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Cultural And Regional Awareness Through All Units

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According to the Chief of Staff of the Army, GEN Ray Odierno our country’s most recent set of conflicts have made it clear the Army needs to expand their levels of cultural and regional awareness through all units. (Odierno 2012) The Army has decided to answer this problem by creating a regionally aligning forces (RAF) strategy to focus units on a particular geographic region. Brigades, Divisions, Corps, and support forces will focus on a specific region within their normal training program and focus their unit’s scope with cultural training and language familiarization. This redesign will theoretically provide increased support to the Combatant Commands and capitalize on the current Total Force concept to team up the Active, Guard and…show more content…
(U.S. Army 2014) With units that have experience in advising, training and partnering with foreign forces through a decade plus at war, the RAF concept capitalizes on current readiness. The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division (2BCT, 1AD) from Fort Polk was one of the first units to align, working through U.S. Army Africa Command to establish an East Africa Response Force. The alignment allowed the leaders to focus their training and change the training paradigm. With help from the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Center of Excellence of Fort Huachuca, Ariz., as well as the NATO School Oberammergau in Germany the unit focused on cultural, geopolitical, regional conflicts unique to the African continent and their culture and vastly different from their Iraq and Afghanistan experience. (Villa 2014)

The Total Force partnership will be vastly more important in countries that have existing relationships through the National Guard State Partnership Program (SPP). The SPP is a Department of Defense (DoD) security cooperation program created in 1991, that matches state National Guards with foreign countries to conduct joint activities—including visits between senior military leaders and knowledge sharing in areas such as disaster management—that further U.S.
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