Implementing Special Forces tactics within the conventional forces is integral to the success of counterinsurgency efforts, according to a panel of Army leaders, both Special Forces and conventional, who spoke at an Institute of Land Warfare (ILW) Forum during the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2011 Annual Meeting and Exposition.The panel focused on how Special Forces and conventional forces collaborate in both gaining support from local villages and training indigenous forces in Afghanistan.In order to understand how these processes are performed, the panel first focused on the soft forces tactics that were being integrated into conventional force behavior."The best answer I can come up with when people ask us what we do is we get a target audience to feel some way about a topic to help the unit accomplish its goals and objectives," 1st Sgt. Daniel McInnis, 4th Military Information Support Group said regarding Special Forces strategy in winning over villages in Afghanistan."In countries such as Afghanistan where there are multi-ethnic groups, lots of tribes and sub-tribes that are further sub-divided into clans, we’re going to go ahead and concentrate on the culture, the religion, and a respect and better understanding of that culture," added Sgt. Maj. Randall Krueger, U.S. Army Special Forces Command. "We also study the insurgency. What makes them drive? What makes them tick? Why are they doing what they’re doing?"Krueger explained how U.S. Special Forces have closely partnered with the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Civil Order Police, paramilitary forces formed to complement the ANA."We eat, sleep, drink and patrol with our partners," he said. "We’re not going to live in separate camps away from them or do drive-by partnerships twice a week with them or something like that. We go on patrols and we conduct operations with them in order to get that better confidence between the two forces."In addition, Krueger added, they’ve given the ANA forces they’ve partnered with specialized training and equipment as well as putting them on a red, amber and green deployment cycle."This deployment cycle gives them more predictability, gives them the ability to go home and visit their families and take care of business back home," Krueger said. "In doing so with this, we’ve increased our retention rates in those units and we’ve also decreased our AWOL rates in those units."As for training with the Afghan National Civil Order Police, Krueger said that before partnering with U.S. forces, these paramilitary groups had an attrition rate of almost 80 percent. This has since been brought down to around 30 percent.It wasn’t soon after Special Forces began using this approach to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, that the conventional forces began to implement these strategies as well."We took these strong points and actually began to live with our counterparts and were able to teach them tactics and techniques for them to be able to essentially patrol on their own," said Staff Sgt. David Beck, 101st Airborne Division. "We were really able to do this training by taking their leaders away from their soldiers and training them first and then pushing them back towards their soldiers and having them train alongside of us, not separated from us."Soon, according to Beck, these ANA units were able to patrol on their own, take control of security in their own villages, and even provide intelligence on the enemy to U.S. forces.Special Forces also evolved ways of winning popular support amongst Afghan villages. This is mainly done through establishing a close relationship with local shuras, which are an Islamic form of representative councils."One of our first priorities is getting the shura stood up and getting the local legitimate leaders established," Krueger said. "Sometimes this can be problematic because they’ve been killed off over the years by previous forces or insurgencies or Taliban forces."If the shura is nonexistent, Krueger explained, U.S. forces will partner with the relevant departments in the Afghan national government to help set up a shura that is representative of all the ethnic groups and tribes of that area.Once the shura is established, another key is to getting it connected with its district government."That is where it seems the real break in Afghanistan is," Krueger said.Conventional forces are also using this approach, as Sgt. Joshua Perry, 101st Airborne Division, explained."It’s kind of a counter propaganda tool for us," Perry said. "We find either an elder in the area or a key leader who has some kind of influence in that area and we discuss with them and explain to them in great detail why we came after this target and why we think he’s bad or why we’re trying to affect a certain area. That way, when the insurgents come in and try to use propaganda about how we come into areas at night or that we’re taking people on the battlefield who don’t need to be, the local populace already knows what the issue was and they’ve already been informed. So it helps stymie some of that propaganda they use against us."Still Serving!