Fayettesville Observer August 03, 2006
Softer side of war
By Kevin Maurer
The Special Forces weapons sergeant was angry.
Days after a successful parliamentary election in Afghanistan in 2005, his team learned it may be ordered to train soldiers in the Afghan army.
For the past couple of months, the team had operated out of a firebase where it tracked Taliban fighters sneaking across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“I didn’t join Special Forces to train people. I joined to kill terrorists,” the weapons sergeant said.
The sergeant’s comments were uttered in frustration, but they reflect a growing concern among ex-special operations soldiers and experts that too much emphasis is being placed on hunting and killing terrorists than on other, less sexy, missions.
“My concern is that all we’re focused on is direct action, to the absolute exclusion of all other things,” Mark Haselton, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel, told the Armed Forces Journal in March. “The war we are fighting ... will require the ability to export training in ways that others can use to organize their own capabilities. If we spend the rest of our lives ‘capturing and killing’ terrorists at the expense of those SF missions that are more important — gaining access to the local population, training indigenous forces, providing expertise and expanding capacity — we’re doomed to failure.”
For the past five years, Special Forces soldiers got a steady diet of “direct action,” or raids.
“We are very good at eliminating top terrorists, once they have been found; less good at finding them; and less skilled still at changing the conditions that breed terrorism in the first place,” Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, said at a June hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities.
The New York-based organization is focused on American foreign policy.
Boot blames U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla. He argues that the command is not placing enough resources in the less high-profile missions.
U.S. Special Operations Command officials could not be reached for comment for this story.
Boot called on Congress to form an Unconventional Warfare Command.
“This could be a joint civil-military agency under the combined oversight of the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence, like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency. It would bring together in one place all of the key skill sets needed to wage the softer side of the war on terror,” Boot said.
The command would be based on the Office of Strategic Services. The service was created in 1942 and was a precursor to the CIA and Special Forces.
This new command would bring together Army Special Forces, civil-affairs and psychological operations units with the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division.
It would focus on building schools, training foreign militaries and intelligence-gathering.
Direct action is one of five primary missions for Special Forces soldiers.
Commonly called Green Berets, the soldiers can also organize and train friendly military forces in foreign countries, sneak behind enemy lines and gather intelligence and train forces in enemy-held or -controlled territory.
“To defeat this Islamist insurgency we must be able not only to track down and capture or kill hard-core terrorists but also to carry out civil affairs and information operations to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the great mass of uncommitted Muslims,” Boot said.
The ‘big bully’
A lack of focus on civil-military missions such as training foreign soldiers are hindering operations in Iraq, according to experts.
“Much of the world sees us as simply a big bully. This is an area the U.S. has neglected,” said Philip Coyle, an expert on national security policy and defense spending.
John Pike, the head of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent military research group, said Iraq is a country of 10,000 neighborhoods, and U.S. forces have not focused on trying to win over each one.
“Arab society is a society of relationships,” Pike said. “There is too much shooting people at night and there is not enough drinking tea with them.”
The special operations community’s sudden growth also may be to blame.
The Quadrennial Defense Review, released earlier this year, calls for the increase of special operations forces by 15 percent. One battalion will be added to four of the five active-duty Special Forces groups through 2011 for a total increase of more than 1,800 Special Forces soldiers.
Coyle said growth dulls the special operations community’s edge.
“U.S. special operations has gotten big. It is now as big as the whole Canadian army,” Coyle said. “The problem is when institutions become big they become more bureaucratic and lose the entrepreneurial spirit.”
But Pike argued that Congress can’t take direct action away from Special Forces. He said unlike some infantry troops, Special Forces soldiers can be counted on to destroy the enemy.
“The special thing about Special Forces is they are prepared to kill people,” Pike said. “There are just not that many people willing to do that.”
© Copyright 2006, The Fayetteville (NC) Observer
