Calling for “News From the Field”
FAOs: What is your job, and why is it important? We’d like to hear from you.
Foreign Area Officers often operate ‘in the gray.’ Meaning we operate in between diplomacy and warfighting, between operations and sustainment, between identifying problems and finding solutions. This role ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.
To that end, the FAO Journal of International Affairs wants to hear from FAOs operating in this ‘ambiguity.’ Whether you are operating in West Africa as an Attache or helping keep tabs on the PRC in INDOPACOM, your job is unique and valuable. Yet many inside the defense enterprise and back in D.C. may not be aware of the roles that FAOs play. We want to amplify these unique contributions, and tell the FAO story.
Explaining your day to day will be extremely useful for others. We encourage more submissions “From the Field,” to help communicate across the Joint Force and create a living repository describing how FAOs are doing their job - either helping inform senior decision makers, rolling up your sleeves in security cooperation, or other unique pol-mil work. Illustrate your point through an anecdote or help paint a picture of a typical day. And above all, keep it concise, interesting, and unclassified. Everyone should be able to tell their story in a 1000 to 1500 words. Finally, be sure to check with your owning unit and chain of command about pre-publication and security review before submitting.
There is no better time to illustrate the effectiveness of the FAO mission for those inside DoD and out. Whether we like it or not, we are experiencing another revolution in military affairs, from the advent of AI and autonomous systems, to the role of the U.S. military abroad, in partnerships and alliances that have enabled our global missions and posture.
Submit all articles in Microsoft Word format to editor@faoa.org in order to begin our editorial peer review process and to be considered for publication.
- Co-Directors of the FAO Journal, COL (R) Jason P. Gresh and CAPT Aaron D. Johnson