Careerism, cronyism, and malfeasance in the Special Warfare Center
BY SOFREP
The following email titled “Careerism, Cronyism, and Malfeasance in SWCS: The End of SF Capability” was sent via a mass blast through Special Operations Command (SOCOM) yesterday. The email was penned by a Special Forces instructor at Fort Bragg who is dismayed by slipping standards and careerism, providing a damning critique of what has been an ongoing issue as the Special Warfare Center and School for over a decade.
In the past SOFREP has published other anonymous (but verified) emails written by active duty Green Berets and Navy SEALs. We will continue to do so as SOFREP is founded by two former Non-Commissioned Officers who strongly believe that the senior enlisted men of the Special Operations community need to have their voices heard above the careerism and cronyism that infects our community. As soldiers, we tend to get weepy over power point slides detailing service members who commit suicide or fall into substance abuse issues but if we want to know what the root cause is, we should look no further than the below email. Our young men and women need strong leaders, not hand holding or kid gloves as we prepare them for war.
SOFREP reached out to USASOC for their comment regarding this email but they did not reply prior to this article being published.
To our fellow Active Duty and Veteran Green Berets,
Our Regiment has a cancer, and it is destroying the SF legacy, its capability, and its credibility.
SWCS has devolved into a cesspool of toxic, exploitive, biased and self-serving senior Officers who are bolstered by submissive, sycophantic, and just-as-culpable enlisted leaders. They have doggedly succeeded in two things; furthering their careers, and ensuring that Special Forces more prolific, but dangerously less capable than ever before. Shameless and immodest careerism has, in no uncertain terms, effectively destroyed our ability to assess, train, and prepare students, or to identify those students that pose very real risk to Operational Detachments. I cannot stress how systematic and severe the effects on the force will be if the standards, recently implemented here in the Special Forces Qualification Course, remain in place.
We consistently and concretely identify dozens of graduates every year who are incapable of ever being ‘value-added’ to ODA’s yet are pushed forward to you. THAT NUMBER IS SET TO RISE DRAMATICALLY in the very near future. To clarify, we instructors recognize that none of us graduating the Q-Course were fully competent Green Berets when we first arrived to our teams. We are also acutely aware that senior generations derisively judging their juniors is a tradition as old as humanity. So this address is not being written because ‘cherries are so much more cherry than we were when we were cherries’. We do not expect them to be assets yet, we only expect that they possess the basic qualities necessary to become assets. I am asking for 20 minutes of your time because many students graduating the Q-course now do not possess those qualities and, from this moment forward, determining if ANY students possess them is not possible. The actions of SWCS leadership have created a new era of Special Forces that are; increasingly incapable of actualizing SOF attributes; markedly and demonstrably weaker; and quantifiably projecting measurable risk and liability onto the teammates with which they serve. Before this paradigm shift, cadre due diligence was capable of some risk mitigation in these aspects. We could, did, and often still do reach back to teams and prepare them for those [inevitable] outliers that slip through the course unimpeded due to cronysim, nepotism, or malfeasance. But the recent systematic dismissal of course standards and continous violation of regulations at the Training Group and SWCS echelons makes student failure nigh impossible. Assessing, Identifying, and mitigating prolonged individual performance has historically been a cornerstone of the pipleline. That has been provably replaced with willful mediocrity. This climate has been empowered by a feckless, selfish, and recreant command ideology, set into motion by MG Linder and COL Lock, and actualized by MG Sonntag, CSM Arrowsmith, COL Kornburger, and CSM Berkibile.
In the last 24 months, Commanders and/or Sergeants Major at the Group and SWCS level have systematically removed numerous fundamental SF standards, lowered and undermined the grading metrics for others, all while simultaneously ensuring that a gagged cadre population was expressly prohibited from holding students accountable for their academic, physical, and character performance. Obviously, this concerns those of us whom are returning to Group. We have an understandably vested interest in developing the best new teammates we possibly can, for we will be serving alongside them. The issue is that career-focused leaders, far removed from team life, have no ‘skin in the game’ and thus do not concern themselves with the problems inherent in employing subpar soldiers in a no-fail environment: where individual limitation creates team-wide catastrophe, often with international repercussions. Their responsibilities involve ensuring that yearly graduation quotas are met and that political agendas are enforced. They do not concern themselves with ensuring that students are capable of surviving the rigors of combat, and in all fairness they shouldn’t. That is the cadre’s mantle to bear. Ignorance of their interference in this endeavor might be forgivable, but they have been told by the operational force numerous times what issues these policies would create, and chose career progression instead. As you will read, this moral cowardice started in the preceding command, and is shared by every current Commander and Sergeant Major at the Group and SWCS level. When one of our cadre addressed these concerns (with examples) directly to the SWCS leadership in an open forum, CSM David Gibb’s (at the time the SWCS CSM) response was verbatim:
“We push some of these issues forward [to the Regiment] because we believe that the Groups can succeed in fixing those problem graduates when they arrive. That is an amount of risk we willingly accept, because after all it’s much easier to get a tab removed at Group if he doesn’t pan out, than to risk relieving what’s basically a fully qualified student who might have been able to fix himself and become a solid Green Beret.”
Specifically, he was defending the decision to graduate a student that had failed the final graduation SFPA (Special Forces Physical Assessment) five times on the 40-minute 5-mile run. He finally passed on the 6th attempt: coming in 12 seconds under time, and 4 attempts past the mandatory 1-year relief dictated by regulation. Over 100 of your current teammates heard this exchange during at SLC in 2016, and can bear witness. A senior E-9, with approximately 20 years in SF, unashamedly acknowledged that reducing, and then ignoring course standards is a perfectly acceptable philosophy to embrace in pursuit of graduation numbers. His response embodied everything that is wrong with SF leadership today. Standards are being drastically reduced, and they are being done so to achieve a very acute goal, one that does not benefit or enhance the force.
So here we are, the trainers, hoping to illuminate to you, the operational force, the severity of this issue. Below, we’ve illustrated a variety of truths to fully encompass the selfish and careerist nature of the leadership that is injecting poison into the SF foundation. This does not capture everything, only the most recent events, and should sufficiently capture the essence of the systematically detrimental change and malfeasance occurring in the SFQC. Deducing their impact on the unit is easy to the operational soldier. Unfortunately it is not to Senior leaders. So, help us to affect change. This plea is on behalf of a clear majority of your brothers who have no real power to affect change on their own. Cadre hands are increasingly tied, and yet they are regularly, randomly castrated as scapegoats for a command that often confuses blind, knee-jerk reactions with due process. SF legitimacy is fading at the hands of self-serving careerism. Commanders truly want to be recognized and rewarded for the milestones they are achieving. Please accommodate them. Spread this message, publish it, share it online, go to the press, and send it to congress. If these “leaders” so desire the recognition for what they are doing, then let us ensure they receive all of it.
I completely understand that some of those reading up to this point may be skeptical. It sounds overly dramatic, tinged with emotion, and can easily be brushed off as the ranting of some scorned, disgruntled has-been who had a bad run-in with a senior leader too many times. Here are the facts, so you can make that decision for yourself. Every single one of you out there in Group knows a brother-in-arms or 2 doing time in SWCS, if your don’t believe me, give any one of us a ring…
THE SPECIAL FORCES QUALIFICATION COURSE
We work in 1st SWTG(A) at USAJFKSWCS. There are currently about 900 GB’s on the roster, and we account for and/or train every single one of the (roughly) 2200 students currently in the Q-course. As a refresher for those of you who have been away for a while, here is a breakdown of what were (key word) the major training requirements that students were were to pass to graduate each phase of the SFQC after getting selected.
o CLT: Graduate to move into the pipeline
o Special Forces Orientation Course (SFOC): Pass Phase 1
-Pass Land Navigation
-Pass Swim test
-Pass 12-mile ruck march (55 lbs dry in under 3 hours)
-Pass SFPA(57 push-ups, 66 sit-ups, 5-mile run in under 40 minutes, 1 rope climb w/25lbs vest)
o Small Unit Tactics (SUT)/SERE Pass phase 2
o MOS Pass phase 3
o ROBIN SAGE Pass phase 4
o LANGUAGE Pass phase 5
-Earn a 1+/1+ OPI in target language
-Pass graduation SFPA
o GRADUATE
Notes:
o The SFOC SFPA and the LANGUAGE SFPA are the only physical requirements enforced in the SFQC, as in they are the only PT events they can be relieved for.
o Failure of any 1 event on the SFPA is a recycle of that phase. Failure on any retest is by-regulation at least an automatic 1-year relief from the SFQC.
o Relief boards are held for all academic or attribute failures in all phases. Even if a relief is mandated by regulation, every instructor must justify why a student warrants relief or retention (e.g. 3x UXO failure, 6x late to formation, any SOF attribute violation, etc.). At the relief board, 15+ instructors and the Battalion Command team review every case, and debate what the punishment should be, and after everyone says their piece, the Battalion Commander makes his decision. Any appeals go directly to the Group Commander, and ALL NTR’s go to the Group Commander.
o Keep in mind, the SFQC goal for graduating Special Forces Green Berets is 550 Active Duty Enlisted (ADE) every year. More importantly, the SFQC produces on-average between 400-470 ADE annually. This is…very important to say the least.
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