Teams would internally track their ARFORGEN
requirements for key members, allowing considerations for new Soldiers, those awaiting MOS reclassification, pending losses, and those with temporary
medical issues, and push for their completion at the
lowest level.5 Unit-level Mission Essential Task List
(METL) training can then be more specifically targeted and verified by battalion or higher leadership, so
as to bring these teams up to ARFORGEN standards
quickly and effectively, resulting in organic elements
that have trained together, with members that are fully aware of, and invested in, their team’s capabilities.
While team-based validation would help to ensure
that missions are assigned to teams that are judged to
be fully capable by ARFORGEN standards, the lessons from recent operations clearly show that simply
providing the proper number of “ready” bodies to a
theater is not always sufficient to ensure success. In an
effort to address a lack in specialized skill sets, the CA
Proponent has further developed its Additional Skill
Identifier (ASI) system. This has partly addressed the
branch’s inability to expand and organize the civilian
skill sets of its Soldiers along CA functional specialties,
such as Public Health, Governance and Rule of Law.
Additionally, a long term plan to provide a separate
career path for Civil Affairs officers, known as the 38G
path, is also in development with the goal of further
enhancing CA’s ability to support its specialized mission requirements.6
These efforts would be a good start if the 38G program were even fully supported for implementation,
but it has languished for several years now. Even if
implemented as envisioned in late 2015, it partly ignores the aforementioned issue that CA missions often require a specific skill set for a specific mission.
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