‍Introduction

Nearly three quarters of the overseas conflicts that the United States has been involved in since the founding of the nation have been irregular, and there is no indication that this trend will change anytime soon. However, the U.S. military has “a tendency to avoid preparing for occupations, grudgingly adapt to them, and discard the knowledge afterward.” This habit is being demonstrated in real time by the current ad hoc doctrine regarding the female engagement teams (FSTs) and cultural support teams (CSTs) that proved critical for reaching the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In order to improve U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, prevent a loss of tactical knowledge, and prepare for the next asymmetric conflict, the use of FET/CST programs should be codified in Field Manual 3-24 as both a strategy for winning hearts and minds and gathering more intelligence more effectively. This memo will summarize the origin and evolution of these teams, their successes, and their areas for improvement before making recommendations for policy updates and implementation. 

‍Origins of the Female Engagement Teams and Current Use

It is unclear which branch first initiated the creation of these teams, but both the Marine Corps and the Army were using Lioness teams in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2005. The goal of these teams was to implement culturally appropriate search strategies, as male soldiers were not permitted to search local women, preventing terrorist attacks and smuggling. 

The next step of the evolution of Lioness teams was to expand their mission beyond searches to include community engagement and outreach as Female Engagement Teams in 2008. The FETs in Afghanistan were then responsible for running medical clinics and distributing over-the-counter medication, distributing aid, and building relationships with local women through direct interactions with different households in addition to conducting searches of local women. In 2010, after the proven success of the Lioness teams and FETs, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) created the all-female Cultural Support Teams to provide the community engagement opportunities of the FETs as well as combat support alongside Special Ops teams like Green Berets.

Female engagement and cultural support teams continued to be used in the Middle East throughout the rest of the United States’ engagement there, but have been suspended since the drawdown of troops in 2021.

‍Review and Successes of the FETs/CSTs

While there has been no official military review of the performance of these teams, there are multiple individual reviews that point to the utility and success that these teams provided on the ground. 

The Office of the Command Historian of the Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) concluded that the CSTs provided valuable support to the missions in Afghanistan to which they were assigned; they provided added value by building relationships with Afghan women and children, collecting information that was otherwise inaccessible to male soldiers, and promoting the legitimacy of the Afghan government to the people.

Major Ginger E. Beals of the U.S. Marine Corps wrote in the thesis for her Master of Military Studies program that “women play a vital role in current counterinsurgency operations” based on her analyses of female Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. She determined that their utility came from providing additional security, improving information operations, and building relationships with the people.

While this policy memo is focused on U.S. counterinsurgency policy, other nations have commented on the efficacy of including female soldiers in counterinsurgency operations. The Governance and Social Development Resource Center (GSDRC) created a report for the United Kingdom Government’s Department of International Development on the topic: they reported that FETs in both the U.S. and the UK productively engaged with both women and men and had a deescalatory effect on potentially dangerous situations. 

‍Areas of Opportunity or Struggle for FETs/CSTs

While the women of these teams were able to fill a gap in U.S. operations and tactics when necessary, this strategy was still in its first iteration and faced all the missteps of any new program. Before making permanent the inclusion of FETs and CSTs in counterinsurgency doctrine, it is important to recognize where the ad hoc strategy was lacking. Any strategy to make these teams and their outcomes better in the future should include mitigations for the following issues. ‍

  • ‍A scarcity of female soldiers with trained specialties. The reports from both Major Beals and the GSDRC mentioned the lack of female translators who are also able to keep up with the physical demands of the soldiers’ jobs. Without a way to communicate with the local women, building relationships and gathering information is infinitely more difficult.‍
  • Lack of leadership support, training, or coordination. Because the teams were created as the need arose, the training and support that the women received was subpar; the women’s training and their tasks in the field weren’t standardized, leading to unprepared soldiers and redundancy in their assignments. ‍
  • Disrespect from male colleagues. The ARSOF resource reported that the CSTs had to constantly defend their presence and utility to the units to which they were attached, because those units had no previous understanding of who the CSTs were or what they did. The GSDRC report also mentions that one of the challenges most commonly faced by FETs was disrespect from male colleagues, who did not perceive their presence to be useful.‍
  • Loss of tactical institutional knowledge. There was no continuity between the FETs themselves or the units to which they were assigned, which made it difficult to pass on knowledge related to in-field best practices, sources of information, or the towns and tribes with which the teams interacted.

Recommendations for Permanently Incorporating FETs/CSTs into COIN Doctrine‍

To strengthen U.S. counterinsurgency strategy and improve the efficacy of these teams on the ground for the next asymmetric conflict, the inclusion and use of FETs/CSTs should be codified in FM 3-24 in the immediate future. By incorporating the use of these teams into doctrine while the U.S. is not actively embroiled in an asymmetric conflict, the Department of Defense will have time to establish the administrative support and standardized training that these soldiers will need. It should be made clear that the soldiers on these teams will be integral to collecting information for human intelligence usage as well as relationship-building among the population. The immediate next steps that the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, and the Marine Corps should take are as follows:

  • ‍Reach out to soldiers who have served on FETs/CSTs. Institutional knowledge was not retained because the outprocessing of CST females did not include formal reviews or debriefing after service. To prevent any more tactical knowledge from being forgotten, a task force should be assigned to reach out to former FET/CST soldiers in order to complete a formal After Action Review, and then synthesize the lessons learned into a useful report.‍
  • Recruit and train more female soldiers to be prepared to deploy with these teams. The appropriate departments for in-military and external recruitment should seek out female soldiers or potential recruits with diverse skills, including translation and interpretation of critical languages and human intelligence gathering, and train them for potential deployment. Major Beals identified Lieutenant Colonel Julie Nethercot as the primary driver for improved training for CSTs — Lt. Col. Nethercot should be contacted and her training program reviewed, standardized, and implemented for future teams.‍
  • Draft an update to FM 3-24 and publish when ready. When the report on lessons learned from the FETs/CSTs is prepared, the information should be used to add the effective use of these teams as a permanent part of U.S. COIN doctrine. ‍
  • Update training materials for deployment to include FETs/CSTs. Once the inclusion of these teams is codified as part of U.S. COIN strategy, the training that all soldiers receive pre-deployment for these missions should be updated. If male soldiers are informed before deployment of the presence and utility of the FETs/CSTs, the teams will not have to convince their units overseas of their value and they will face less disrespect from male colleagues. This step will improve unit cohesion and operational effectiveness in conflict zones.

Conclusion

These next steps will benefit both the teams themselves and U.S. COIN doctrine: if the teams are properly trained and supported by military administration, they will provide better operational outcomes. Those operational outcomes (relationship-building, human intelligence, community development) will improve the U.S. military’s ability to find and eliminate dangerous insurgents while still supporting the population through the conflict.