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These articles were selected from publicly available sources and compiled as a resource for the government, industry, and research community interested in culture and personnel issues relevant to national security. Excerpts of each article are provided with the title and link to the full text. Some articles may be accessible only with a subscription. The views expressed in these articles do not reflect the positions of the Institute for Defense Analyses or the positions or policies of the U.S. government.

Praise the Host and Pass the Fish Sauce

I was not sure what to expect when I was first assigned as the officer in charge of an embedded training team in support of the Afghan National Security Forces in 2006. I had once read David Donovan’s Once a Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam, the autobiographical story of an adviser in Vietnam, but he was a combat arms officer, and I was a Medical Service Corps officer. Recognizing that the role of advising was not a new military mission, I wondered what the experience of medical advisers had been in our last sustained war, Vietnam. As one reads through memoirs, reports, and analyses written before the January–February 1968 Tet Offensive, the goal of enabling a fledgling country to become self-sustaining was emerging and doing well. The medical field, in particular, benefited from dedicated advisers and other medical personnel providing education and assistance to their military medical counterparts. The roles of advisers in Vietnam, specifically those in the Army Medical Department, are presented here as a reminder of the valuable work those individuals accomplished and as potential historical lessons for similar future counterinsurgency missions.
http://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/September-October-2017/Woodard-Praise-the-Host-and-Pass-the-Fish-Sauce/

Security Force Assistance Brigades: It’s About Time

A reduced U.S. military footprint around the world coupled with an increase in state and non-state threats, whether it’s Russia, North Korea, ISIS, or AQ, has forced us to reconsider our strategy and posture. We can’t be everywhere, nor do we want to be. But our interests are global so we need friends and allies around the world to assist us in shaping the environment (Phase 0 efforts) in an effort to mitigate regional instability and avoid wide-scale conflict. The U.S. Army will soon officially activate its first purpose-built conventional advisor unit, the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade (1st SFAB) at FT Benning, Georgia. This brigade will be the first of six designed specifically for security force assistance, deploying elements ranging in size from 10 to 100 or more. In addition to standing up the SFAB, the Army has stood up a Military Advisor Training Academy (MATA) to prepare officers and NCOs for their assignment as SFAB advisors. With a division and corps level advisor headquarters potentially on the horizon as well, it seems that John Nagl’s 2007 recommendation for an “advisor corps” is finally taking shape.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/security-force-assistance-brigades-it%E2%80%99s-about-time

Special Operations Forces in the 21st Century: Perspectives from the Social Sciences

This book sets out the major social scientific approaches to the study of Special Operations Forces. Despite consistent downsizing, over the past two decades the armed forces of the industrial democracies have seen a huge growth in Special Operations Forces (SOF). Through increasing numbers of personnel and more frequent deployments, SOF units have wielded considerable influence in conflicts around the world, with senior SOF officers having led major strategic operations. This increased presence and unprecedented expansion for SOF is largely a result of the ‘new’ kinds of conflicts that have emerged in the 21st century. At the same time, even with this high profile in the military, policy and media and popular cultural arenas, there is relatively little social scientific research on SOF. This volume aims to fill this gap by providing a series of studies and analyses of SOF across the globe, since the end of World War II. Analysing SOF at the micro, mezzo and macro levels provides broad and diverse insights. Moreover, the volume deals with new issues raised by the use of such forces that include emerging modes of civilian control, innovative organizational forms and the special psychological characteristics necessitated by SOF operatives. It concludes with a discussion of a question which continues to be debated in today’s militaries: what makes SOF ‘special’?
https://www.routledge.com/Special-Operations-Forces-in-the-21st-Century-Perspectives-from-the-Social/Turnley-Michael-Ben-Ari/p/book/9781138632622

Reinventing Social Science in the Military: Lessons Learned from the United States and New Zealand

At first glance, the relationship between social science and the military may not be clear. A closer analysis of the opportunities that social science offers the military shows, however, that it provides a variety of research and educational capabilities to address the human dimensions of military organizations and their operational contexts. For instance, psychological and human performance criteria are firmly rooted in social science constructs within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).1 In New Zealand, this argument shifts toward education, notably whether social science should be taught as part of professional military education (PME) of senior officers. The New Zealand 2016 National Security System and 2016 Defense White Paper both emphasize whole- of-government approaches to defense and security, and that basic social science education can give aspiring commanders another tool to understand complexity, or the variety of horizontal, whole-of-society, institutional, political, structural, economic, and social dimensions of the nation’s security threats and risks.
http://cco.ndu.edu/News/Article/1299601/reinventing-social-science-in-the-military-lessons-learned-from-the-united-stat/

Army Kills Contracts for Hundreds of Immigrant Recruits

Internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Post have said the immigrant recruitment program, formally known as the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) program, was suspended last fall after the clearance process was paralyzed and officials voiced concern over foreign infiltrators, though it remains unclear whether any threats have ever materialized. Experts say the relatively small number of recruits in the MAVNI program possess skills with outsize value, such as foreign languages highly sought by Special Operations Command. The program has rotated 10,400 troops into the military, mostly the Army, since its inception in 2009.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/09/15/army-kills-contracts-for-hundreds-of-immigrant-recruits-sources-say-some-face-deportation/?hpid=hp_no-name_hp-in-the-news%3Apage%2Fin-the-news&utm_term=.bcd5513180ab

Language and Culture Note 1: On the Gray Zone and the Space Between War and Peace

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operations Enduring Freedom (OEF) were the first large-scale counterinsurgency efforts the US had ever been involved in and created a very steep learning curve in missions seeded with non-kinetic and population-centric operations. If OIF and OEF confronted the US military with undergraduate cross-cultural issues and needs, Syria today gives us a PhD lesson in the cross-cultural complexity that now confounds our involvement in areas around the world. The evolution of how we now go to war, or perhaps, better, how war now fits into missions that always feature a complex web of social and cultural relations has brought us to this point in time. We are not in Kansas anymore. This essay, or “note” will focus specifically on the utility or lack of utility of using mission-centric labels, such as gray zone, in conceptualizing and operationalizing mission “space,” place and activity. Bottom-line, there are all sorts of dangers of using comfortable concepts, labels and approaches to define and discern intent and motivation in behaviors of others. We may not be in Kansas anymore, but are we in our deployments around the world really in a human domain or gray zone?
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/language-culture-note-1-on-the-gray-zone-and-the-space-between-war-and-peace

DoD Suggests Changing Promotion Boards to Keep Talent

The Defense Department wants Congress to change the law regarding one of the most controversial parts of the military’s “up or out” system. A Sept. 11 DoD legislative proposal asks Congress to allow officers to opt-out of promotion board consideration upon request if it is deemed beneficial to the military. The idea is something brought up in the past by former Defense Secretary Ash Carter as part of the Force of the Future initiative, which expanded maternity leave for service members and lengthened child care hours, among other things.
https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-news/2017/09/dod-suggests-changing-promotion-boards-to-keep-talent/

Military Civilian Workforce Summit Gives Air Force First Forum on Talent Management

In the past year and a half the Air Force has made a significant push to ease unnecessary burdens on its airmen and give them more time with their families to better the force. The most recent iteration of that includes a military and civilian workforce summit hosted by the Air Force Talent Management Innovation Cell. That summit wrapped up this week. “We view talent as a collective set of knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences and potential that our Airmen bring to the Air Force. Air Force talent management is an integrated set of personnel processes designed to meet mission objectives by optimizing Airmen’s talent,” said Lt. Gen. Gina Grosso said, deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services in a Sept. 1 statement.
https://federalnewsradio.com/defense/2017/09/military-civilian-workforce-summit-gives-air-force-first-forum-on-talent-management/

AETC Commander Discusses Continuum of Learning, Force Development at AFA

Learning. It's a mentality as much as it is an activity. In Air Education and Training Command, learning is being looked at whole-sale, to meet the demands of a modern force and to meet the needs of tomorrow's fight. Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson, AETC commander, speaking before a room overflowing with Airmen from around the Air Force, presented the redesigned Continuum of Learning in a discussion at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Sept. 19, 2017, in which Airmen were invited to take part and ask questions about how the shift in learning culture would affect them.
http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1317732/aetc-commander-discusses-continuum-of-learning-force-development-at-afa/

Memo to Government Reformers: Don’t Forget the Soft Stuff

The Trump Administration is committed to restructuring government. Recently the Volcker Alliance and the Partnership for Public Service announced a joint blueprint for reform, Renewing America’s Civil Service. Together those initiatives promise to change the bureaucracy—the regulations, rules, systems, reporting relationships, assigned duties, etc. The civil service reform initiative is comprehensive. If implemented, it would be the broadest revision of federal HR management in a century. The reform is intended “to help ensure that our government has a first-class workforce.” Missing from the public statements, however, is any reference to the impact the changes would have on the workplace or how the reforms will help solve government’s workforce management problems. The Sept. 5 announcement highlighted the lack of interest in government careers among young people and the high percentage of employees eligible to retire in five years. Even more important than attracting well qualified applicants is keeping the best performers. Implicit is that changing the HR policies or systems is the solution. But both the Trump administration and the Alliance/Partnership initiatives overlook the research on the importance of the “softer” issues—organizational culture, healthy organizations and employee engagement.
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2017/09/memo-government-reformers-dont-forget-soft-stuff/141113/?oref=eig-homepage-module

America’s Government Is Getting Old

It's no secret that American workers are getting older. Even as millennials become the biggest cohort in the labor force, the median age of all U.S. employees has crept up from 30 to 42 over the past 30 years. But when it comes to getting older, a POLITICO analysis finds, the private sector has nothing on the U.S. government. The U.S. just elected the oldest new president in history, and Congress, too, has been getting consistently older, with its average age now up around 60. But the vast majority of the government consists of the 2 million-strong federal civilian workforce. And thanks to slow-moving hiring practices and a huge cohort of baby boomers who haven’t retired at the predicted rates, it has grown significantly older than the American workforce overall.
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/27/aging-government-workforce-analysis-000525

Principles and Practices for Federal Program Evaluation: Proceedings of a Workshop

In October 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a 1-day public workshop on Principles and Practices for Federal Program Evaluation. The workshop was organized to consider ways to bolster the integrity and protect the objectivity of the evaluation function in federal agencies—a process that is essential for evidence-based policy making. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24831/principles-and-practices-for-federal-program-evaluation-proceedings-of-a?utm_source=NASEM+News+and+Publications&utm_campaign=df636d6952-NAP_mail_new_2017-09-05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_96101de015-df636d6952-103042273&mc_cid=df636d6952&mc_eid=f2f7e79cb0