If you would like to become a Special Forces Soldier in California, or just want to learn more, we invite you to look around. If you are preparing for Special Forces Readiness Evaluation (SFRE), important information and required documents are to the left.

The life of a Special Forces Soldier is rewarding, but is also stressful and challenging. Here are a few of the skills you must have and challenges you must manage to be successful.

The Special Forces Military Occupational Specialties: A Warrior's Tradecraft

• MOS 18A: Special Forces Operational Detachment Commander.
• MOS 180A: 
• Medical aid
• Engineering
• Weapons
• Ability to teach, train, advise, and assist partner-nation forces.
• Learn and adapt to an area's native language and culture.

The National Guard SF Soldier
• Is held to the exact same standard as their active duty counterparts
• Must find time away from their civilian jobs to attend mandatory schools, some of which can last nearly a year.
• Must attend monthly drills and deployments well beyond "one weekend a month - two weeks a year".

Seven Core Tasks

Unconventional Warfare Operations (UW): UW is a broad spectrum of military and/ or paramilitary operations and activities, normally of long duration, conducted through with or by indigenous or surrogate forces who are organized, trained, equipped, supported and otherwise directed in varying degrees by an external source. UW can be conducted across the range of military operations against regular and irregular forces, state-sponsored or not

Foreign Internal Defense (FID): SF asses, train, advise, and assist host nation military and paramilitary forces in order to enable these forces to maintain the hostís nationís internal stability, to counter subversion and violence in their country and to address the causes of instability.

Direct Actions (DA): DA missions are short-duration strikes and other small scale offensive actions conducted in hostile, denied, or politically-sensitive environments. These missions employ specialized military capabilities to seize, destroy, capture, exploit, recover personnel or equipment or damage designated targets.

Special Reconnaissance (SR): SR actions are conducted in hostile, denied, or politically-sensitive environments to collect or verify information of strategic or operational significance, employing military capabilities not normally found in conventional forces. SR includes target acquisition, area assessment and post-strike reconnaissance

Counterterrorism (CT): CT operations include the offensive measures taken to prevent, deter, preempt and respond to terrorism. SF Soldiers apply specialized capabilities to conduct these operations in environments that may be denied to conventional forces because of political or threat conditions

Counter-proliferation (CP): CP actions are designed to locate, seize destroy, render safe, capture or recover weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, in order to prevent the acquisition of WMD and delivery systems, to roll back proliferation where it has occurred, and to deter the use of WMD and its delivery systems.

Support of Information Operations (IO): IO actions are taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one's own information and information systems in order to affect or defend information and information systems to influence decision making. IO includes electronic warfare, computer network operations, PSYOP, military deception and operations security in concert with targeting, special technologies and modeling capabilities to facilitate mission accomplishment across the range of military operations.