Two of the most important topics in the Navy today are Human Capital Strategy (HCS) and how the military can better transition to and from hostilities. Both received ample coverage in a Proceedings article written by retired General Robert Scales. Scales's article discusses building military capacity for culture-centric warfare through "a cadre of global scouts."1 The Department of Defense (DoD) also recognizes the importance of culture-centric warfare. In October 2004, Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld released a memo stating "foreign language skill and regional and cultural expertise are essential enabling capabilities for DoD activities in the transition to and from hostilities." DoD recently released the Defense Language Transformation Roadmap which highlighted these same issues.2
Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) are at the heart of this culture-centric issue. FAOs are also at the convergence of Human Capital Strategy and improvement of the Navy's transition capabilities. While General Scales never specifically mentions the FAO program, the DoD memo did. In April 2005, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz asked the services to provide him with detailed FAO action plans by 30 June.3
The Navy must overhaul the FAO program to address the issue of how to improve the Navy's culture-centric warfare skills. An improved program can significantly contribute to transitions to and from hostilities as well as support DoD plans to improve human intelligence capabilities and strategic communications.
DoD FAO Programs
The Defense Department requires all services to maintain FAO programs but each service manages its program differently. Officers are normally assigned to key positions in the defense attaché system, security assistance organizations, the joint staff, State Department, combatant commands and defense agencies, the service staffs, and military service schools
Navy
The Navy program, which was instituted in 1997, is designed to:
(Ensure) selected officers develop the skills required to manage and analyze politico-military activities with an in-depth understanding of underlying economic, social, cultural, psychological and political factors. Using their unique combination of professional military skills, regional expertise, language competency, and pol-mil awareness, FAOs will advance the U.S. interests in a country or region, and enhance the effectiveness of Navy interactions with foreign navies, military, and foreign affairs organizations.4
Accession: Officers, who must be at least lieutenants, are designated following selection by a non-competitive board based on their language aptitude or proficiency and a regionally-focused postgraduate degree, regional experience, or a previously attained subspecialty code.
Training: There is no specific training or sustainment program in the Navy for FAOs. Some lieutenant designees are sent to postgraduate school.
Placement : They are assigned only "when not serving in billets essential to their officer
community."5 There is no career path for them because they are beholden to the career path of their parent community. For this reason, an officer will usually serve in only one regional assignment and then return to his or her community in order to stay competitive for promotion.
While the Navy has only one FAO-coded billet, there are approximately 250 billets that are regionally focused and could be coded for such officers.6 The placement officer does attempt to put personnel with at least a regional subspecialty into these assignments.
Army
The Army has the best program for training and managing their FAOs within DoD and FAO is a designated separate career field. Army FAOs compete only against Army Acquisition Corps officers for promotion.7
Accession: The Army holds a board to select FAOs. However, candidates must have served at least five years in a specific career field and must have held a company command or equivalent. The Army does not designate its officers as FAOs until they are majors.
Training: Army training consists of 6-18 months of language training, 12 months in-country
training,8 and 12-18 months of graduate school. Some of this training can be waived depending on an officer's experience.
Placement: The Army has around 700 FAO billets and more than 1000 designated officers.9 Officers serve almost exclusively in designated billets and tend to spend about twice as much time overseas as they do stateside.
Marine Corps
The Marine Corps program is part of the International Affairs Officer Program (IAOP), which also governs Regional Affairs Officers (RAO). The regional officer is essentially one who desires FAO qualification but does not possess language skills.
Accession: The Marine Corps designates FAOs through both a study and experience track. Selection for the study track is done through an annual competitive board and unrestricted first lieutenants through majors with no less than three and no more than 11 years of service are eligible. The Marine Corps also holds a quarterly board to select officers requesting a FAO designation based upon prior experience.
Training: Training consists of 12 months at Naval Postgraduate School, 6-15 months of language training at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) and then 12 months of in-country training.
Placement: The international affairs program manager has 48 foreign area officer and six regional billets. There are an additional 160 positions for which international affairs officer skills are desired. All FAOs/RAOs are dual-tracked and must maintain proficiency in their primary specialty. Marine FAOs/RAOs typically alternate between assignments in their region of expertise and their primary specialty. The Marine Corps tracks FAO promotion and retention rates.10
Air Force
The Air Force FAO program was recently reconstituted under the International Affairs Specialist (IAS) program. There are two IAS categories, the Regional Affairs Specialist (RAS) and the Political-Military Affairs Strategist (PAS), both of which are secondary Air Force Specialty Codes (AFSCs).
Accession: The Air Force has not yet implemented the IAS program. However, it will hold an annual competitive board to designate IAS officers. The first board is scheduled for August 2005. Ideally, each program will accept experienced officers, with 7-10 years for RAS officers and 9-10 for PAS officers.11
Training: Regional affairs officers will complete a 3-year program, earning an advanced degree in international or national security studies, attending language training at DLI with follow-on cultural immersion. Political-military officers only need a similar advanced degree.
Placement: The Air Force has identified approximately 320 RAS and 330 PAS billets. The intent is to have RAS officers alternate between assignments in their primary and secondary AFSCs. PAS officers will also alternate between their primary and secondary AFSC, however, assignments in their primary AFSC will emphasize positions focused on their region of expertise.
In summary, each of our sister services has now developed a program with FAO as either a primary or secondary specialization and a plan for tracking and using FAOs. The Navy is the exception—as most of the people I spoke with regarding the Navy FAO program noted, "What FAO program?"12
Recommended Changes
As noted, Navy FAOs are assigned only when their community allows it. Relegating the program to a secondary role in the assignment process doomed the program before it got off the deck. Community managers rarely release personnel to these billets because they have too many unfilled essential billets. Most officers don't want to work outside of their community because of the negative effect on promotion. Those officers who do work outside their community do so generally because they are no longer competitive.
If the Navy wants personnel to become global scouts, it must create a FAO community and career path that will allow competitiveness and promotion. The best way to achieve this goal is through a separate FAO career designator headed by a flag officer.13 Current FAO strength is about 900 officers. A fully implemented program should probably include between 500 and 750 officers. Anything short of a stand-alone community would not only be less effective but would likely result in a failed program—as happened with the current program and its predecessor, the Country-Area-Regional Specialty (CARS).
The argument against any new officer community is typically that the Navy cannot afford to give up operators to fill staff functions. However, not everyone needs to be a trigger-puller to be considered a war fighter. Ralph Peters points this out forcefully. "A single officer fluent in the local language and aware of cultural nuances can be far more valuable to our military than entire squadrons of F/A-22s."14
The Naval Intelligence community probably has the most to lose from the creation of a FAO career field. Many FAOs are intelligence officers who may decide to leave the intelligence community. Intelligence and FAO missions can overlap. These issues could be mitigated. FAOs could and should be assigned to intelligence organizations at operational fleets,15 the Navy Staff, and in Joint Intelligence Centers (JICs) during their career progression.16 Further, while there may be some duplication of effort between FAOs and intelligence officers, FAOs should serve as intelligence force multipliers by enhancing the information that intelligence officers, who are normally assigned based on factors other than regional expertise, provide to their commanders.
The Navy must also provide an incentive to achieve and maintain language proficiency. While some The mission assigned to FAOs quoted previously should add the following: "In addition, FAOs serve a critical role in the development and red-teaming of operations plans, serve in intelligence assessments, contribute to DoD human intelligence programs, and serve as political-military advisors to operational Navy staffs."
Accession should consist of an annual competitive board with specific allocations based on staffing needs. Applicants should possess at least five years of service and no more than eight and come from all officer communities.20
Training for new accessions should consist of 18 months of postgraduate education, 6-15 months of language training and between 6-12 months of in-country training.21
Placement should ensure a mix of in-country, operational, and staff assignments. The most common criticism of Army FAOs is that they lost touch with Army issues because they stay in-country too long. Adding operational and Navy staff positions to the FAO career path will help ameliorate this concern while keeping officers employed in positions within their regional expertise will ensure competencies and skills are maintained.
Career Milestones will reflect those in other communities, with screening boards for senior in-country positions at the commander level (command equivalent) and for the post of Special Assistant for Regional Affairs to an Operational Commander at the captain level (major command equivalent)22, which would be an assignment designed to approximate a combatant commander's political advisor. Additionally, FAO promotion should be 1-2 years behind Navy averages due to the long training time involved. (See Table 2.)23
Conclusion
The post-cold war environment has shown time and again that DoD needs culture-centric expertise for the planning and execution of various military operations. FAOs provide the regional and linguistic skills to support those operations. The Navy is correctly focusing on Human Capital Strategies that improve our warfighting capability and a revamped FAO program must be part of that process. Reconstituting the FAO program will create regional experts who can improve operational planning, intelligence, and strategic communications. Put simply, an overhauled FAO program will provide human capital and a long-term strategy for the Navy to better deal with the threats it is sure to face in the future.
Lieutenant Commander Boraz is a Western Hemisphere FAO and a 15-year veteran of Naval Intelligence. He is a distinguished graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and is currently a Federal Executive Fellow at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA.
1. Robert H. Scales Jr., "Culture-Centric Warfare," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2004, pp. 32-36. back to article
2. Secretary of Defense Memo, "Defense Capabilities to Transition to and from Hostilities," 8 October 2004. The "Roadmap" is at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050330roadmap.pdf. back to article
3. DoD Directive1315.17, "Military Department Foreign Area Officer Programs," 28 April 2005. back to article
4. OPNAVINST 1301.10, 23 April 1997. back to article
5. Ibid. back to article
6. Billets include assignments in the Personnel Exchange Program (PEP), Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC), Military Group (MILGP), Military Advisory Group (MAG), Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG), Military Liaison, Office (MLO), Security Assistance Organization (SAO), and as Defense Attaché Officers (DAO). back to article
7. See Defense Language Transformation Study at http://www.defenselink.mil/prhome/docs/dflttask2.doc, p. 22-23. back to article
8. In-country training generally consists of an officer being "home-based" out of an embassy and given a budget to manage his or her travel in the region. This sounds like a 12-month boondoggle, but the FAOs I spoke with all called this the most valuable part of their training because it provided not only language immersion but cultural immersion as well. back to article
9. Op cit. back to article
10. Ibid. back to article
11. USAF International Affairs Specialist Program Briefing. back to article
12. The N51 has recently developed a proposal for re-instituting the FAO program though has not determined the top course of action yet nor received approval to re-start a program. back to article
13. Aside from being the Senior Navy FAO, a FAO flag officer could compete for flag officer positions at embassies in China, France and Russia, and for N5/J5 positions at the Navy Staff, Combatant Commands, or the Joint Staff. back to article
14. Ralph Peters, "A Grave New World," Armed Forces Journal (April 2005), p. 36. back to article
15. Here I mean NAVSOUTH, CNFJ, CNFK, all numbered fleets, COMPACFLT and CFFC. back to article
16. This is routinely the case with Army FAOs. back to article
17. A list of language category codes is at http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/MCO7220_52D.pdf. back to article
18. Interviews by author with PERS 4411C (25 January 2005) and PERS 442C (26 January 2005). Also see Attaché Placement officer "Frequently Asked Questions" at link to article. back to article
19. Schirmer et al., New Paths to Success: Determining Alternatives for Field Grade Officers (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2004), p. 35. This study also recommends eliminating up-or-out for Army FAOs. back to article
20. One of the N51 proposals is to accept only URLs as FAOs — that could adversely limit the available personnel from which to choose. back to article
21. The Navy can probably accept 6 months of in-country training for FAOs with specialization in CAT I and CAT II languages but CAT III and CAT IV trained FAOs need the full 12 months in-country to improve language skills. back to article
22. In-country assignments include those listed in note 6 above. back to article
23. Navy Staff, Combatant Command or Joint Staff (including DIA) assignments. back to article