If Special Operations Forces—like this U.S. Navy SEAL advancing on a suspected al Qaeda/Taliban location in Afghanistan—are to remain the lead in the war on terror and win, the Department of Defense must address three issues: retention, command and control, and intelligence collection.
Special Operations Forces. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has tapped this organization to take the lead in the war on terror. It appears certain they will remain in the middle of this fight in the years to come. But who are these guys? What can they do, and are they being used in this war to best advantage? Can they run bin Laden and al Zarqawi to ground and protect us from another 11 September-style strike?
When most Americans think of Special Operations Forces (SOF), they see men with blackened faces silently gliding in by parachute at night or emerging from a dark body of water, steely eyed and ready to strike. While our SOF warriors have all this derring-do and more and are being pressed forward to the front line in this current conflict, they are one of the least understood components of our armed forces.
SOF includes Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics Teams. There also are special aviation components, psychological operations teams, and civil affairs units. And, of course, there are the special mission units—the ones the Secretary refers to as the "hunter-killer" teams and whose missions, and even whose existence, are classified. Even when one adds all these groups together, they are not a large force—just more than 50,000 personnel, including command, control, support, and maintenance. Of that number, perhaps 16,000 are "pure shooters," men tasked with ground combat special operations. At best, we currently can sustain only about 5,000 of those on deployment in the global war on terror.
Given the job their nation has handed them, a great deal is riding on the success of these warriors. Yet, in a defense budget of more than $400 billion, special operations receives less than $7 billion, up from $5 billion just a few years ago. Money always helps, but can we buy more of this special capability with greater funding? If we could field twice the number of special operations forces as we do today, would that be enough? Perhaps we should see these warriors as they see themselves. The mantra of Special Operations is what is called the SOF Truths:
- Humans are more important than hardware.
- Quality is more important than quantity.
- SOF cannot be mass produced.
- Competent SOF cannot be created after the emergency arises.
These tenets have political as well as operational significance. SOF is a very mature force. The average age in a SEAL platoon is 28; for a Special Forces A-team, 32. It takes three years or more to train a new man for duty, and many more years before he becomes an impact player in that unit. It is a business in which talent and experience count. New men entering the SOF training pipelines today will not deploy in operational units until 2007 at the earliest, and not reach their potential as special operators until well past the end of the decade.
It is also a business that carefully screens for a superior physical and intellectual standard. For every man who completes training, four others will have failed to meet that standard. It takes time, and it is expensive. Yet, there is no other way to create these special warriors—men of action who have the language and cross-cultural skills to operate independently and effectively along the Afghani-Pakistani border against a fanatical, entrenched enemy. The campaign in Iraq is evolving into a full-blown insurgency. These men, with their counterinsurgency skills, now have to engage this same enemy in the cities, as well as in their remote tribal areas. It is a tough job requiring a warrior with a unique skill set.
Currently, the SEAL, Special Forces, and Ranger training cadres are running at full capacity, but these men cannot be mass produced without risking the quality of the force. And given the lead time required to train and develop a competent special operator, we now are losing them faster than we can make them.
Corporate security firms are a growth industry, and their best hire is an experienced SOF operator. The backbone of SOF is the senior enlisted men who earn on the order of $55,000–$60,000 a year. After 20 years, they can retire with half that pay plus a tidy benefits package. Military pay scales do little to encourage these valuable men to stay on after 20 years—when their experience is at its peak. The Blackwaters of the world know full well how much time and money it takes to create this kind of talent, and they know a bargain when they see one. That is why they are prepared to pay these men as much as much as $1,000 a day to leave the military and hire on with them. Bottom line, we are losing our very best at a time when we are trying to grow the force to take the lead in the war on terror. Unless there are immediate changes, the force will become younger, less experienced, less capable, and less special.
It also is likely that SOF will be asked to carry a heavier load in this fight. Along with a reorganization of our multilayered intelligence apparatus, the 9/11 Commission has recommended that responsibility for paramilitary activity and covert action be shifted from the Central Intelligence Agency to the military. These are difficult undertakings; both require skilled and experienced personnel. Setting aside the thorny issues of presidential findings and congressional oversight that currently accompany covert operations, these taskings surely will fall to SOF, which already is stretched.
Even as our Special Operations Forces are losing their most experienced men, they face a nimble and highly adaptive enemy. In the streets of Iraq and in the tribal areas of Afghanistan, al Qaeda and its Islamist allies are making themselves less vulnerable to conventional U.S. force and air power. The administration has chosen to fight the war on their turf, not ours. Not a bad idea, but only U.S. SOF has the capability and experience to beat this enemy at their game and on their turf. Given their current tempo of operations, I'm not sure they can take on additional duties and responsibility.
So how do we shore up and expand our SOF capability? How do we get these warriors into this fight in the numbers required to win and still honor the SOF Truths?
The first order of business is to keep our experienced operators in uniform. The loss of these men is not a flesh wound; it is arterial bleeding. It takes millions of dollars and more time than we have to grow a young American into an effective SOF operator. The only triage for this hemorrhage of talent is money. Pay them. It is one of the few areas in the Department of Defense where the direct application of taxpayer dollars buys immediate and proven operational capability. There is no long procurement process, no training lag, no jostling of defense contractors. Every dollar goes to retain essential human talent.
There is precedent for this. We give bonuses to our military physicians because of the salary gap between military and civilian medical practice. We need to do the same for SOF. How much? How about a quarter of what this talent can command on the outside? We could offer senior, experienced, proven special operators $50,000 per year on top of their regular pay for a five-year extension of their enlistments, or simply offer them their active salaries and their retired pay if they stay on after 20. If these warriors can keep the fight over there, this will be cheap in terms of treasury—less than cheap in terms of the human suffering of another 9/11. And these funds cannot go into general military coffers; they have to be fenced for salary bonuses to retain SOF operators.
Next, we must let the special operators fight this war as they are trained to fight and under the direction of a SOF command structure. Most SOF operations still are conducted under the command and control of conventional military theater commanders. Two years ago, Secretary Rumsfeld directed that SOF conduct operations in theater and across national boundaries as a supported force—that conventional military commanders assume a supporting role for SOF. Not an easy thing within the conventional military establishment, and not an easy issue for SOF.
During its almost two decades of existence, the U.S. Special Operations Command has focused on training and deploying operational components for overseas assignment to the regional theater commands. Assuming command and control of their deployed forces is a new role. Yet, for SOF to achieve its potential in the critical areas of unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense, it must undertake the duties and responsibilities of operational command with full support from the conventional force structure. This does not mean the end of existing regional theater commands, but it does mean conventional military commanders must work with and in support of SOF elements whose commanders may be junior to them. In Afghanistan and Iraq this has worked very well in the field—the guys on the ground tend to do what is necessary to get the job done. We must have that same understanding and cooperation at the senior command level.
Third, special operations must be allowed a more active role in the collection of intelligence. Our enemies have had a good lesson in the capability of U.S. air power and armor and now embed themselves in urban populations or remote tribal areas. This tactic denies us the use of much of our technology. SOF, Army Special Forces in particular, has the cross-cultural skills to conduct unconventional warfare and to develop networks of information in hostile areas. If we are to win this war, we have to develop a more robust counterinsurgency capability, and that will require intelligence—the kind that is developed locally and volunteered by locals.
Our SOF direct-action strike teams are very good at kicking in doors, but this works only if you know which door to kick. We are in the process of reorganizing our national intelligence apparatus. In the past, we have built bureaucracies to provide intelligence product for decision makers; that is why we have 90-odd collection organizations. In the world of tactical intelligence, the kind needed to target al Qaeda effectively, the information has to be precise, timely, and operationally user-friendly. Why not involve the guys on the ground in building this new national intelligence effort? We no longer really need an agent to tell us what the old men in the Kremlin are doing; we need a young man to tell us where terrorists are hiding in his village. More often than not, this information comes from a SOF operator who understands the people in that village and has developed a rapport with them.
The warriors who serve in our Special Operations Forces are unique and special. In many respects, they are our best and brightest—men who are carefully screened, highly trained, and endure danger and prolonged family separation on a regular basis. They stand between us and the dark forces that at this moment are trying to figure out a way to kill large numbers of Americans here at home. That there have been no successful homeland attacks since 9/11 may well be because we have taken the fight to them, in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
Some 60 years ago in the skies over England, a handful of young men fought and died to protect England from Hitler's legions. We now have a small number of special men trying to do the same for us. They believe in America and in the SOF Truths. Isn't it time for us to show we believe in them and do all in our power to support them?
Dick Couch writes extensively on Special Operations and Special Operations training. His most recent book is The Finishing School, Earning the Navy SEAL Trident (Crown Books, 2004).