14 Delta Force operators completed a three-week training program with the British SAS in the jungle. This was not the first time the two units had trained together, but it was the first time Delta had committed a full composite element, senior operators, team leaders, and planning staff to a program designed and run entirely by the SAS in SAS selected terrain.

 The previous joint training had been in environments where the two units contributed equally to the program structure and had been designed to develop joint operating procedures rather than to expose one unit to the other’s training methodology. This program was different. The delta element was there to learn the SAS approach in the SAS environment on the SAS schedule.

They had agreed to this arrangement without fully anticipating what it would mean in practice, which was partly because the seaas’s description of the program had been accurate, but had not conveyed the specific quality of what three weeks in this particular jungle under this particular instruction would actually feel like from inside it.

 They finished the three weeks, all 14 completed. The things they said about it afterward entered Delta’s training community as the most detailed firsthand account of the SAS approach available from inside that community. What Delta said about the SAS after the program was not a single statement. It was a collection of accounts, assessments, and observations produced across the weeks and months following the return in formal debrief documents, informal conversations, training discussions, and the personal notes that several of the

operators kept. What made the collection significant was its consistency. 14 operators who had experienced the program from different positions within the group and who were asked about it in different contexts at different times described what had changed in their understanding of the SAS in ways that converged on the same set of observations.

 The convergence was noted by the training staff who processed the debrief materials. It suggested that what the operators were describing was not 14 individual experiences but one shared experience. the experience of encountering an operational approach that was sufficiently coherent and sufficiently different from what they had previously known that it produced a consistent description regardless of the specific angle from which it was viewed.

The jungle environment the program used was in a region that the SAS had operated in repeatedly over several decades. The SAS’s familiarity with the specific terrain was not incidental to the program. It was foundational. The SAS operators who ran the instruction were not instructors in the generic sense of people trained to teach a curriculum.

 They were operators who had worked in this terrain across multiple operational periods and who had developed through that work a relationship with the terrain that was different in character from anything that could be produced by instruction alone. The Delta element encountered this difference in the first hours of the program.

 The SAS operators move through the terrain. The way people move through a place they know well, not in the sense of knowing its geography, but in the sense of knowing its texture, the specific qualities of its light, sound, and humidity at different times of day, the patterns of its wildlife, the ways that the vegetation responded to weather and time.

 The Delta operators moved through the same terrain and processed it as unfamiliar. The gap between these two modes of being in the same place was the central thing the program was about. The first week of the program was directed at the delta elements relationship with the jungle’s pace. This was the element the preparation materials had most inadequately described.

 The materials had said the program moved slowly. The Delta operators had read slowly and had translated it into the slowness appropriate to difficult terrain, the slowness of weight and vegetation and heat. The program’s slowness was different. It was the slowness of observation, moving at a pace calibrated to the rate at which the terrain’s information could be processed rather than at a pace calibrated to the terrain’s physical difficulty.

 The two paces are different numbers. In the terrain the program used, the physical difficulty set a pace of approximately 200 meters per hour for a loaded group. The observation pace was significantly slower than that. Not because the terrain was more physically difficult at observation pace, but because observation pace is set by a different variable from terrain difficulty.

 By the end of the first week, the delta element had begun to understand the difference between these two slownesses, which was the first thing the program was trying to establish. The SAS operators who ran the instruction did not explain the program’s underlying principles in advance.

 They demonstrated them and then created conditions in which the delta operators encountered them directly. This was consistent with the SAS approach to instruction in general. Concepts that can be demonstrated are demonstrated rather than described because the experience of the concept is more durable than the description of it. The Delta operators in their debrief accounts noted this consistently.

Several of them said that they had understood after the fact things that they had not understood in advance even when the things had been described to them. The understanding had arrived through the experience of encountering the thing in the terrain, not through the prior description. This was not a criticism of the prior description.

 It was an observation about what instruction in this kind of program can and cannot convey, and it was consistent with what the SAS operators who ran the program would have said about it if asked, that the program could not be understood without being done. The second week introduced the program’s second major element, the relationship between stillness and information.

Stillness in conventional military training is a technique, a method for avoiding detection, for maintaining position, for managing energy. In the Sea Jungle program, stillness was anformational state rather than a positional technique. The difference was that the program stillness was not about the body’s position, but about the mind’s orientation.

 The cultivation of a state in which incoming sensory information from the environment was not filtered through the military training template that defines the relevant categories of information. In the program’s instruction, the relevant categories of information were whatever the environment was offering, including categories that military training has conditioned trained operators to treat as background noise.

 The Delta operators spent the second week discovering which categories of information they were trained to filter out and what those categories contained when they stopped filtering. The second week’s instruction did not operate from the same framework as the first weeks. The first week had been in large part a technical exchange.

 The SAS instructors had shown the Delta operators what they did and had received through the interaction a view of what the Delta operators did. The second week was different in kind. The instruction was designed to put the operators in situations where the skill being developed was the skill of developing skills in the field.

 The ability to identify what a situation required and to build toward it through the operation itself rather than through pre-operation preparation. The distinction was between being trained for contingencies and training yourself through contingencies. The discovery process was for several of the Delta operators the most disorienting element of the three weeks.

It was not physically disorienting. By the second week, the physical demands of the program had become familiar in the sense that the body had adapted to the pace and the load and the conditions. The disorientation was cognitive, discovering that the template through which they had been processing the environment had been filtering out information that the environment had been generating continuously and that the filtered information was not irrelevant noise, but data about the terrain that the SAS operators were

using to navigate, plan, and make decisions. One operator described this in his debrief as finding out that you have been reading a map with part of the map blank and that the blank part has always had content. He said the content was not more important than the part of the map he had been reading.

 He said it was the part of the map that told you where the content you were reading meant something. The disorientation was professional rather than personal. It was the specific experience of encountering a difference in how a task you consider familiar is performed by people for whom it is also familiar and finding that the difference is not in the outcome.

 Both approaches produced operationally effective results but in the process and that the difference in process implied a difference in what the process was training. Encountering a difference in what a familiar process was training was disorienting in a specific way because it raised the question of what your own process was training which was a question you could only examine from the outside of it.

 The SAS operators who ran the instruction were not pedagogically systematic in a way that produced a formal curriculum with identified learning objectives and assessment checkpoints. The instruction followed the terrain and the Delta elements responses to the terrain. The SAS operators observed what the Delta operators were encountering in each phase of the program and adjusted the subsequent instruction based on what they observed, which meant the program was customized in real time to the specific group rather than delivered as

a fixed syllabus. Several Delta operators noted in their debrief accounts that this made the program feel different from any training they had previously attended where the schedule was set and the instruction delivered the schedule regardless of what the trainees were experiencing. In this program, the schedule emerged from what the trainees were encountering, which meant the program was always at the level of the actual problem rather than at the level of the planned problem.

 The Delta operators found this more efficient and less comfortable than scheduled instruction in roughly equal measure. The third week was the program’s operational application phase. The first two weeks had built or begun to build since 3 weeks is not enough time to fully build what the program was building, the attentional state and the information processing orientation that the program was developing.

 The third week used that foundation in an operational context. Small groupoup activities in the terrain that required the operators to apply what they had developed against actual operational objectives. The activities were not exercises in the sense of simulations with role players and scenario injects. They were real tasks in real terrain with real objectives conducted under the observation of the SAS instructors who were assessing the group’s operational application of the program’s content.

The distinction between the first two weeks and the third was described by the Delta operators in debrief as the distinction between learning to read and being asked to read something. They had been developing a new way of processing information. The third week, asked them to use it.

 What they could do after three weeks of development was different from what they could do after 20 years of prior training plus three weeks. What Delta said about the SAS after the program’s third week fell into several categories in the debrief. The first category was about pace. The consistent observation that the SAS operated at a pace that was slower in movement and faster in decision than the Delta operators had expected.

 The pace was slower because the SAS were continuously processing the terrain at a resolution that required more time per meter. The decisions were faster because the processing had already produced the information that the decision required by the time the decision point arrived. The Delta operators had experienced decision points in their own operational approach as moments when information was assembled for a specific decision.

 The SAS decision points had the character of moments when a decision that had already been substantially made was confirmed. The difference in decision speed was a downstream product of the difference in processing pace. And recognizing this connection was something several operators said they had not understood before the third week.

 What Delta said fell into categories that taken together constituted a description of an encounter with a training approach that was different from their own in ways they were still working to articulate. The first category was the technical specific methods, specific sequences, specific equipment choices that were different from Delta standards and that raised questions about whether the differences were preferences or whether they were products of something more fundamental.

 The second category was the structural observations about how the SAS program was organized, what it was optimized for, and how the optimization differed from the optimization Delta’s training was designed to achieve. The third category was the hardest to articulate and took the most time to produce. Observations about what the three weeks had done to the Delta operator’s understanding of their own training.

 The second category of what Delta said about the SAS after the program was about silence. Not the acoustic silence of the jungle, though that was also significant, but the operational silence of the SAS instructor’s communication with each other. The Delta element had observed across three weeks that the SAS operators communicated less in the terrain than the Delta operators were used to communicating and that what communication occurred was more economical in a specific way.

 It conveyed orientation rather than instruction. where the Delta operator’s communication said, “Do this here.” The SAS operator’s communication said, “We are here and this is the situation.” With the implication that the receiver already knew what to do with that information. The economy was not a discipline imposed from outside.

 It was a product of the shared operational picture that the SAS operators carried. They communicated less because they needed to communicate less because the shared picture reduced the amount of information that needed to be transmitted explicitly. The Delta operators could see what the shared picture produced.

 Building the shared picture was what the program had been about. The third category was about the relationship between the SAS operators and the terrain. This was the category that produced the most varied language in the debrief accounts because it was describing something that the available vocabulary was not well equipped to describe.

 Several operators used the word comfort, though they noted that comfort was not quite right. It wasn’t that the SAS operators were comfortable in the jungle in the way you are comfortable in a familiar place. It was that they were in the jungle in a way that the Delta operators were not in it. Meaning they were engaged with it rather than operating through it.

 The Delta operators operated through the terrain, using it as a medium for movement, as a source of cover, as a feature of the operational environment. The SAS were in the terrain in the way the terrain was in the SAS, as a continuous informationational exchange rather than as a setting for activity. Finding the right language for this observation occupied several debrief accounts for multiple paragraphs each.

 None of the operators who tried to describe it was satisfied that the description had fully captured what they had observed. The formal debrief document produced after the program was 43 pages. The sections addressing the program’s content and schedule were standard training assessment format. each element, the learning objectives, the assessment of whether the objectives had been met, and the recommendations for future programs.

The section that departed from standard format was the conclusion, which was written by the senior delta operator who had led the element and which was unusually personal in its register for a formal training document. He said the program had produced a change in how he understood what the SAS was and that the change was not about capability in the narrow sense of what the SAS could do.

He said he had known what the SAS could do before the program from the accumulated record of joint operations and from everything that was known in the special forces community about the regiment. What the program had changed was his understanding of how they did it. not the techniques which were observable but the operational orientation that made the techniques possible which was not observable without having been inside the program.

He said this had changed something in his professional understanding that he had not known needed changing. The senior operator’s conclusion was read by the Delta training and evaluation staff who processed the debrief. It was read carefully and with the kind of attention that a document receives when it describes something the reader recognizes as true from indirect evidence but has not had direct confirmation of.

 The training and evaluation staff had been receiving reports from joint activities with the SAS for years that described SAS performance in terms that implied an operational orientation different from deltas. but that had not described the orientation directly because the people writing the reports had not had the access to see it directly.

 The 43page debrief was the first document the staff had received that described the orientation from inside written by someone who had spent 3 weeks living in it. The document was circulated within the training and evaluation community more widely than its formal distribution list in the way that documents describing something true and previously undescribed are circulated.

 The training and evaluation staff’s read of the senior operator’s conclusion produced a response that was delayed by several weeks after the initial read. The delay was not from institutional resistance. It was from the genuine difficulty of interpreting a conclusion about a training program’s implicit content. The conclusion implied that the program had been producing an effect that the program’s design had not explicitly intended and assessing whether an unintended effect was present and whether it was the effect the senior

operator had described required looking at the program’s outcomes rather than its design. Looking at the outcomes took time. What Delta did after the program in terms of institutional response was a function of what the program had produced in the 14 operators and of what the 14 operators were able to convey to the wider unit.

 The program had produced a change in the 14. What the 14 were able to convey to the wider unit was the description of the change which was not the change itself. The distinction between experiencing a change in operational orientation and describing the experience to someone who has not had it was one the 14 operators were acutely aware of from the debrief process.

 They had spent 43 pages describing the experience and had consistently noted in those pages that the description was insufficient. They had the experience. The wider unit had the description. The description was useful and specific and was incorporated into the training and evaluation community’s working knowledge of the SAS. It was not the experience.

 The gap between the description and the experience was the gap that subsequent exchange programs were intended to close one participant at a time. What Delta did after the program was substantially a function of the program’s third category of findings. the observations about what the three weeks had done to the operator’s understanding of their own training because those findings were the ones that had the most direct implications for the training program’s design.

 The technical findings produced equipment and method reviews. The structural findings produced planning assumption reviews. The third category findings produced a review of what the training program was actually optimized for and whether the optimization was the right one for the operational demands Delta was expecting to face in the following years.

 The review was the most consequential of the three. The SAS operators who ran the program were asked through the liaison channel for their assessment of the Delta element’s performance across the three weeks. The assessment was brief. It said the element had been professionally disciplined, had adapted to the program structure without requiring modification of the program structure, and had produced in the third week’s operational application phase work that was of a quality consistent with operators in the early stages of developing the program’s

primary skill. Early stages was noted by the Delta debrief staff as the SAS’s characterization of where the 14 operators were at the end of three weeks. early stages after three weeks of intensive instruction. The training and evaluation staff processed this characterization without visible surprise because the 43-page debrief had already established that the 14 operators had understood what they were in the early stages of.

 Understanding what you are in the early stages of is, as the program structure implied, a necessary condition for leaving the early stages. The SAS operators were asked through the liaison channel because the question was not the kind that was appropriate to the formal assessment document. The formal assessment document was an institutional record.

 The question being put through the liaison channel was a personal question about professional experience. What had the SAS operators understood about the delta element from the three weeks of working with them in terms that were not in the formal assessment? The liaison channel supported this kind of question. The answer that came back through the channel was the most direct single statement that either unit produced about the other in the program’s context.

 The response to the senior operator’s conclusion was direct and substantive. The training and evaluation staff read the conclusion and recognized in it a description of something they had been aware of as a possibility without being able to articulate it clearly enough to act on it. the specific outputs that the 14 operators were expected to produce following the program.

 Changes to how they planned and conducted operations that reflected the program’s content were tracked informally by the Delta training and evaluation staff over the following six months. The tracking was informal because the formal assessment system was not designed to measure the specific changes the program had been building and designing an assessment for those changes would have required more specificity about what the changes were than the debrief had produced.

 The informal tracking produced observations rather than metrics. Notes from commanders who had observed the 14 operators in subsequent exercises and operations. comments from teammates about changes in how specific operators moved and communicated in the field and the operator’s own accounts of moments when they had applied something from the program and had found it produced a different result from what their prior approach would have produced.

 The observations were consistent with each other and with the debrief accounts. Something had changed. The precision with which what had changed could be described remained limited by the same limitation that had constrained the debrief. The vocabulary available for describing a change in operational orientation is less developed than the vocabulary available for describing a change in specific technique.

 The two SAS operators who had led the instruction during the 3-week program were by the end of the three weeks able to give a precise assessment of each of the 14 Delta operators in terms of where they were in the program’s development arc. The assessments were held by the SAS program staff and were not formally shared with the Delta training and evaluation community, partly for reasons of professional courtesy and partly because the assessment framework the SAS program staff used was not one that translated directly into the Delta

evaluation system. The SAS program staff’s assessment framework had categories that Delta’s system did not have, and translating between the two would have required more explanation than the translation was worth. What the SAS program staff were willing to say through the liaison channel was that two of the 14 operators had progressed in three weeks to a point that the program staff considered notable in the sense that their progress had exceeded what the program typically produced in operators of comparable prior

experience. This information was communicated to the Delta training and evaluation staff who noted it and did not pursue further specification because they understood that the specification would not be provided and that the observation as stated was the useful part. The two operators identified by the SAS program staff as having made notable progress were not by Delta’s own evaluation system the two most senior or most experienced members of the element.

They were the two members who had in the 14 operators collective assessment and in their own accounts the easiest initial transition from the delta processing framework to the program’s framework. The easiness of the transition was not a function of their prior training. It was, as best any of the 14 operators could identify, a function of something prior to and independent of their training, a quality of orientation toward their environment that the program had been able to develop more quickly because it had

found something to develop in. The quality was not nameable with precision by any of the 14. It was recognizable after the fact. The two operators who had made notable progress were the two whose debrief accounts used the least language of translation. The others described the program’s approach by comparing it to Delta’s approach.

 The two described it without comparison as though the program’s approach had become native. three weeks in the jungle with the SAS produced for the 14 operators a change that the debrief characterized as the beginning of a different professional self-standing rather than the acquisition of a specific skill. This is an unusual thing for a training program to produce and it was unusual in a way that the Delta training and evaluation community was not sure how to process.

 Training programs produce skills, competencies, and procedural knowledge. They produce changes in what operators can do. They do not typically produce changes in what operators think they are doing and why or in the framework through which operators interpret their own professional activity. The 3-week program had produced this kind of change in the 14 operators or had begun to produce it had planted a seed that the program staff expected to develop over subsequent months and years as the operators applied the program’s content in operational contexts. The seed metaphor

was the SEAS program staffs offered in a conversation with the Delta liaison officer after the program concluded. They said the program plants a seed. What the seed produces depends on the soil and the weather of the subsequent operational experience. We cannot know what it will produce. We can only confirm that the seed is in the soil and weather of the subsequent operational experience were for the 14 operators.

The deployments and exercises that followed their return from the program. These were conducted in environments different from the jungle program’s terrain, which raised a question that several of the operators had asked the SAS program staff before leaving. Was the orientation the program had been building specific to jungle terrain or was it transferable to other environments? The SAS program staff’s answer was that the orientation was developed in the jungle because the jungle was the best environment for

developing it, not because the jungle was the only environment it applied to. The jungle was the optimal development environment. The orientation once developed transferred. The operators tested this in the environments that their operational schedules provided. And the assessments in the debrief accounts indicated that the transfer was real but imperfect.

 The orientation was more accessible in the jungle’s specific sensory environment than in other environments, but it was present in other environments as a function of having been built, which was different from being absent in other environments as a function of being terrain specific. The Delta training and evaluation staff’s recommendation following the program was to expand the exchange, not to increase the number of participants in the same program, but to develop a ladder structure in which operators who had completed the 3-week program could

return for subsequent stages building on what the 3 weeks had planted. The recommendation was based on the SAS program staff’s characterization of the 3 weeks as an early stage. If the 3 weeks was an early stage, the completion of the three weeks was the beginning of a development arc rather than the end of one.

 And the development arc could be supported by subsequent engagement with the program in ways that the debrief suggested would produce significantly greater changes than the three weeks alone had produced. The recommendation was accepted in principle. The implementation timeline was dependent on operational schedules and program availability, neither of which was immediately aligned with the recommendation.

 The latter structure was planned. Its execution proceeded at the rate that operational tempo permitted, which was slower than the recommendations authors had hoped. The 14 operators accounts of the program circulated within the Delta unit in the way that accounts of significant training experiences circulate through conversation, through formal debrief sessions, and through the informal professional culture of a unit where what members have experienced is known and discussed.

 The circulation produced a specific effect in the unit’s training community. It created a waiting list. Operators who had not been on the program requested to be considered for future exchanges. The waiting list was longer than the program’s capacity to accommodate, and the program’s capacity was constrained by the SAS’s scheduling of the instruction, which was not infinitely scalable.

 The waiting list was managed by the training and evaluation staff on a priority basis with the criteria for priority developed from the debrief’s observation about the two operators who had made notable progress. Preference was given to operators whose operational profiles suggested the kind of prior orientation that the program had been able to develop quickly.

 This was an imprecise criterion. It was the best criterion available given the information the debrief had provided. The SAS program staff’s postprogram assessment of the delta element included one observation that was not communicated to the delta side through the liaison channel but that appeared in the SAS program records.

 The observation was that the Delta element had been the most professionally accomplished group of foreign operators the program had hosted in the preceding 5 years and that the program had produced less visible change in this group in 3 weeks than it had produced in less accomplished groups. The observation was not a criticism. It was consistent with what the Delta debrief had produced and with what the first visit pattern in the individual exchange record showed that the more developed a professional framework, the more resistant it is to the specific

kind of disruption the program applies. The Delta element’s professionalism had been a factor in making the program’s effect slower. The program had still produced the effect. The speed was different from less accomplished groups. The direction was the same. The three-week program’s place in the broader relationship between the two units was as a formal mechanism for what had been happening informally for years.

The exchange of operational approaches through shared training, joint exercises, and the movement of liaison personnel between the two units structures. The three weeks formalized the exchange and gave it a defined structure, an assessment process, and a shared outcome document. The formalization changed the exchange in specific ways.

 It made the exchanges outcomes more legible to institutional decisionmakers than informal exchanges were, which meant the outcomes were more likely to produce changes in training programs and planning assumptions. The 3 weeks value was partly in what it produced directly and partly in what the formalization made possible.

 The 3-week program’s place in the Delta unit’s training history was not as the unit’s first exposure to the SAS, but as the unit’s first systematic exposure to the SAS in a format designed to develop the SAS approach rather than to develop joint operating procedures. The distinction mattered to the training and evaluation staff because it changed the question the program was addressing.

Previous joint training had been designed to make the two units work together more effectively by improving their shared procedures. The 3-week program had been designed to make the delta element work differently, not to work more like the SAS in the sense of adopting SAS procedures, but to develop the underlying orientation that the SAS procedures expressed.

 Developing the underlying orientation was a different objective from improving shared procedures. And the 43-page debrief was evidence that the objective had been real and had been partially achieved. The post-program assessment was shared with the Delta training element in a modified form with the observation communicated through the liaison channel rather than in the formal assessment document.

 The informality of the communication was deliberate. A formal assessment document would have required a formal response and the observation the SAS were communicating was not something that required a formal response. It required a considered one. The liaison channel allowed for the considered response to develop over time rather than in the time frame a formal document exchange would have imposed.

What Delta said about the SAS after the program was in the end something that most people who read the debrief summarized as they are doing something different from what we are doing and we now understand what the difference is but we do not yet fully know how to do it ourselves. This summary was not precise enough to capture everything the debrief contained but it was accurate as far as it went and it was the summary that moved through the Delta training community as the debrief circulated.

 It entered the unit’s informal vocabulary as the something different, the phrase that referred to the SAS operational approach and that stood in for the longer description when longer description was not available. The something different was not a term of inferiority or superiority. It was a term for a recognized gap between two highly capable approaches to the same kind of work approached from different foundations producing different capabilities that overlapped in most respects and diverged in the specific respects that the 3-week program had

made visible. The program’s place in the longer history was as a formal mechanism for what had been happening informally for years. the exchange of operational approaches between two units whose work overlapped substantially and whose training designs over overlapped somewhat less than their work did. The formal mechanism changed the exchange in specific ways.

 It made the exchanges outcomes legible to institutional decision makers which meant the outcomes were more likely to produce documented changes in training programs and planning assumptions. It also created a record that both units could use as a reference in future exchanges, which reduced the amount of ground clearing that subsequent exchanges needed to do before reaching the productive part of the conversation.

The 14 operators who completed the program returned to Delta and continued their service. They conducted subsequent operations and exercises and developed through the subsequent years in the directions that their operational experience shaped. The two who had made notable progress in the program continued to develop in the direction the SAS program staff had predicted.

 The seed had found soil and weather that suited it, and the development the program had begun continued in operational contexts that were different from the jungle, but that contained enough of the relevant conditions that the orientation continued to grow. The other 12 developed too at different rates and in different ways.

 And the debrief accounts they had produced were the most honest available document of where that development had started. 14 operators, 3 weeks, one program designed by people who had been doing this for decades in this terrain. The 14 came back different from how they had left. How different depended on the year you asked them.

 And the best answer was always the one given by the person who had done the asking. Find the 2-year account. The 3-week account tells you what was planted.