The work by the military team was exceptional and really established a baseline of where SOF unit and personnel strength should be working in the years ahead. Once we had the answer to the first part, we added the enablers to support the force and that provided a “strawman” of where we needed to go.

We then formed a QDR team, which built the plan and developed a “playbook.” It was detailed. We knew the force structure, the program costs and the timeline for every new unit or capability in our plan. The entire plan came together when we put my then-deputy, Adm. Eric Olson, USN, in Washington, D.C., almost full time, to lead our team. He was tremendous, and in my opinion our methodology and attention to detail brought us great success.

To name just a few areas of success, we grew our Army Special Forces operators that were vital to our operations in OEF and OIF. We also grew the U.S. Navy SEALS, and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

Air Force Special Operations Command [AFSOC] made the greatest transformation as we added to the Foreign Internal Defense [FID]Squadron, bought additional manned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance [ISR] platforms, added an MQ-1 Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle [UAV] Wing to work for SOCOM, and a fleet of non-standard aircraft for the various theater-level SOF component commands. I am told that many of these SOCOM initiatives are now in the field, and doing well.

I cannot say enough about the sacrifice of the QDR team that lived in D.C. for months to ensure success in the QDR. They worked tirelessly. One last thing we developed was an online “dashboard” as we began fielding these new units and capabilities, so that the leadership could go online every day and follow the growth and immediately identify those areas where there were problems.

Was this trend to transform and enlarge the SOF schoolhouses first something that has been mirrored by the conventional forces when they grow, or unique to SOCOM?

I think it is partly a matter of scale, because if the conventional forces were to grow by some really big numbers, they would have to enlarge their training centers. They could expand their forces a little without having to significantly grow their schools; we in SOCOM could not. Frankly the percentage of growth in special operations was so dramatic, fully one-third in active-duty Army Special Forces (SF) groups (SFGs) for example, that there was no way we could have grown SOF end strength without ensuring the building/enlarging of the schoolhouses first and adding to our training capacity/throughput. By comparison, the recent percentage growth authorized for the U.S. Army is in the low single digits, about 22,000 out of 500,000. We simply could not do that in the special operations community.

You have to remember that when I was the U.S. Army Special Operations Command commander, we were well short of SF “A-Teams” and SF non-commissioned officers (NCOs), and it seemed to me that it was very difficult to get any initiative going to grow the force and fill those empty SF manpower slots. In fact, at one point I was told to take those slots and move them somewhere else that we needed, but I did not do that. I felt then and now that the SF groups are the heart and soul of USASOC. We tried some things down at the JFK Special Warfare Center and School [JFKSWCS], but we did not grow very fast.

I will tell you that once I was the SOCOM commander and Maj. Gen. Jim Parker, USA, went into the JFKSWCS, his work down there at Fort Bragg, N.C., was magnificent. He reorganized the entire structure of the school, streamlined the way that we recruit and train SF NCOs, and maintained the standards of quality and excellence of that community. I did not originally think we could grow the SF community as quickly and keep that quality the way Jim Parker reorganized it. I think that Jim Parker did it all! Now, I think it needs to be said that what he did had a large dose of common sense, by identifying the bottlenecks and streamlining the processes of the SF Q-Course. For example, we used to recruit and assess SF soldiers, and then put them through this incredible course, but then if they failed the foreign language course, [they] were eliminated. What Jim Parker did was to start teaching language from the beginning of the course, so the students can be assessed much earlier, and not waste their time or the Army’s. He really remapped the entire program. We also resourced the JFKSWCS much better than we had previously, which helped Jim and his people power through to success.