Army - Kicking Tires On Jltv

U.S. Army/Sgt. Gemma Iglesias
Above: Soldiers from African nations visit the
Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels,
Germany; left: Soldiers from the 173rd
Airborne Brigade demonstrate room-clearing
techniques to Ukrainian troops in Ukraine.
U.S. Army/Spc. Joshua Leonard
For Army units involved in RAF, the devotion to a particular
region helps provide purpose for home-station training, ensuring
that they focus on what combatant commanders want. With
“engagement” now listed as one of the Army’s warfighting functions
and “shaping the security environment” counted among
the core competencies of the Army, the security cooperation nature
of many RAF-executed deployments demonstrates that a
unit’s participation in RAF can directly contribute to its preparedness
to execute some of the Army’s core missions.
Prepare for Domination
Several RAF activities to build partner capacity were conducted
alongside special operations forces with long experience
in the region, with general purpose and special operations forces
complementing each other’s capabilities. All of this prepares
units to dominate the human domain, as ground forces are
called upon to do. Small-unit, geographically distributed expeditionary
missions also provide excellent leadership and command
opportunities, and force the exercise
of Mission Command at a time
when situational awareness tools seem to
allow this prerogative of effective operations
to be a popular theme that is often
ignored in practice.
Despite these clear successes, criticisms
of the RAF concept remain, and some of
them are valid. The concern that implementation
would be too costly to the
Army has been shown to be largely unfounded,
as many RAF-executed activities
are financed with Title 22 (Department
of State) funding for activities
related to building partner capacity, or through exercise-related
funds. This money would be spent anyway, regardless of which
unit participated in the exercise.
There is, however, an opportunity cost for a unit involved in
RAF. For example, time spent on learning to use a foreign
weapon for an activity related to building partner capacity is
time that is not spent conducting battle drills. Some 20 years
ago, soldiers participating in peacekeeping missions in Bosnia
developed the small-unit leadership skills and attributes that
proved to be essential in operations in Afghanistan over the
last 15 years. We should expect similar intangible benefits and
training offset from soldiers conducting activities that are new
to them in regions they do not know well today.
Some of the more common criticisms of the RAF concept are
related to its definition and why it’s important. Since its inception,
RAF has meant different things to different people: a new
focus on building partner capacity, to some soldiers; predictable
availability of troops, to geographic combatant commands; per-
February 2016 ■ ARMY 33