#208: Small, Light, Fast, Agile...Lethal - 1st Special Forces Command BG Joseph Wortham, CSM Lee Strong, CW5 Jerry Brown

The Jedburgh Podcast

The command team of 1st Special Forces Command discusses the rapid evolution required to meet modern battlefield threats. They explore how t

Key takeaways

• The 12-man ODA structure is being preserved as a core unit, with new technical capabilities 'bolted on' to meet modern demands.
• A new Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) for robotics is being developed to manage the rapid six-week innovation cycle of unmanned technology.

Main topics

• Evolution of Special Forces
• 12-man ODA structure

Notable quotes

Humans are more important than hardware.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a strategic balance between honoring military t

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) The battlefield is changing faster than ever before. America's adversaries are adapting in weeks instead of years. For U.S. Army Special Forces, rapid evolution while maintaining the people, partnerships, and culture that have made Special Forces effective for generations is the key to success on today's battlefield. From the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Museum at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I sat down with the command team of 1st Special Forces Command, Brigadier General Joseph Wortham, Command Sergeant Major Lionel Strong, and Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jerry Brown. Together, they lead the U.S. Army's Green Berets, civil affairs, psychological operations, and the soldiers who enable them. Their mission? Prepare, train, and equip Army Special Operations forces to win against an increasingly complex global threat. We discuss whether the legendary 12-man ODA is still the right formation for the wars of 2030 and 2040, and why the future may not require changing its core, but building new capabilities around it. Robotics and unmanned systems are rapidly becoming part of that evolution, including the development of specialized technical expertise designed to keep pace with technology that can change in a matter of weeks. But technology alone will never define special forces. We examine where Green Berets are supporting large-scale combat operations, how special forces can shape the deep fight for conventional commanders, and why psychological operations, civil affairs, and trusted partner forces become even more important against peer adversaries. The battlefield may look different from the one this generation fought throughout the global war on terror, but the requirement remains the same. Create options, influence the fight, and give the joint force an advantage before the enemy ever knows we're there. The next generation of Army Special Operators will fight with tools its predecessors could have never imagined, but its greatest advantage will remain the same. Exceptional people, trusted partners, and a culture built to take on the missions others cannot. The Jedberg Podcast is brought to you by OneBreathe. enabling military leaders to make innovative, informed, and deliberate decisions faster than ever before. Superhuman command Speaker 4 (2:00) wins wars. Speaker 3 (2:02) Follow the Jedberg Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge. Speaker 3 (2:18) General Wortham, CSM Strong, Chief Brown, welcome to the Jedberg Podcast. Speaker 1 (2:23) Well, thanks for having us. We're super excited to be here. I know this is my first time on the podcast. I think you have a repeat offender over there beside me. He was a star. Speaker 3 (2:32) Yeah. Huge star from when the CSM was at SWCC. And so, yeah, we had a chance. How does it help you to say that either? And then, of course, Jerry. Yeah. First time. First time. Glad to be here. All right. So you owe beer. I do. That's the way it works. That's the way it works. I do. The boss owes whiskey because he's a general. So that's the way it goes. I think General Linder taught me that. Speaker 1 (2:54) Yeah. He would know. General Linder would know. That's right. Speaker 3 (2:59) Well, we're honored to sit down here with you. We're back in the JFK Special Warfare Museum here at SWCC on Fort Bragg. We feel like this is home. And so we want to give a quick shout out to Roxanne and her staff here. They do such a great job. And every time we come in here, there's new, there's so many new exhibits and how dedicated they are to telling the story. of the regiment and Army Special Operations Forces throughout history, I think is unmatched. And so we appreciate them and we appreciate the time to sit here with you guys because first, Special Forces Command is at the center of it all. We have a lot of units in the Army Special Operations Command, but for me, for you guys, this is home. And your organization sits front and center when we talk about Army Special Forces capability. And so when you look, sir, across the formation today, and we're going to talk a lot about the evolution of the current combat environment and our adversaries and what we're facing. What is your guidance on the mission to 1st Special Forces Command? Speaker 1 (4:04) First of all, what I think makes 1st Special Forces Command unique, not only in the use of SOC, but also for SOCOM and really the department is. We don't like to do anything by ourselves. We do everything with a partner. So everything that when we look at a problem and we train people, equip people, everything's done through the lens and the focus of it's partner-faced. And we don't like to go to war by ourselves. We will. And we've done that through our history. But our value is certainly being able to bring alongside partners, allies, and whoever and do that. And we think that sets us apart from, and that's really our... center of who we are. When Speaker 3 (4:46) we look at our partner forces and our ability to, as Green Berets primarily, and we have our CA and our PSYOPs units that we'll talk about, that relationship that we forge with our partners is critical to force multiplication. Chief, you spent time at 110, so fellow 10th group here. Just a little bit. Yeah, just a small amount of time. But as a forward deployed battalion, you have an opportunity at a greater scale sometimes than those who serve in like 10th Maine to really interact and build those relationships, especially across the European theater. Talk about the importance of those partnerships and throughout a career, because I mean, I'm still talking to the Italians that I met in Africa. Speaker 2 (5:31) Right. So proximity is key, right? You're there in Europe with them. So it's unlike traveling from CONUS to go and do small unit exchanges or J-sets. And that's built on a legacy of those partnerships since 10th Group was first installed there in Germany in 1952. And it's just building on those relationships and that legacy of partnerships with our adjacent either like elements, whether they're soft or even they're conventional forces. And you name a country, each one of them. wants an opportunity to work with US SOF and with the United States Army. CSM. When we look at the Speaker 3 (6:07) formation, there's a lot of effort that we put on our language development, on understanding culture of our partners. How are we instilling the importance of cultural awareness, understanding, language capability, and being able to look at the problem set that's been given to us by our higher headquarters and our senior leaders within the government, but we got to look at that lens through our partner's eyes to best get them to support what our end state is. How are we instilling that within our- Yeah, Speaker 4 (6:43) I Speaker 3 (6:43) think, Speaker 4 (6:43) again, At the core of everything we do is partnered operations. And then how do we create a culture that truly sees the value of partnering? And I think as we go and we deploy around the world, those partnerships have to be, they have to be genuine. They have to be authentic. And I think we start that initial foundation baseline training here at language school. So if we rewind all of us, or we just graduated, finished Robin Sage, graduating the Q course, you're thinking, how am I going to learn a foreign language? That's like what's in your mind as a student is the emphasis on learning that language. The true value of our course is the cultural piece of it, not the language. We're baselining people to learn about empathy and appreciate the situations of these people. And then as you go forward and you go somewhere and you're eating lunch with those folks or living in their neighborhoods and walking a mile in their shoes, you start to build those real genuine relationships. And you see those play out over generations. Where two weeks ago at the last regimental first formation, CSM Dorsch was the guest speaker and he gave a great example. of uh they were trying to do something operationally down south and it was a cw5 and seventh group that had 10 years you know 20 years deploying the same area and was able to pick up the phone and in one phone call the relationship eliminate friction and make things move fast um and i think that's the value of our relationship but it starts by being a just a genuine authentic good partner not transactional when you look sir at at the command Speaker 3 (8:10) You have the special forces groups, you have civil affairs, and you have psychological operations as the three core components of the command. You serve as a force provider who has to train, man train and equip the organizations to then supply them in a sense to the TSOCs for employment. How do you balance that? When you look at readiness, what are your top priorities? Speaker 1 (8:35) So when I talk about readiness and we think about it, you know, there's three kind of core things that when we think about our priorities and one is lethality, right? And we think about war fighting. And when I think about that, I think about is what are the fundamental baseline tasks that what makes an SFODA, right? You know, we're deployed, you know, in 70 plus countries around the world. Those people want our teams and our people there. Because we're good at the basics, right? They know that the U.S. and what we do is we're good at those baseline capabilities. And so they want to train with us. They want to be with us. And so when I think about lethality, it's what it means to be a great team and what it means to be, whether it's a civil affairs detachment or a CA team or any of our other units of action. And we've actually been on a great journey over this. past year, really just to kind of what should be common to all and really raise the baseline expectations. So when those units do go out to a TSOG commander, a theater special operations commander, they can expect like, hey, this is the minimum that they're able to do. And then that buys down their risk to mission, right? Because it's less risk to force. So our people are more prepared. That means that they are. easier and they're more agile to be moved from what was an anticipated mission. And it gives commanders, especially out in the COCOMs, the ability to take one unit that maybe had not trained for that specific mission, but able to quickly allow them to pivot and do something completely different maybe. So that's what I'd say. So it's first, it's lethality. Lee talked a little bit about people and he talked about The language parts of that and what we do, you know, first off, truth, right? Humans are more important than hardware. And so those humans, those people that are in our formation is what makes us great, right? And investing in them and making sure that they're prepared to go meet those challenges is really, really important. And we do that in a whole bunch of ways. One really important one. way is good, hard training so they will survive on the modern day in the modern day environment. And then the third one is obviously as we transform or how we modernize our units to be competitive and help the army and the joint force win on the modern day in modern day combat. We see that over in Ukraine, just like the rest of the world. So we take those. lessons learned and we apply those across the force, ensuring that we're able to do those things and they're survivable. So those three kind of bins are the things that we kind of think about at the command and we spend a lot of time. So when they do go out the door and we give them to every geographic combatant commander, every TSOC that's out in the globe that we know and we can have confidence to tell all of those commanders that they are prepared for anything that you would ask them to do. Speaker 3 (11:40) I'm going to ask you about something that was brought up in my last, well, the CSM and I talked about it in the last interview we had when he was at SWCC and then General Ferguson, your predecessor and now boss. So we're Speaker 1 (11:54) going Speaker 3 (11:54) to invoke him now. He brought up, and so did the CSM and General Beaupair during that conversation, the fact that we as a regiment have to question a couple of things. We have to question number four structure. And say, okay, the organization's been, as Chief said, been around since 1952, and we've had 12-man ODAs. And we have to ask ourselves, is the 12-man ODA what we need in 2030, 2040? And are we doing the hard analysis to make modifications that our MTO may not be exactly what we need it to be for the next round of our adversary? So when you, and I... go to all three of you, you know, as you look across the organization, is the 12-man ODA what we need? Are there still discussions about potentially having to make modifications to that? And then I'm Speaker 1 (12:48) going Speaker 3 (12:48) to ask you about robotics. Speaker 1 (12:49) Sure. Absolutely. I can go first or do you guys want to go first? All you, sir. All me. Okay. So yeah, we've had the 12-man ODA. We haven't always had a 12-man ODA. I think for most people, if you look through our history and you go back to the Jeds, I know it's been 16, 15, it's a morphed in exchange. And we have certainly settled on a 12-man ODA for over ever since Aaron Bank kind of wrote it all down. We've had those conversations of probably the past four or five years. The parallel I'll draw is like the infantry squad. The infantry squad's nine people. It's been nine people for probably longer, right? And the approach that we've taken is, hey, When you look at fundamentally what an ODA was built to do, right? When you look at what their purpose is, we talked about being able to partner. An ODA was built in general to be able to employ roughly a battalion size worth surrogate ally partner and be that force, you know, to add to a joint force commander or an army commander, another option, right? So we look at the parts and pieces that are in there that do that. When we do the analysis, we think we're pretty comfortable with the 12 people. We think what they're being trained on and what the skills that those 12 people have certainly are probably the harder look. And that gets into the next topic that you want to talk about. You want to talk about unmanned systems. You want to talk about other things that we think those people should be able to do. The ODA, at least from my experience, is the most diverse organization at the team level than any probably unit of action in the Department of War takes seven different MOSs to make one unit, right? And that's pretty unheard of. If you look at whether it's an NSW SEAL platoon, or you look at an infantry squad, or you look at a tank platoon, like they're generally, or any other kind of infantry ranger, they're generally one or two MOSs. We have seven that are in 12. So the homework that we're on is like of those seven different skill sets, right? Those are military, occupational specialties with a specific skill that when you squish them all together, build a capability. We're taking the approach like, hey, we need to look at what flavor and what things do we need to change within those military