Marine Trainers Bound for Africa, S. America

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InsideDefense.com NewsStand | Zachary M. Peterson | May 22, 2006

Camp Lejeune, NC -- Despite delays, the first four Marine Corps foreign military units are set to deploy to Africa and South America before the end of the fiscal year, according to Lt. Col. Daniel Kaiser, executive officer for the foreign military training unit headquarters.

The first unit was supposed to deploy to an African nation in April, but security issues in the country postponed the deployment date, said Maj. Cliff Gilmore, spokesman for the recently-formed Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC). The mission location has not changed, Kaiser told Inside the Navy during an interview in his office here May 15.

Gilmore declined to comment on where in Western Africa and South America the units will deploy. He acknowledged the Africa deployment falls under U.S. European Command's Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, a program that involves Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and other countries. Marine units have previously trained troops in Chad and Niger.

At a special operations conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association in March, Army Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, commander of Special Operations Command South, cited the need to build the capacity of foreign militaries in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru (ITN , March 20, p1).

“I really look forward to bringing the [foreign military training units] on board because we've already programmed some missions for them,” Cleveland said.

Beyond the four units that will deploy this year, Kaiser said, 22 missions are planned for fiscal year 2007. These missions may include repeat deployments to the same countries, he explained. The duration of the deployments will vary.

“Anywhere between six weeks and three months will be a typical deployment,” he said.

Right now, three units are mission capable and a total of six teams will be trained, equipped and capable of worldwide deployment by the end of this fiscal year, according to a briefing slide provided to ITN .

A total of eight 11-man units are formed, with two more set to come together this summer, Lt. Col. Andrew Crabb, operations officer for the foreign military unit headquarters, told ITN May 16.

Eventually, the foreign military training component of MARSOC will consist of 24 units divided into two companies of 12 units each. Company A, or Alpha Company, will focus on the areas of responsibility of U.S. Central and Pacific commands, while Company B, or Bravo Company, will focus on U.S. European and Southern commands. Currently, the units set to deploy this year are part of Alpha Company, but will nonetheless deploy to EUCOM and SOUTHCOM, Kaiser noted.

Each 11-man unit is commanded by a Marine major. Under the commander there is also a captain, who is the team leader, and a gunnery sergeant, who is the senior enlisted Marine. Every unit, or team, has a corpsman and communicator along with six enlisted Marines generally at the rank of corporal or above.

These units are tasked with training foreign militaries and providing combat advisers in countries where ungovernable regions or civil wars could potentially have implications on U.S. national security -- what U.S. Special Operations Command labels “foreign internal defense” missions.

Kaiser said there is also a secondary unconventional warfare core task to these units, which may increase once SOCOM issues its mission guidance letter to MARSOC.

“Right now we're focused on [foreign internal defense],” Kaiser said.

Kaiser explained Marine foreign military units will “complement” what Army Special Forces units have been doing for years.

“We complement what Army SF teams are doing, there's no doubt about it,” Kaiser said. “There's enough work to go around for everybody -- more than enough work.”

The mission statement for the Marine units calls for providing tailored military, combat skills training and adviser support for “identified foreign forces in order to enhance the tactical capability of partner nation forces, and prepare the environment in support of SOCOM.”

The first unit, scheduled to go to Africa sometime this summer, has been training together since last year. The unit has been studying French and going through cultural and intelligence training along with conventional U.S. and foreign weapons training.

Though the unit will deploy not intending to enter combat, there is a force protection element that is essential to its mission.

“There's a force protection piece,” Maj. Chris Nicewarner, commander of Team One, told ITN during a break in a two-day weapons training exercise. “We have to train for the worst-case scenario.”

With the small size of each foreign military training unit, Nicewarner said it is essential each Marine and corpsman in the unit can perform at a high level.

“When you've only got 11 guys, you can't have one who's mediocre,” he explained.

Crabb, operations officer for the foreign military unit headquarters, said the units will deploy “late” this summer. Though he did not identify where the units would deploy, Crabb noted site surveys have been performed in six different countries in three areas of responsibility. He added that Marines are “not going there as tourists,” explaining that the surveys consist of in-depth research on accommodations for the units, the capabilities of the host nation's military and potential threats in the area. The result of the surveys is a “tailored, unique plan” for each mission, he said.

Crabb said political and other types of issues within countries will not be anomalies for these units, but rather the norm.

“We're a flexible and adaptive organization,” he noted.

The foreign military units will be “very busy” in the fiscal year 2007, Crabb added. He said they have “more than enough on our plate.”

During congressional testimony in March, SOCOM commander Army Gen. Bryan “Doug” Brown said, “The foreign military units have a language capability, operate in small teams and are going to be very valuable to us [SOCOM] to go into areas and train host nation forces to better defend their borders and better eliminate terrorist activities in the traditional foreign internal defense mission we routinely do today.”

“We are not doing as much [foreign military training] as we would like to around the world, simply because of our commitment to the [U.S. Central Command area of responsibility],” he added. “[The Marine Corps units] will give us additional capability.”

Crabb said these Marine units are not focused on training missions in Afghanistan or Iraq in the near term.

“We are focused on what our commanding officer [currently Col. Pete Petronzio] likes to call the ‘next ridge line over in the war on terrorism,'” he said.

Currently, the foreign military training unit as a whole is in the “building stage,” Crabb said. According to the command brief, the foreign military training unit component of MARSOC will consist of a total of 434 Marines (a total end strength of 2,600 is slated for MARSOC as a whole). As of May 15, there were 236 Marines on-hand at the command's headquarters at Camp Lejeune.

The foreign military units make up one-third of the recently-formed MARSOC, which was formed late last year and officially stood up in February. A Marine special operations regiment (the source of Marine special operations companies) and Marine special operations support group (a wide range of combat enablers, including fire support, intelligence, interrogators, linguists and logistics forces) round out the MARSOC.

The foreign military training unit component was formed prior to the establishment of the MARSOC last November. The foreign military training unit activated Oct. 11, 2005, as part of the now-defunct 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade.