The SysAdmin officer knows his surroundings--inside out

■"In Iraq, One Officer Uses Cultural Skills To Fight Insurgents: While Talking Like a Bedouin He Sees Smuggling Routes; Spotting a Phony Kurd," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2005, p. A1.

Another great piece by Jaffe.

The Ranger who wears civvies, sports the beard, and works with just a 9mm pistol . He speaks Arabic with a Yemeni accent.

No young kid. The classic SysAdmin officer is closer to 40 than 20. Our man David is 37.

His commander is the legend-in-the-making Col. H.R. McMaster. Say his name around Central Command in Tampa or the Qatar, and you will hear stories.

David is part of a "small cadre of cultural experts in the Army known as foreign-area officers." The acronym is FAOs.

These are the cultural scouts, the negotiators, the dances-with-wolves types who nonetheless are the most important of team players.

Jaffe quotes his colleagues as describing David as invaluable: "We ought to have one of these guys assigned to every [regional] commander in Iraq," says one senior officer, "I'd love to say 'assign me 100 of these guys.'"

How many of these guys can you buy is you go short on one of those $3b Cold War platforms?

Lots and lots.

Guess how many lives these guys save?

Lots and lots.

Is it really that simple? Yeah, when the same choices are made year after year and we keep going to both war and peace with the force that we have, instead of the one we need.

But David is being sent back to Yemen, out of Iraq, his unit disbanded.

Why?

The Army is debating how far they will go in adapting themselves to the unconventional warfare that will define the SysAdmin force. As Jaffe writes, these approaches "don't lend themselves to the Army's traditional reliance on firepower and technology."

Traditional?

For the 20th century, perhaps, but not for the calvary that settled the West in the latter decades of the 19th century.

Some in the Defense Department, Jaffe writes, are convinced that FAOs are the future.

An Army colonel who oversees the FAOs in the region says the "Cold War mindset in which we are still fighting the hordes in Eastern Europe" is to blame.

Cold War mindset all right, but that vision shifted east, my friend, to China.

But the colonel's right. Of the 1,000 or so FAOs, only about 150 focus on the Middle East. Most are still trained for Europe--if you can believe it!

Buy one military,operate another. The condemnation still stands.

Rest assured, the McMaster's of the Army will push for change.