528th Sustainment Brigade

 There is an old military maxim: “Amateurs study tactics, but professionals study logistics.” Nowhere is this more true than within the small but highly effective unit known as the 528th Sustainment Brigade. Supporting all of USASOC’s units, both stateside and deployed overseas, the 528th is U.S. Army logistics distilled down to its smallest and simplest form, with an efficiency that few other military units anywhere achieve. Col. Thomas J. Rogers commands the brigade, ably supported throughout 2012 by Command Sgt. Maj. Bobby R. Hagy, acting as the brigade’s senior enlisted adviser.

 

The Future: Silent Quest 13-1 and ARSOF 2022

As America’s massive commitments of forces to Southwest Asia during the long war of the early 21st century draw down, the obvious question for America’s SOF community is, “What do we do now?” It is a question with a great deal of relevance and value in light of the pending cutbacks within DoD, and the continuing budget crisis within the American government as a whole. While they have seen the value and achievements of SOF over the past seven decades, and especially the past dozen years since 9/11, they are not passive about the future. It is important to remember that no successful American Army has ever come home from victorious combat and failed to be cut to the bone, and the present day is no exception to that rule.

SOCOM Commander Adm. William H. McRaven proposed his “Global SOF Network” in 2012, designed to remake the U.S. SOF community into a more relevant and sustainable force into the middle of the 21st century. At the core of the Global SOF Network is his goal of using U.S. SOF units to go out around the world and help build new relationships, allied/partner military capacity, and support those nations desiring to make their military/internal security forces more capable. With these basic goals understood, the USASOC leadership initiated their own studies and efforts to begin making the Global SOF Network into working plans and doctrine.

For USASOC, this process began within exercise known as Silent Quest 13-1. Silent Quest provided an experimental medium for the various USASOC component commands to begin exercising ideas about what they plan to do in the next decade. The exercise is a synthetic scenario, placed about a decade into the future, allowing the command elements to exercise against a variety of proposed future threats in situations during that period. Col. Ernesto Sirvas, director for USASOC’s Concepts, Experimentation and Analysis or G-9, indicated the various Silent Quest 13-1 scenarios were designed to test the command’s future concepts from all USASOC components, along with other interagency and DoD partners.

“Silent Quest 13-1 is the main experimentation effort for this command,” Sirvas said. “It will provide future senior decision-makers with innovative ideas and viable options to better operate in future environments.”

MISOC’s Warburg, also the exercise director for Silent Quest 13-1, explained the direction for this particular Silent Quest.

“The Silent Quest exercise series is nested with the Army’s Unified Quest and the USSCOM’s Shadow Warrior project,” he said. “USASOC has taken the first step in USSCOM’s family of subordinate commands by scheduling and executing a major exercise. And certainly what we are doing with 13-1 will not only support USASOC’s Silent Quest 13-2, but will also inform the Army’s next Unified Quest exercise as well as ongoing USSCOM programs [of] the role that special operations forces can provide.”

Silent Quest 13-1 is just the first of a series of such exercises, the next of which will commence in the fall of 2013. Therefore, Silent Quest is an ongoing learning opportunity that works within the framework of Army Special Operations Force (ARSOF) 2022’s Campaign of Learning. Derived from the lessons learned in other studies, the resulting ARSOF 2022 document is the commander’s strategic vision for change.

“ARSOF 2022 describes precepts and imperatives that will enable ARSOF to thrive in a future operating environment that is characterized by uncertainties,” said Cleveland.

 

The Cost: 2012

Every year since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, USASOC has lost warriors in combat operations. And every Memorial Day since 2002, there has been a gathering at the Memorial Wall adjacent to USASOC Headquarters to mark their sacrifice and add their names onto the stone tablets that marked the losses. 2012 was no exception in this tradition, and on May 25, then-USASOC Commander Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland Jr., hosted the ceremony in the presence of friends and family members of the fallen, to add their names to the Army SOF Roll of Honor.

This article was first published in The Year in Special Operations: 2013-2014 Edition.