“Whether we bring our enemies to justice

or bring justice to our enemies,

justice will be done."

- President Bush, 21 September 2001

05 November 2001.  It was less than two months after the events of September 11^th, when the Group Commander called me into his office.  “Joe, how would you like to command another Detachment?”  I had been working a desk job for almost seven months and it was killing me.  My peers were on their way to Afghanistan - doing what I was trained to do and I was standing on the sideline – assigned to the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, it is the Special Forces “School House.”  I missed commanding a Special Forces Detachment and leading Special Forces Soldiers.  “Great Sir. What is it and when do I go?” 

  The Group Commander continued, “There is a huge demand for Special Forces Soldiers in response to the war on terror.  We can’t recruit enough Soldiers from the active force to meet the need.  Using an ‘off-the-street’ recruiting program, we can draw from a much larger pool of candidates and can meet the needs of Special Forces Command.  The National Guard has five NCOs that have a small but successful program to prepare National Guard Soldiers for Special Forces Assessment & Selection – they will be the foundation of your new detachment.  They are accustomed to running a course with a student to instructor ratio of 3:1, but you won’t have that luxury.  Your mission is to be ready to train up to 125 Soldiers to successfully complete Special Forces Assessment and Selection by January 5^th.  I don’t have any barracks for you, no dedicated training areas and no mess hall.  Figure it out.” 

  Now that’s a mission I can sink my teeth into – less than six weeks to execution, very few constraints and a clear desired end state – allowing me figure out the “how.”  With that, I engineered the program that is rapidly growing to include a huge percentage of the Soldiers entering the Special Forces Training pipeline.   Originally, I was allocated only two weeks to train and prepare the Soldiers for Special Forces Assessment and Selection, also known as SFAS.   How do you get privates ready for SFAS in two weeks?  Throwing them into a meat grinder without proper training would be a waste of time, energy, money and training resources.  Luckily, we were able to use the ten days allowed for a permanent change of station move to begin their training.  This gave us almost 4 weeks to prepare the recruits for SFAS – and four weeks was enough time to meet the requirement.

  How do we prepare initial entry Soldiers to successfully complete SFAS with four weeks of training?  This was the focus of all my attention.  Initial entry Soldiers military experience would be limited to basic infantry training and Airborne School.  The National Guard had a good foundation, but we wouldn’t have the luxury of a tremendously low student to instructor ratio to accomplish the task.  We had to develop a course and systems that would allow us to duplicate their results without the tremendous demand for instructors, who were harder to find than any other resource. 

  Reverse engineering was the key.  I realized that SFAS, although difficult, was not an insurmountable task.  If I could complete it, anyone could.   First, I had to determine what caused candidates to fail at SFAS, then engineer training to prevent or minimize those factors.  The next step was to arrange that training into a coherent training plan that took only four weeks to accomplish everything.  Finally, we needed the training resources to meet the needs of the students and instructors – and we needed everything in less than six weeks.  It would be an interesting couple of weeks.

  Special Forces Assessment & Selection (SFAS) is an intense course where Special Forces Candidates are tested mentally, physically and emotionally through various tests and events that evaluate their fitness, trainability, suitability and maturity to continue in the Special Forces Training Pipeline.  Traditionally, Special Forces Candidates were drawn strictly from a qualified pool of experienced Soldiers who had already proven themselves in conventional units.  This program was breaking that mold and allowing privates to enter into Special Forces Training.  Course criteria and graduation requirements would not change, only who was assessed for further training.

The Special Operations Preparation and Conditioning Course (SOPC) is what the preparatory training became known as...and it's success has put countless young Soldiers through the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) and ultimately onto Special Forces Detachments and into combat.

  It was an honor to be handed such an important task at such a crtical time for our Force.