In my January Army Magazine article ("Front & Center"), I presented an "Open Letter to Army FAOs," discussing why I, as a geographic combatant commander, believe that the Army can do better at growing and leveraging the unique and critical skills of our Foreign Area Officer (FAO) Corps in today's strategic environment. While the reception from the piece has been overwhelmingly supportive, the obvious follow-up question is, "What do we do about it?" In today's budgetary environment, that question must be taken seriously. In my previous article, I indicated five necessary actions that would improve the management and readiness of our FAO community--correcting the definition of foreign area officer to keep pace with the demands being placed on the officers, improving utilization and career paths, enhancing entry-level orientation, better integrating FAOs into the total force, and building a companion Foreign Area NCO Corps. Collectively, these would lead one to assume that the FAO community must grow, which runs the risk of bringing up too early the discussion about identifying billpayers. We have an opportunity to rethink how the critical skills that FAOs provide are grown and managed throughout the Army, beyond those who carry FA (Functional Area) 48. I am convinced that a strategic approach will allow for both improved utilization of the existing FAO Corps while increasing the number of officers and noncommissioned officers with valuable skills that improve the effectiveness and efficiency of joint and land operations and security force assistance activities, all vital to our Army's mission. This implies rethinking how we institutionalize the FAO community and its skills in the Army. To that end, I have four specific recommendations. Grow a virtual FAO center of excellence. Throughout my joint and combined service, I have had the pleasure of working with uniformed and DoD civilian foreign area experts working in academia, at the war colleges and other military professional institutions, or as fellows in think tanks. Many of these institutions conduct or support symposia that directly or indirectly address issues of interest to our FAO community. I have personally addressed a number of them over the past several years and consider them to add tremendous value. Yet, because many of these events focus primarily on the needs of an institution, the collective energy has not been fully harnessed and applied for the benefit of the broader FAO community and the Army as a whole. A way to reinforce the success of these events is to provide a mechanism for greater collaboration that could allow the proponent, service component commands, and combatant commands the ability to tap into these resources more readily. In essence, this would be a virtual center of excellence (CoE), serving as an execution arm for the proponent functions carried out by the Army G-3/5/7. Like the Center for Army Analysis for FA 49 (Operations Research) and the Signal Center for FA 53 (Systems Integration), the FAO CoE would support the development and implementation of all Army programs, activities and communications supporting the FAO mission and assist the proponent in assessing emerging requirements and accession demands. Such a mechanism would greatly enhance our ability to distribute FAO skills more consistently and coherently around the force. Because of current manpower constraints, this would have to be built using existing manpower and institutions. One approach would be to create the CoE virtually through Army Knowledge Online, networking with existing institutions that currently support Army FAOs. The core would probably consist of personnel assigned to the Army Staff, the Army War College, the Combined Arms Center and the Army service component commands (ASCCs). The geographic combatant commands and Department of Defense institutions such as the Defense Language Institute and the regional centers (for example, the African Center for Strategic Studies at Fort McNair, D.C.) could be invited to participate. The CoE would also establish a global outreach capability across academic institutions that can support FAO training and education. Integral to making a virtual CoE work would be a feasible and suitable charter of responsibilities that the core institutions must provide the proponent, which would greatly improve upon current processes. Elements of this charter could include the following. - Development of qualitative measures of effectiveness and periodic assessments of the FAO Corps in meeting them--in the aggregate and by region. - Development of emerging and evolving requirements coming from the field, especially from the country teams through the combatant commands and ASCCs, engaged with appropriate academic institutions for integration into FAO entry-level and sustainment education programs. - Strategic guidance to Human Resources Command to help prioritize assignments qualitatively through feedback from the combatant commands and ASCCs to ensure that FAOs are distributed to billets where they can make the greatest impact, rather than based primarily on fill percentages fixed by region. - Management of research into FAO matters as required by the proponent, and provision of independent review of such research. For example, the CoE can review the merits of establishing foreign area-capable NCOs and develop an implementation strategy. - Development of relationships outside the traditional FAO community to facilitate further integration of the Corps with the force. - Reconciliation of the differing entry-level training and schooling, utilization and career progression. Include skills training in basic officer courses. We must go beyond including "cultural awareness" in our current efforts to improve foreign language skills and exercise greater sensitivity to foreign cultures. Today's junior officers need the skills to survey unfamiliar social-cultural environments and assess second-order effects of military activities. This would allow them to be effective when deployed to a partner nation as part of a small team to conduct tailored security force assistance based on understanding the perspectives and needs of the partner. More than cultural awareness, this is "knowledge development," a skill that allows one to listen to and learn from partners to understand how a partner responds to our activities. The first step is to address all the doctrinal implications of this needed requirement to develop a feasible and suitable plan for inculcating knowledge-development skills throughout our professional military education system. The result would be an officer corps that is better attuned to and more independent in the global environment. It should reduce the eventual entry level training and education requirements for those officers who decide to pursue FA 48 as their functional area. It could also potentially mitigate increasing the number of FAOs as the Army would have a larger pool of skilled non-FAOs who could respond to short-term surge requirements in the event of sudden favorable changes in relations between the United States and a potential partner, a scenario that is rather common in some theaters such as Africa. Broaden the scope and influence of FAOs. While regional expertise is a hallmark among the Army FAO community, this knowledge must be better integrated into military structures--not just the geographic combatant commands (GCC), but at higher echelons that create the framework in which subordinate commands operate. This recognizes the role that regional specificity and cultural nuance play in the development of effective plans and strategies. Such an approach reduces the isolation of FAO experience, particularly in the Army, and allows greater transferability into the joint military arena. By the time FAOs reach the rank of colonel, they can have 10 to 15 years of experience within a given region. This is invaluable and needs to be better leveraged. It also serves to enhance the effectiveness among our interagency and host-nation partners. Currently, FAOs have limited upward mobility past the rank of colonel, even within the GCCs. This is a poor utilization of the time and money that has been invested in building FAOs and deprives the larger military of their expertise and extended services. Whereas crises will arise throughout the world, FAOs are an effective economy-of-force measure in areas that have minimal DoD focus. In this sense, they are vital strategic assets. It takes the case of Libya today, perhaps, to remind us that "quiet" regions do not always stay that way. By placing FAOs in positions of increased responsibility and influence, we posture ourselves to better meet threats in a changing and volatile world. Introduce more generalism among FAOs. While regional expertise is a hallmark among the Army FAO community, it has the disadvantage of both constraining career paths of officers based on the distribution of attaché and security assistance officer billets within a theater and limiting the ability of realigning FAOs as the strategic environment changes. Mobility among the regionally based FAO military occupational specialties is also limited because--as, for example, in Africa--"spaces often exceed faces." Under the current manpower constraints and continued requirements for FAOs in operational theaters, we must accept that greater mobility is required, and FAO doctrine must reflect an increased need for O-6 level generalism, extending the skills gained during early FAO assignments to allow greater transportability to where they are needed. This is achievable if learning skills are properly developed early in our professional military education, allowing our FAOs to switch areas of concentration more readily without sacrificing the unique regional expertise they currently provide. Language skills will be the clear "long pole in the tent," but we already face this challenge whenever we find ourselves having to send a non-South Asia FAO (48D) to Afghanistan to augment the security force assistance effort. On the other hand, this will potentially help make the existing FAO staffing process more efficient. Implementing these four recommendations would merely initiate the process, showing that the Army's institutional approach to FAO management will need to change further. An initial investment in manpower and time to develop the center of excellence's charter and tackle the initial doctrinal and management challenges will lead to a significant return on investment through a greatly improved ability to prepare the force to be more effective in foreign environments.