Date: Fri, 01 Aug 1997 12:19:30 -0500
From: Michael Novick <mnovick-AT-laedu.lalc.k12.ca.us>
Subject: AUT: US Green Berets in Africa pt. 1


NEWS BRIEFING ON AFRICAN CRISIS RESPONSE INITIATIVE BRIEFERS: 
>  MARSHALL F. MCCALLIE, SPECIAL COORDINATOR, AFRICAN CRISIS
>  INITIATIVE, U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT COLONEL DAVID E. MCCRACKEN,
>  COMMANDER, ARMY 3RD SPECIAL FORCES GROUP THE PENTAGON 3:04 P.M. EDT
>  TUESDAY, JULY 29, 1997
>
>                TRANSCRIPT BY:  FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE
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>      THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT.
>  
>     ---------------------------------------------------------------
>  
>      STAFF:  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
>  
>      I'd like to welcome Ambassador Marshall Fletcher McCallie, the
>  special coordinator for the African Crisis Response Initiative, to
>  the Pentagon today.  He is being joined by Colonel David E.
>  McCracken, who is the commander of the 3rd Special Forces Group,
>  headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  This is the unit that
>  is engaged, currently, in conducting peacekeeping-humanitarian-
>  relief training in Senegal and Uganda, and which will be moving on
>  to Malawi, Ethiopia and Mali later this year.
>  
>      The ambassador has a brief opening statement, and then he'll
>  turn it over to Colonel McCracken, who will brief you on the
>  African Crisis Response Initiative and the training that his unit
>  is giving the Africans that are involved with this particular
>  initiative.
>  
>      Ambassador McCallie?
>  
>      MR. MCCALLIE:  (I'm ?) delighted to be with you.
>  
>      As you know, 120 U.S. peacekeeping trainers traveled to Senegal
>  and to Uganda, on July the 21st, to begin a peacekeeping-training
>  partnership with those two countries.  They traveled to Africa as
>  part of the African Peacekeeping Response Initiative.  And I would
>  like to speak with you today, on the record, to place this
>  initiative in context, and particularly in a broad international
>  context, and to answer any questions that you might have after
>  Colonel McCracken has given his presentation.
>  
>      Let me stress that this is a training initiative; we are not
>  trying to create an army in Africa.
>  
>      Colonel David McCracken, who is commander of our 3rd Special
>  Forces Group, does much of our training in Africa, and he is
>  present and is prepared to answer any questions you have on the
>  duration and the nature of the training.  He really is the expert.
>  
>      ACR is a training initiative.  It's intended to work
>  cooperatively with African states to create highly-effective and
>  rapidly-deployable peacekeeping units which can operate together in
>  either a humanitarian operation or in a standard peacekeeping
>  operation.
>  
>      Our emphasis, as Colonel McCracken will explain, is to provide
>  training with a common peacekeeping doctrine based on international
>  standards, and to provide common communications equipment which
>  will enable trained units from any part of the African continent to
>  work together in a peacekeeping operation.
>  
>      While the United States has agreed to provide peacekeeping
>  training with several of our African partners in the context of
>  ACRI, we're also working closely with Great Britain and France to
>  blend our initiatives into a common peacekeeping training
>  initiative.  We hope this initiative will lead to opportunities for
>  joint training and joint exercises.  The joint initiative will be
>  based upon the principles of building long-term capacity
>  enhancement, legitimacy, openness, and transparency.
>  
>      Britain and the United States and France are all committed to
>  work closely together with the Organization of African Unity and
>  with the United Nations, as well as with our many African partners.
>  We also recognize that many other countries can contribute
>  constructively to this effort, so we are inviting a much broader
>  level of participation.  We are really asking other countries to
>  join us in this initiative, both in Africa and outside of Africa.
>  
>      We believe it would be desirable for the international
>  community to create an African peacekeeping support group, or
>  perhaps a Friends of African Peacekeeping Group, which could give
>  greater focus to all of our efforts together.  Clearly, we would
>  like to draw on the past peacekeeping experience of our African
>  partners, many of whom have done peacekeeping.
>  
>      The unique aspect of this initiative, both our own, and the
>  joint initiative with Britain and France, is that we would like to
>  use a common peacekeeping doctrine, build a capacity for common
>  communications so that when units are called into peacekeeping
>  operations they'll be able to work easily and effectively together.
>  
>      Colonel McCracken?
>  
>      COL. MCCRACKEN:  As Ambassador McCallie indicated, I'm really
>  here to talk about the military training component of this
>  initiative. And so I've got some charts and I've got a couple real
>  experts because they just came back in from actually doing the
>  concept tests, and I'll introduce them as we go through this.
>  
>      How are we going to do this military training?  We want to do
>  the lowest cost with the highest leverage.  And so we build on this
>  existing capacity, and so when I went up as the pilot team chief to
>  the countries and did some assessments of were they capable or near
>  capable, because that was the goal.  In fact, in every country they
>  were at least near capable. So in our short 60-day training
>  program, we truly believe we can achieve the standard.  But we'll
>  be measuring that in a combined fashion with the host nations with
>  which we work.
>  
>      Providing minimum equipment -- and each country will get about
>  $1 million worth of equipment -- and maximum training, and the
>  training cost is slightly under $2 million per battalions.  As the
>  ambassador said, I command the third group.  We have a responsible
>  for U.S. interests in about 40 countries in Africa, so all those
>  countries, third group will be the base for the training.  But in
>  those countries that belong to the United States Central Command
>  area of responsibility, which is from Egypt all the way around the
>  Red Sea, around the Horn and down to Kenya, Fifth Special Forces
>  Group will conduct the training, using the same training handbook,
>  et cetera.
>  
>      I want to point out that it's not just Special Forces soldiers,
>  though.  We think it's very important that we help establish a
>  logistics capacity in each of these countries' battalions.  So some
>  of them, they do exist, some of them exist maybe more weakly.  So
>  we've solicited and received augmentation from about 10 combat
>  support soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps for each country, as
>  well as a psyops and civil affairs -- psychological operations and
>  civil affairs officer from our United States Army Special
>  Operations Command that will go to each country as well.
>  
>      We are raising them to a common peacekeeping standard.  And
>  again, we've built a training handbook.  I'll talk a little bit
>  more about that in one of the upcoming charts.  The idea being, at
>  the end of this training there will be an initial capability, and
>  the goal is for the battalions that we're worked with to be ready
>  to be called up within 30 days if their countries' leaders decide
>  that they're going to participate in some peacekeeping operation.
>  
>      It's also clear to me that the immediate impact will come from
>  the opportunity for them to participate in the humanitarian
>  assistance action within their own borders, because clearly there
>  will be some of that very important training component that I'll
>  talk about also.
>  
>      And, of course, interoperability, all to a common training
>  standard and all with common communications gear, which is
>  principally what we're buying with that $1 million.
>  
>      Going into the "what kind of equipment", all the equipment that
>  we're providing is non-lethal equipment.  Now, we'll tell you
>  straightaway, non-lethal, that does include, though, ammunition.
>  We are providing training ammunition for the soldiers.  And that's
>  designed to be a portion of our training package that's for force
>  protection of the units.
>  
>      Now, in every one of these countries that we've been to they
>  have participated within the past three to five years in a either
>  peacekeeping or humanitarian operation in Africa.  And in every
>  discussion during the pilot team with their leaders they've been in
>  some kind of a fire fight, even if it was just acts of banditry.
>  In some cases some of the non-belligerents became belligerents.
>  And so we think it's very important to include some force
>  protection training.  Part of the reason for that is we are not
>  providing any vehicles, and in each case the country solicited some
>  armored vehicles, armored personnel carriers.  It's too expensive,
>  and we think that's outside the boundaries of the initiative as we
>  know it now.
>  
>      I mentioned the communications gear.  It's about a half million
>  dollars' worth of communications gear, principally Motorola hand-
>  held radios.  And we're buying over 500 of those for each
>  battalion, as well as repeater systems so they can cover a broader
>  range of operations, some high frequency radios to do upper level
>  command and control, and even a couple of satellite communications
>  so they could come back to a central authority.  We're also
>  providing some mine detectors, because in the peacekeeping
>  operations frequently the bad guys use mines, and so that's a force
>  protection item.  And water purification, and our thoughts there
>  were several of the countries operate within their own borders
>  quite effectively now.  But if we want them to deploy, since
>  there's deployment-type set of training, you also want to have
>  pure, safe water for the soldiers to drink. And that would be
>  particularly important in the humanitarian assistance operation,
>  where you might be in and around disease.
>  
>      "Soldiers needs" is almost enough to make me smile.  But in
>  each of the countries, less one, the soldiers that we assessed
>  truly do not have canteens.  Now, they had uniforms, they had
>  equipment. And quite frankly, their weapons were in pretty doggone
>  good shape, but good soldier discipline and good maintenance, but
>  they don't have canteens because generally speaking they operate
>  inside their borders and private citizens carry water to them.
>  Well, if we're going to have them deploy, we have to have them the
>  capability to do patrolling.  So we're going to provide them basic
>  load-bearing equipment with a canteen, a backpack, because in the
>  same area they didn't carry backpacks because they have their own
>  host nation folks who prepare food and carry it to them.  So we
>  think that's an important thing. And then also we're going to
>  provide one uniform complete from boots to head gear because we
>  know during the training there'll be a tear-up of uniforms.
>  
>      Jim, if I could get you to change the charts.
>  
>      And this will be my opportunity then to first introduce Major
>  Hager (sp).  He's over here on my left.  And I want to introduce
>  him because he's the man who literally created the 60-day program
>  of instruction that has been endorsed by the United Nations
>  Department of Peacekeeping Operations.  We have a full-page
>  endorsement. Major Hager (sp), together with one of our warrant
>  officers and a master sergeant from the 5th Group, went to the U.N.
>  and went through this rather exhaustive document.  It's about this
>  thick.  And we have a copy, and we're going to provide it to the
>  DOD public-affairs folks, and so you're welcome to see it.  But the
>  key is that the UNDPO training unit endorsed these training
>  standards, and so they're adaptable to all the countries.
>  
>      It's going to be a multi-echelon approach to training.  We'll
>  do things simultaneously.  There'll be individual tasks, as well as
>  squad, platoon -- up to company maneuver.  These functional
>  platoons that will do the logistics will do concurrent training.
>  The leaders will have concurrent training and staff coordination,
>  as these two gentlemen also are here because they did the concept
>  test.
>  
>      And as we found out in our concept test in Mali, there is not
>  the experience of having a staff like we have in our U.S.
>  battalions. They pretty much have a battalion commander, and
>  there's two -- a second in command.  But in the training that they
>  conducted, very effective staff procedures from the personnel,
>  intelligence, operations, logistics, civil-military operations and
>  communications -- and by the end of the exercise, these gentlemen
>  were functioning as a fully integrated staff, and it was quite
>  exciting because clearly our concept test was proven to be valid.
>  
>      I mentioned that that's going to be standardized measurements.
>  And we'll do the measurements based upon an evaluation team
>  consisting of half U.S. trainers and half host-nation officers.
>  This will be an opportunity for us to link our Individual Military
>  Education and Training, the IMET program that you're familiar with,
>  from Security Assistance, because in each of these countries,
>  there's been an array of officers who have attended U.S. schools.
>  So we know they understand the concept of task conditions and
>  standards and the type of training that we do.  So we know we'll
>  get an effective outcome in terms of our evaluation.
>  
>      As I mentioned, it's adaptive.  Each of the countries is going
>  to have a slightly different task organization.  It's going to have
>  certain fundamentals:  three infantry companies, at least; a
>  combat- support company.
>  
>      But for example, in Senegal, they have elected to take
>  companies from different battalions and pull them together in a
>  battalion-task- force type of arrangement.  In Uganda, they have
>  elected to take a numbered battalion that was organic in existence.
>  Those are both credible ways to do business.  We think each one
>  will achieve our goal.
>  
>      We're going to use the concept of train the trainer.  We're
>  sending about 60 U.S. trainers into the country, and they're going
>  to focus principally on between 125 and 150 host nation leaders
>  down through squad leader level in this 600-(man) to 800-man
>  battalion. And again, each host nation battalion will vary.  On
>  average, it will be about 750, which I think I put in the press
>  release that I handed out.
>  
>      And of course the training standard's are going to be
>  exportable. And because it was endorsed by the United Nations, we
>  know that it's at least a valid start point.  I would also point
>  out that the handbook that Major Hager (sp) showed you clearly has
>  the words "Draft" on it.  And as we go through this, we're going to
>  adjust those conditions, because conditions vary in different parts
>  of Africa.  I would also point out that a very effective
>  multinational exercise occurred in southern Africa, sponsored by
>  the Southern African Development Community.  I got a chance to go
>  see that.  It was a world-class event.  And quite frankly, most of
>  the things we're integrating in our training, in our field training
>  exercise ???, are indicative of the same kinds of tasks that are
>  going to be, because U.N. peacekeeping tasks are pretty much
>  common.
>  
>      I would then want to point out on this chart here to my left,
>  this snazzy multi-color chart, it kind of brings out a couple of
>  things we think are important.  The host nation is contributing the
>  forces.  That combined evaluation team -- and we're using the term
>  "training assistance team" because that conforms to the type of
>  training the U.N. does.  They have a course they run in Italy, and
>  they exported that course to Ghana.  We've had soldiers attend both
>  the one in Italy and in Ghana.  And so that's another validator of
>  our evaluation team.
>  
>      Of course, our U.S. trainers, I mentioned about 60, and about
>  20 percent of those 60 are combat support logistics folks.
>  
>      The donor observer trainers.  We have solicited our European
>  allies to provide trainers, if they will, for the full 60 days, and
>  i they cannot afford that -- because we've not offered to pay for
>  that -- certainly would want them to send observers for the final
>  two weeks when we'll be doing our collective situation training
>  events and our final comprehensive field training exercises.
>  
>      Regional observers.  We've again solicited each country to
>  invite its contiguous neighbors to reduce any suspicion as to the
>  transparent program as to what's going on across the border.  And
>  particularly important to us would be any of the regional
>  organizations -- for example, SADAC, which I already mentioned, in
>  southern Africa, or the ECOWAS in West Africa or IGADD in East
>  Africa, and up through the OAU. We also intend to invite the UNDP
>  --
>   (inaudible) -- training unit folks to come out and observe our
>  final exercise because we think, again, we want the maximum
>  qualitative evaluation that we can get.
>  
>      I think the other things that I would want to tell you about
>  are we have an optometric evaluation.  It's the first event that
>  goes on. That's already been completed in one of these two
>  countries, Senegal and Uganda.
>  
>      About 70 out of 300 soldiers that were evaluated needed
>  glasses, and we're going to provide those as part of a security
>  assistance package.  The rationale for that is really fundamental.
>  If the soldier cannot see the target, then we cannot expect him to
>  perhaps shoot effectively at the target.
>  
>      And we think that's where discipline starts.  If the soldier
>  can see the target, then his probability -- and his confidence in
>  his weapons -- and we're going to do marksmanship training -- then
>  the probability, if he gets into a belligerent activity, single-
>  shot fire, as opposed to automatic fire.  And, of course, the goal
>  is peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance.  We think that, again, is
>  an important start to discipline.
>  
>      We're issuing the equipment right now.  Training will actually
>  begin on Friday the first of August.  And again, on an individual
>  platoon company we'll have the situation training exercises for
>  each of the collective tasks, and we'll do that leader training,
>  and the leaders will actually write the report -- or, I'm sorry,
>  write the orders that they'll then execute.  And again, I can point
>  out from these two gentlemen's oral reports to me, and you'll have
>  the chance to ask them questions, that their -- that worked very
>  effectively. By the final exercise in Mali, they were doing their
>  own work.
>  
>      And again, Master-Sergeant Lamb (sp), who is a company
>  sergeant- major that was the senior NCO responsible for the
>  training, will be able to answer questions, along with Major Hager
>  (sp).
>  
>      The last thing then would be the establishment of the
>  civil/military operations center that's organic in each of these
>  exercises.  And here we're going to integrate the international
>  organizations -- non-governmental organizations, private volunteer
>  organizations -- and quite frankly are looking forward to the
>  opportunity for media interplay, again, a very important component,
>  because you all are in the crisis area, as are the NGOs, PVOs set,
>  and we think it's important that the host nation leaders and
>  soldiers know how to work effectively with those very important
>  parts of the battlefield.
>  
>      And on that, I think my prepared comments are about complete.
>  And again, let me reintroduce Major Hager (sp), who was the
>  commander of the Company C, First Battalion, of our third group.
>  He recently, as of yesterday, quit being the commander and became
>  the Battalion Operations Officer.  We think that's a move up,
>  because now he'll actually be responsible for establishing all of
>  the training activities in North and West Africa, which is where
>  that battalion is responsible.
>  
>      And Master-Sergeant Rick Lamb (sp), who was the company
>  sergeant- major, and still is, of C Company.
>  
>      Again, your questions.
>  

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