1.3: What to Give an NCO for Christmas
Not everything I did with data had immediate impact in combat. In fact, a lot of what had a much longer lasting effect was buying time back for my NCOs. The army likes to say, ‘NCOs are the backbone of the Army’. If that holds for Special Forces, then we’d be 90% backbone. Of the 88 soldiers in a special forces company, only 16 aren’t NCOs. The most impactful and pivotal NCO in special forces is the detachment operations sergeant, or ‘team sergeant’. My entire time in command of ODA 1323, Chad was our team sergeant.1
I could not have designed a better team sergeant than Chad. He was the walking definition of Green Beret, and a perfect example of what the best NCOs do. His first enlistment in the Marine Corps lasted long enough to get his Shellback Certificate. When he re-enlisted in the Army he started in LRS before going to Special Forces Assessment and Selection and becoming an 18C engineer sergeant.2 Along the way, he developed an incredible eye for detail, a warm sense of humor, and an unflappable commitment to his profession.
That attention to detail mean Chad did things most other NCOs don’t get around to. Chad did them because they were things you were supposed to do. Like counseling. The Army mandates that every soldier under your supervision gets initial counseling, and then further updates every 90 days before their annual report. Almost no one in the Army actually does regular counseling though. Chad did. Any new member of the detachment would get counseled within an hour of walking into the team room. And every 90 days, Chad would sit down and counsel every member of the detachment under him. When I joined the team in 2009, I watched as once a month he broke out a large calculator with 1” square buttons and, chewing on a pencil, he would crunch how many days every soldier under our command had until their next counseling.
My second month in command, watching him plug away at those giant plastic buttons, I offered to automate it for him. He gave me a very skeptical look, but to his credit, he let me show him what I could do. So, I built my first Übertracker on an excel spreadsheet. It tracked every member of the detachment, with formulas at the end that would update automatically every time Chad opened the tracker up, calculating in less than a second what normally took him most of an hour. Then I showed off by making the cells automatically change different colors when that date was 90 / 60 / 30 days out. I set it to turn black with red text when the date became late, which ultimately ended up being a waste of my time. Chad wasn’t late on things.
Chad tentatively took the spreadsheet over, and tried to not let me see him still using his calculator to be sure it wasn’t slipping up. But in the end, he embraced it. And he took those hours back. Hours he wasted doing stubby pencil math were transformed into time building better training, counseling the team, or, most importantly, down in the Sergeant Major’s office fighting for schools and money to help out the team.
Not all engineer sergeants are OCD, but the best ones are. Trusted with making explosives, they need to have an obsession with fine details. They are also invested with responsibility for all the equipment of the team. The average ODA in 2009 had about $2.5 million worth of equipment, making this no simple task. Chad was no longer the team’s engineer sergeant, but you could no more take the 18C out of Chad than you could take out the Marine.
We had two 18X for our team’s engineer sergeants, which are recruits straight off the street. Normally Special Forces NCOs and officers have a minimum of four years of experience before they can apply, but post 9/11 the army returned to an old recruitment program that allowed some people to enlist straight into Special Forces. They still needed to pass selection and SFQC but once they graduated, they were green berets and quickly put onto teams.3 18Xs are full of energy and motivation, and they have none of the bad habits that the Army instills into you. They just need mentorship and counseling. Our two 18Cs had lucked into the best provider of both in the entire Army.4
Chad immediately set about teaching the new engineers their craft, both out on the range and in the team room. An 18C can do a lot of damage with det-cord, but the most casualty producing weapon in the team room is the DA Form 2062, The Hand Receipt. It’s how the Army accounts for everything; from the end item down to the tiniest piece of kit that comes with it. If anything ever goes missing, the first place you look, and the only thing that will save you, is a 2062.5
Keeping track of all the kit, all the parts, and all the 2062s is a pain. This is exacerbated every time you do a change of command because commander’s sign for everything in the Army. When a new one comes in, every single piece of kit must be accounted for and signed over from one commander to another. Smart commanders immediately then sub-hand receipt that equipment back down to their subordinates, passing down the responsibility for keeping account for every widget. What results is binders full of 2062s doing the same dance you see at the change of command where a flag gets passed around in a circle just to end up right back where it started.
Having seen what I could do with the Übertracker, Chad challenged me to do the same with the team’s 2062s. It took a couple of nights, but a captain needs something to do while he’s on staff duty. We built a single Excel file that had a tab for each piece of kit with a table on the left that tracked the authorized-versus-on hand quantities of every sub-component. That simple table was automatically transcribed via formulas into a print-out that was indistinguishable from an actual 2062. When a new commander came onboard, what used to take days now took less than an hour to update. We actually spent less time updating them than it took to printing the documents out and put them in a binder for the new commander to sign.
Every unit in the Army does this paperwork shuffle with 2062s. There’s no reason the Army shouldn’t have a small bit of software that did exactly what our detachment’s spreadsheet did. But the Army didn’t have one, because the Army didn’t value the power of data back when I was a team leader. In many formations, it still doesn’t.
Time is our most valuable resource. In combat, you’ll always find yourself working back in your mind, wondering where you could have bought yourself more time to prepare. 1323 didn’t waste hours doing paperwork, hand jamming 2062s. Getting off analog paper and leveraging data tools bought my detachment time to train on skills that kept us alive.
Chad took advantage of all the time I bought him back and spent most of it with those junior engineer sergeants. He spent it teaching them their craft, but he also taught them how to counsel, how to write evaluations and awards, and how to be the next generation of leaders. The time he spent saved a lot of lives, to include my own.
We deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 to a remote site in the Afghan countryside where EOD support would take at least two days to reach us.6 The locals were tipping us off on the locations of IEDs, but those tips would only keep coming if we did something about the bombs that endangered their families. So our ODA engineers disarmed them by themselves. Over a ten-month deployment, Chad and those 18Cs took apart over a dozen separate IEDs. They did this incredibly dangerous work with nothing more than a multi-tool and a paint brush, and with Chad kneeling right by their side.
Operational Detachment Alpha, or Special Forces (SF) teams. The core is eight soldiers: two weapons sergeants (MOS 18B), two engineers (18C), two medics (18D), and two commo sergeants (18E). The 4-soldier leadership cell consists of an intel sergeant (18F), team warrant (180A), team sergeant (18Z), and team leader (18A), rounding out the remaining 12-members of detachment. The term ODA has a long convoluted history going back to World War 2. There are also ODBs, ODCs, an ODD, and ODGs.
Long-Range surveillance. Small scout teams that were capable of operating for a week behind enemy lines. No longer in the Army inventory.
Special Forces Qualification Course, or ‘Q course’.
While they will all get an SF MOS, 18Xs are 18Xs forever, even when they are Sergeants major.
Preferably with someone else’s signature on it.
Think Hurt Locker, only don’t, because that movie is horrible.