From the commandant.

For more than 50 years, the JFK Special Warfare Center and School has been training the Soldiers at the tip of the spear. Over the past seven years, our instruction in counterinsurgency has been honed and refined by operations on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and other places, such as the Philippines and Colombia.

The lessons we take from those operations are put into practice here at the Army's premier training center, not only to train new Soldiers to fill the force, but also to improve the skills of the men and women already filling the force. These Soldiers carry an enormous responsibility. Their missions are demanding and require a high degree of professionalism, and yet they succeed, day after day, on battlefield after battlefield. They are why we are here. They are the reason we continually seek to improve our training, to learn more about insurgency and to improve our understanding of this ancient form of conflict.

Our special-operations Soldiers have many weapons at their disposal, but perhaps the most important is their diplomacy and their ability establish trust and win friends in villages and towns in remote corners of the world.

In this issue of Special Warfare, Major Danford Bryant discusses an increasingly nonlethal approach to insurgency and says that Civil Affairs Soldiers can be at the center of that approach. His article details how elements of the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion deployed to Chad last year to support operations in the Trans-Sahel region. There, they not only supported the operations of other special-operations forces, or SOF, but also traveled to remote regions to conduct operations of their own. Their work in those remote areas established trust and opened doors for subsequent SOF operations, and the good will they established will provide beneficial effects for some time to come.

Major Bryant's article gives us a good example of the importance of Civil Affairs Soldiers and reminds us that CA must be a part of all ARSOF planning and must be active in our operations. But as Major Bryant points out, as a civil-military support element, CA forces are not acting ...