The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command G-2’s Foreign Military Studies Office discovers and describes open source, foreign perspective insights of understudied and unconsidered aspects of the operational environment. FMSO’s products are integral to critical thinking in the Army’s leadership, analytic communities, and military education, and wherever there is a professional interest in what “they think they think.”  

     Officially established as the Soviet Army Studies Office (SASO) in 1986, SASO’s mission was to learn about the Soviet Army, primarily from their own writings, and provide unclassified information with expert analysis for use across numerous learning domains—from professional military education to unit‐level briefings and senior leader consultations to foreign engagements. From the beginning, the organization was staffed with a combination of leading academics, U.S. Army Foreign Area Officers, and expert analysts. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, SASO became the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO). Despite the globe-sized increase in the scope of research that the name change implied, FMSO’s mission has remained the same: to support the development of agile and adaptive Army leaders.