article seems to argue that the US should emulate the British use of troops made up of colonial subjects commanded by the titular "British masters". But unlike the British colonial empire, the American sphere of influence is mostly comprised of sovereign countries whose governments might object to foreign-controlled guerillas operating in their territory primarily to protect American interests. So I'm not sure whether that's really an "insight of particular salience still today".
I think their use of "foreigners" there just refers to non-British, as both of their examples largely used locals for that role. Countries are often quite willing to allow US officers in train and assist their army.
When was this last tried? The SFAB.
As someone who helped train the SFAB, which is basically what the author is cribbing the idea from, it was a joke in application and reeked of the hot idea from whatever O6 was gunning for O7.
Of 8-9 SFAB companies supposed to do this out in the bush in AFG with local forces, only 1 ended up doing it. This was an Army-wide initiative mind you that dragged in multiple other units to help train, changed deployment schedules, changed funding, and so on.
The institutional willpower to put the 5-10 years of culture change behind conventional army who just wants to shoot artillery just isn’t there at the moment.
And perhaps the regular army should do just that and stay good at it. Past efforts at conventional -> SFAB transition efforts, i.e. “everyone deploys as the infantry” rotted the skill sets of the NCO corps in high skill branches like artillery.
Military thinkers keep advocating for conventional army to be anything and everything, and end up just reinventing SF units and jobs the state department needs to be doing. Then, those same thinkers get confused why gunnery certifications get failed en masse by line units who have to train back and forth across these conflicting priorities.
EDIT: less cynical, i guess my point is that your comment is so full of jargon that it's near impossible to follow for me, and likely many other readers. In fact I googled SFAB but the wikipedia article doesn't really tell me what it is either (other than "a group of soldiers doing soldiery stuff")
https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2019/06/28/japanese-style...