Warrior-Mentor
09-19-2007, 20:27
Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command
Armed Forces Journal
An idea that wouldn't die may be getting a new lease on life. Despite years of the idea being shot down at the highest levels, there are again growing calls from inside and outside the military for the establishment of an "unconventional warfare command" that would oversee those special operations forces whose primary mission is not killing and capturing the enemy.
Recent leadership changes in Congress, the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command have given supporters of the idea fresh hope that the PowerPoint slides might finally become reality.
At the core of the debate are the Army's Special Forces, who specialize in working "by, with and through" indigenous forces. They have long complained that they play second fiddle in U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCom) to those units that specialize in direct action, i.e. missions focused on capturing or killing enemies. SOCom gives direct-action units, particularly those that fall under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), priority in resourcing, and it is from those units that most of SOCom's leadership is drawn, they say. Only by the creation of an unconventional warfare command will the special ops units that emphasize indirect action get a fair shake on the battlefield and inside the bureaucracy, their argument goes.
People on all sides of the debate trace the priority SOCom gives to JSOC and its component units — such as the Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 75th Ranger Regiment, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the Navy's SEAL Team 6 — back to the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 mission to rescue the Iran hostages that met disaster at a remote landing strip codenamed Desert One. The debacle eventually led to the formation of SOCom.
"The nation was embarrassed, the Army was embarrassed, special ops was embarrassed," a retired Special Forces colonel said. "Desert One was a disaster. For 25 years, the message that has been given to the senior leadership of the special operations community has been: 'No matter what else you do, no matter how much it costs, we will never have another Desert One.' Now it's not surprising that for 25 years, when that has been the national priority, that SOCom has oriented on the forces that make sure that we never have a Desert One. They're good soldiers. They do what they're told, and it's not surprising if that has been the priority that the leadership from the priority units have risen to the top of SOCom. So when you ask for something for 25 years and give it unlimited resources, you shouldn't be surprised when that's what you have when you're done."
"Now, all that changed on Sept. 11," the retired SF colonel said. "The No. 1 priority of the nation for special operations was no longer episodic direct action to surgical standards. ... [E]verybody recognized we had to be able to do unconventional warfare like we did in Afghanistan, but many places at the same time. And everybody understood that it was no longer about airplane takedowns and ship recoveries and these episodic events, it was about a sustained presence in a country to destroy an infrastructure."
But SOCom leaders did not adapt fast enough to the new realities, he said. "It's understandable but regrettable that the senior leadership that had spent 25 years living up to a different paradigm was slow in recognizing that their world had changed and their priorities had changed, and therefore their resource allocation decisions had to change."
Part of the problem was that senior Bush administration figures also remained too focused on direct action.
"The senior [U.S. government] leaders, if you believe the open press, had print sheets of [enemy] faces and were X-ing them out as the direct action [units] killed or captured them. So while the senior leadership of the command should have recognized that the world had changed, their senior leaders were still telling them to do direct-action kinetic stuff. That was the measure of success."
2 PROPOSALS
The proposals for the creation of an unconventional warfare command fall into two rough categories: those that argue for breaking the unconventional warfare (UW) forces away from SOCom altogether, and those that advocate grouping those units under a two- or three-star UW command that remains part of SOCom as the indirect-action equivalent of JSOC.
The former version is a major recommendation of two recent books by Defense Department academics: "United States Special Operations Forces" by David Tucker, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., and Christopher J. Lamb, a senior fellow at National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.; and "Afghanistan & the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare" by Hy S. Rothstein, a retired Special Forces officer who also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Tucker and Lamb, who had outlined their proposal in a January 2006 paper that circulated widely, call for SOCom to be split into two four-star commands. One, "perhaps called the Unconventional Warfare Command," would oversee the indirect-action capabilities that currently reside within SOCom, supplemented by a new capability "dedicated to understanding and influencing traditional social and communication networks." The other, "perhaps called the Special Operations Strike Command," would take charge of the direct-action forces.
A seminar featuring two panels discussing the ideas presented in the book will be held Sept. 20 at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Fort McNair. "What Chris and I have in mind is something that would be very different from simply collecting civil affairs forces, psychological operations forces and Special Forces together and putting them in a separate command," Tucker said. Just grouping the indirect-action forces in a new command would not achieve major change, he said.
"It only makes sense if you recognize how different the work is that these people would do and, therefore, that you're going to have to select different kinds of people than we now tend to select, train them differently, support them in the field differently [and] promote them differently," Tucker said.
"We argued that there were different capabilities that were needed," that would require members of the command to spend long periods in far-flung locations to get to know areas and to build relationships, he said. That "starts to point toward a whole different personnel system — ultimately, one in which people don't go through the lieutenant to general officer set of ranks, for example."
Rothstein goes so far as to call for a new service that would include "all of the UW-type forces" along with a proportionate share of SOCom's intelligence, aviation and other assets. "You'd have a new UW Command with a service secretary, a civilian, and this service secretary would also be the president's principal adviser for unconventional warfare, or irregular warfare might be a better term today," Rothstein said, adding that SOCom would be left with the direct-action missions. "That's their focus anyway, that's what they spend most of their time and effort on anyway, and so in an operational sense, it doesn't take much away from them."
Rothstein's new unconventional warfare command would be headquartered in Washington, D.C., to enable coordination with other government agencies. "This particular service coordinates with the Joint Staff, but they don't have to go through the Joint Staff," he said.
After Tucker and Lamb published their first paper, the response from SOCom's then-commander, Army Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, and his deputy (and successor) Adm. Eric Olson has been "very negative," Tucker said. Their objections revolved around two themes, he said: that the direct- and indirect-action forces work best when brought together, and that SOCom is "already fixing the problem" outlined by Tucker and Lamb.
Brown did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. SOCom spokesman Army Col. Hans Bush would say only, "We are interested in these discussions, and that's why we are participating next week," a reference to SOCom's plans to send representatives to the Sept. 20 seminar at Fort McNair.
The Tucker and Lamb proposal even meets resistance in the SF community. It is in the best interests of neither the direct- nor indirect-action forces to be separated, according to the retired SF colonel. "It's like going back to the days of cavalry, infantry and artillery never talking to each other," he said. "The question is how do we achieve a better balance of both capabilities so they can be used in a complementary fashion? That's not served by having the limited number of experts split in half into ... two unified commands, which means there's going to be two budgets, which means every time the secretary of defense says, 'I want to talk to my SOF guy,' two four-stars show up. It's an administrative and management nightmare."
Armed Forces Journal
An idea that wouldn't die may be getting a new lease on life. Despite years of the idea being shot down at the highest levels, there are again growing calls from inside and outside the military for the establishment of an "unconventional warfare command" that would oversee those special operations forces whose primary mission is not killing and capturing the enemy.
Recent leadership changes in Congress, the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command have given supporters of the idea fresh hope that the PowerPoint slides might finally become reality.
At the core of the debate are the Army's Special Forces, who specialize in working "by, with and through" indigenous forces. They have long complained that they play second fiddle in U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCom) to those units that specialize in direct action, i.e. missions focused on capturing or killing enemies. SOCom gives direct-action units, particularly those that fall under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), priority in resourcing, and it is from those units that most of SOCom's leadership is drawn, they say. Only by the creation of an unconventional warfare command will the special ops units that emphasize indirect action get a fair shake on the battlefield and inside the bureaucracy, their argument goes.
People on all sides of the debate trace the priority SOCom gives to JSOC and its component units — such as the Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 75th Ranger Regiment, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the Navy's SEAL Team 6 — back to the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 mission to rescue the Iran hostages that met disaster at a remote landing strip codenamed Desert One. The debacle eventually led to the formation of SOCom.
"The nation was embarrassed, the Army was embarrassed, special ops was embarrassed," a retired Special Forces colonel said. "Desert One was a disaster. For 25 years, the message that has been given to the senior leadership of the special operations community has been: 'No matter what else you do, no matter how much it costs, we will never have another Desert One.' Now it's not surprising that for 25 years, when that has been the national priority, that SOCom has oriented on the forces that make sure that we never have a Desert One. They're good soldiers. They do what they're told, and it's not surprising if that has been the priority that the leadership from the priority units have risen to the top of SOCom. So when you ask for something for 25 years and give it unlimited resources, you shouldn't be surprised when that's what you have when you're done."
"Now, all that changed on Sept. 11," the retired SF colonel said. "The No. 1 priority of the nation for special operations was no longer episodic direct action to surgical standards. ... [E]verybody recognized we had to be able to do unconventional warfare like we did in Afghanistan, but many places at the same time. And everybody understood that it was no longer about airplane takedowns and ship recoveries and these episodic events, it was about a sustained presence in a country to destroy an infrastructure."
But SOCom leaders did not adapt fast enough to the new realities, he said. "It's understandable but regrettable that the senior leadership that had spent 25 years living up to a different paradigm was slow in recognizing that their world had changed and their priorities had changed, and therefore their resource allocation decisions had to change."
Part of the problem was that senior Bush administration figures also remained too focused on direct action.
"The senior [U.S. government] leaders, if you believe the open press, had print sheets of [enemy] faces and were X-ing them out as the direct action [units] killed or captured them. So while the senior leadership of the command should have recognized that the world had changed, their senior leaders were still telling them to do direct-action kinetic stuff. That was the measure of success."
2 PROPOSALS
The proposals for the creation of an unconventional warfare command fall into two rough categories: those that argue for breaking the unconventional warfare (UW) forces away from SOCom altogether, and those that advocate grouping those units under a two- or three-star UW command that remains part of SOCom as the indirect-action equivalent of JSOC.
The former version is a major recommendation of two recent books by Defense Department academics: "United States Special Operations Forces" by David Tucker, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., and Christopher J. Lamb, a senior fellow at National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.; and "Afghanistan & the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare" by Hy S. Rothstein, a retired Special Forces officer who also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Tucker and Lamb, who had outlined their proposal in a January 2006 paper that circulated widely, call for SOCom to be split into two four-star commands. One, "perhaps called the Unconventional Warfare Command," would oversee the indirect-action capabilities that currently reside within SOCom, supplemented by a new capability "dedicated to understanding and influencing traditional social and communication networks." The other, "perhaps called the Special Operations Strike Command," would take charge of the direct-action forces.
A seminar featuring two panels discussing the ideas presented in the book will be held Sept. 20 at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Fort McNair. "What Chris and I have in mind is something that would be very different from simply collecting civil affairs forces, psychological operations forces and Special Forces together and putting them in a separate command," Tucker said. Just grouping the indirect-action forces in a new command would not achieve major change, he said.
"It only makes sense if you recognize how different the work is that these people would do and, therefore, that you're going to have to select different kinds of people than we now tend to select, train them differently, support them in the field differently [and] promote them differently," Tucker said.
"We argued that there were different capabilities that were needed," that would require members of the command to spend long periods in far-flung locations to get to know areas and to build relationships, he said. That "starts to point toward a whole different personnel system — ultimately, one in which people don't go through the lieutenant to general officer set of ranks, for example."
Rothstein goes so far as to call for a new service that would include "all of the UW-type forces" along with a proportionate share of SOCom's intelligence, aviation and other assets. "You'd have a new UW Command with a service secretary, a civilian, and this service secretary would also be the president's principal adviser for unconventional warfare, or irregular warfare might be a better term today," Rothstein said, adding that SOCom would be left with the direct-action missions. "That's their focus anyway, that's what they spend most of their time and effort on anyway, and so in an operational sense, it doesn't take much away from them."
Rothstein's new unconventional warfare command would be headquartered in Washington, D.C., to enable coordination with other government agencies. "This particular service coordinates with the Joint Staff, but they don't have to go through the Joint Staff," he said.
After Tucker and Lamb published their first paper, the response from SOCom's then-commander, Army Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown, and his deputy (and successor) Adm. Eric Olson has been "very negative," Tucker said. Their objections revolved around two themes, he said: that the direct- and indirect-action forces work best when brought together, and that SOCom is "already fixing the problem" outlined by Tucker and Lamb.
Brown did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment. SOCom spokesman Army Col. Hans Bush would say only, "We are interested in these discussions, and that's why we are participating next week," a reference to SOCom's plans to send representatives to the Sept. 20 seminar at Fort McNair.
The Tucker and Lamb proposal even meets resistance in the SF community. It is in the best interests of neither the direct- nor indirect-action forces to be separated, according to the retired SF colonel. "It's like going back to the days of cavalry, infantry and artillery never talking to each other," he said. "The question is how do we achieve a better balance of both capabilities so they can be used in a complementary fashion? That's not served by having the limited number of experts split in half into ... two unified commands, which means there's going to be two budgets, which means every time the secretary of defense says, 'I want to talk to my SOF guy,' two four-stars show up. It's an administrative and management nightmare."