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Researchers' Findings Spanned Three Operational Challenges for Special Operations Forces

• Special operations forces (SOF) and the U.S. Department of State do not integrate their processes as much as they could. SOF teams' mission effectiveness appears greater when there is transparency and trust in teams' interactions with the embassy country team. Integration could also improve between SOF teams.
• Short-duration deployments coupled with poor to nonexistent documentation for subsequent teams have resulted in dropped products and degraded teams' ability to build on past efforts.
• The most challenging, mission-critical contract that SOF personnel negotiate appears to be for hiring interpreters. Funding processes generally also frustrate SOF personnel. And many teams found that the foreign disclosure and vetting processes for foreign personnel took longer than the team had expected, which has led to canceled training missions.
• In addition to these unity- and continuity-of-effort and administrative complexity challenges, researchers found inefficiencies and incongruity in information-sharing between SOF and partner-nation (PN) forces, in PN equipment for training and exercises, in lacking language capabilities upon deployment, in failed or insecure communication capabilities and equipment, and in body armor that can be worn less visibly when wearing civilian attire for meeting with local leaders.