Special Ops: The Evolution Part 2: Forging the Culture of 427 Squadron – Chris Bray

Yeah.

So I think I'll rewind slightly to two thousand six when CANSOFCOM was, uh, kind of ultimately formed.

You know, we went from supporting a single SOF unit to supporting an entire command, which we touched on.

So the demand for SOF aviation, uh, started to grow beyond the capacity of a single subunit.

So for a number of years, we attempted to solve this by having a domestic capability and an out-of-area capability.

But as we discussed, this was not sustainable, and we needed the whole unit to be trained to the same high s- uh, readiness standard.

So that's really where things started to evolve, uh, around two thousand eleven, was kind of that convergence towards a unit capability and not just subsets of capabilities within four two seven.

How do you think the culture changed as you went from a divided series of silos to more of a amalgamated approach?

Yeah.

So I think the shift primarily started on the capability side, uh, first, and then followed by structure and culture.

And like we mentioned, we had, uh, A, B, and C flight at the time, which eventually got reorganized to the SOA structure that we have today.

But we really started with the capability development back in the early twenty tens.

And what that meant was giving that baseline skill set to all the air crew, specifically insert and extract capabilities.

So as you can see, uh, in many places or sources around the Internet, we do that by conducting fast rope, repel, low hover, land on inserts, much like a lot of our partners.

But we needed to create that baseline skill set, uh, across the unit.

You know, I like to say that that is the reason we exist.

The, the fact that we can insert our force packages on time, on target, in synchronization in such a deliberate and precise way, that's really what kinda sets us apart.

So we identified that that was the primary skill set that the entire unit needed to achieve, followed by kind of like secondary skill sets such as, you know, contingency fires and other capabilities like that.

So we started down that route where we started providing training to the whole unit to build that kind of a baseline.

And then from there, we started looking at the structure and culture, uh, of the unit as well.

We had a vision where the operational subunits were pretty much identical and self-contained to, uh, conduct operations, so that when, you know, one of the SOAs is providing support, it should look and feel almost identical to the other SOA.

So it took time to get there, but essentially that was the, uh, vision from the early twenty tens to where we are today.