Book Review | Training for Victory: U.S. Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan
Training for Victory: U.S. Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan. By Frank Sobchak. Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2024. ISBN: 978168247133. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Notes. Sources cited. Index. Pp. 1-352. $39.95.
The closeout of the Global War on Terror and the contentious politics over the withdrawal from Afghanistan gave the Army every opportunity to avoid deliberate introspection about institutional performance in fulfilling the various missions assigned to it. In particular, Security Force Assistance – the training and development of foreign military forces and institutions – was widely viewed as a mission that failed writ large. This training, designed to develop the recipient nation’s forces to provide for their own security, was a hallmark of the last twenty years of American military activity abroad. After the collapse of conventional Iraqi forces during the rise of ISIS, and the near entirety of the Afghan National Army during the American withdrawal, American citizens can reasonably ask, “Does this ever work?”
A casual observer may conclude that these efforts are wasted, doomed to fail for myriad reasons, and a distraction from the pursuit of unilateral combat power. This perspective misses critical outliers, and Training for Victory by Dr. Frank Sobchak uses a comparative analysis of five cases to illuminate these exceptions. This research sheds light on the space between the binary distinction of success and failure. By examining five factors that shape advising efforts and evaluating the resultant combat effectiveness of the recipient units across four core competencies, this book identifies which relationships resulted in durable combat power, and what, if any, factors were the most critical to those assistance efforts.
Forty Years of Advising
To ensure the comparisons were appropriate, Dr. Sobchak selected cases where the US Army Special Forces (SF) established and sustained support for an elite force during that nation’s ongoing conflict. This avoided episodic training engagements and ensured that the cases represented instances where United States policy makers were invested in success. The choice of dependent variables, or the inputs that just might hold a key to the combat effectiveness of the trainees, is critical. This book goes to the heart of the way Special Forces thinks of its own best practices and evaluates language training and cultural competency, consistency in advisor pairing, partner-to-advisor ratio, ability of the advisor to structure the host nation unit, and the authority to accompany the trainees into combat. Dr. Sobchak measures the quality of each input using historic deployment data, language proficiency scores, combat authorities or the lack thereof, and extended interviews with participants from every case study.
Measuring the impact of a tactical unit on the course of a war is difficult, however, especially when insurgencies often resemble social movements and violent political struggles for legitimacy more so than organized military campaigning. To avoid coloring the analysis of the foreign Special Operations Force (SOF) units by the success or failure of their government’s strategic efforts, the book focuses on the ability of the SOF units to achieve their tactical tasks. In this instance, combat effectiveness is measured by a qualitative evaluation of fighting without advisors, at night, for up to three days, and winning while doing so. While this bar seems relatively low for professional soldiers, depending on the adversary, it leaves considerable room for applying clever tactics and operational art, something the Colombian case demonstrates in spades.
The cases begin with US support to the Guatemalan military in the 1980s and the establishment of the Batallones de Infanteria de Reacción Inmediata (BIRIs) to combat a communist-inspired insurgency. The next case study illuminates a largely understudied portion of the Global War on Terror in the Philippines when SF developed the Light Reaction Regiment to fight Islamic insurgents in Mindanao and surrounding islands. In the third case study, the Colombian SOF operations against the FARC insurgency diversify the case selection away from Islamic insurgencies and represent the most capable partners evaluated. Finally, the performance of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces and the Afghan Commandos is analyzed with starkly differing results. By taking five cases covering forty years of history, with distinct adversaries and geographies, Training for Victory avoids cases that are too similar to travel to other contexts.
The results of the study confirm that routine training with consistent mentorship over a long period of time is effective. That is an expected result. Additionally, the authority to make structural choices and guide the partner force, especially by removing particularly ineffective leaders, is critical. The greater the emphasis on the practice of leadership, the more effective the units examined were in combat. While some may make an argument that these actions limit the partners’ sovereignty, both parties should remember that capacity building is a two-way street. Additionally, not all nations actively insulate their militaries from domestic partisanship or attempt to promote through a generalized meritocracy. If partner nations are wholly unresponsive to the recommendations of the advisors, it may signal a desire to increase US direct involvement or slow-roll progress for additional aid. At the very least, consistent advising relationships can identify this behavior and trigger a policy review process in Washington to ensure valuable SOF resources are not wasted on recalcitrant partners.
Surprisingly, Dr. Sobchak’s work found that the impact of language skills and the ability to fight with the partner nation was less essential. The book distinguishes language proficiency and the type of cultural rapport that soldiers build at a professional level. Servicemembers with joint experience will recognize this. The mixed communication of professional soldiery, delivered through instruction and demonstration, is facilitated with caffeine, nicotine, and jokes more often than precise technical jargon. Part of this disconnect is likely inherent to the challenge of designing a force with the right language capabilities at the right time, and the other half is that current defense language program testing objectives are ripe for reform to bring the subjects tested into the ballpark of being relevant.
Perhaps most controversially, Training for Victory concluded that accompanying the partner force on operations was not essential. This result, and the data around it, is worth close examination as “skin in the game” is an almost unquestioned truism within Special Forces. The Colombian case was the most instructive in this regard, where the political realities of US support precluded direct combat against the FARC. In this conflict, the Colombians could not rely on the United States to fight on their behalf and were, therefore, unable to shift the combat burden to their American advisors. At the same time, they developed robust training regimes through their Lancero school and succeeded in the field. In contrast, the Afghan Commandos, who operated almost wholly alongside US forces, were the least effective partner force surveyed and almost wholly dependent on the Americans. This juxtaposition of expected outcomes should remind both policymakers and practitioners that there are many paths to success and no silver bullets in the world of capacity building.
One potential shortcoming in Training for Victory is the lack of cost comparison between the evaluated programs. Bureaucracies fight over budgets, and in the current fiscal and political climate, scrutiny over defense spending remains elevated. While building partner capacity is cheap in defense budget terms, train and equip programs from fiscal year 2018 to 2022 spent a little over one billion dollars annually. While this spending is related, it is not a direct mirror of SF peculiar missions, and the available data does not shed light on the specific programs in the book. The cost and scope of divested materiel, in addition to the cost of the forces employed in the case studies presented, would have been an interesting component to identify where the advising missions were the most spendthrift per unit of combat capability. Given the author’s access and understanding of the authorities used during the periods examined, further data on the financial cost of success could have improved the overall perspective created in Training for Victory.
Implications for Policy and Operations
Stakeholders at different levels will find that Training for Victory provides broad utility. For the practitioner, and especially the Special Forces noncommissioned officers tasked with building effective partners, this book offers a historical view that opens the professional aperture beyond one’s regional experience at a given moment in time. Critically, our community has few opportunities to learn deeply from one another’s capacity-building experiences across geographic commands outside of informal exchange at Professional Military Education or advanced schools. Connecting in this way is invaluable, but it leaves a lot of insight on the cutting room floor, has limited reach, and no record. This book addresses those shortcomings by drawing insights from data and capturing the perspectives of critical members of the Special Forces regiment as they age out of our formations. Training for Victory is an important reference to assist in structuring the discussions around designing a new advising effort and, perhaps more importantly, how to sustain it effectively.
For the planners and policymakers, this book is a powerful counterpoint to arguments for large-scale disengagement from our military relationships abroad. Rather than illustrating broad-based failure, the cases selected show that SFA missions can be effective when consistently resourced at modest levels. As the United States seeks to increase burden sharing among allies and partners, Special Forces advising missions represent a small-footprint approach to ensure these states develop the capability to defend themselves and the ability to integrate with US forces if needed. In contrast to large conventional overseas deployments, small teams with a persistent presence have a demonstrated history of success when thoughtfully implemented. More than a canary in the coal mine, these relationships increase American influence, provide a “ground truth” feedback loop to senior policy officials, and, perhaps most importantly, are never large enough to do the work for our partners.
Future Considerations
This book provides timely insights as the Department of Defense considers changes to force structure. A renewed focus on large-scale combat operations as both a capability and deterrent may suggest a decreased need for small advising missions. This is a potential oversight. Clear American conventional overmatch will likely incentivize nations to seek asymmetric means of achieving policy objectives, similar to the proliferation of small wars throughout the Cold War. By working with allies committed to improving their SOF capabilities, we can frustrate adversary operations away from our homeland and leverage deep relationships as a powerful diplomatic tool. If the United States intends to maximize the benefits from the increase in allied defense spending, we should look at sustainable Security Force Assistance missions as a way to ensure that the dollars and euros spent will result in real lethality. Fortunately, Training for Victory helps identify the key planning considerations that our Special Forces soldiers apply when turning dollars into deterrence.
