Reconstitution of OSS

[Backwoods]

In the last 3-4 years there have been several articles and books published (e.g. The Coming Anarchy-Kaplan, Max Boot’s testimony to congress, Afghanistan And the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare-Hy S. Rothstein) stating that SF should be pulled out of the Army and reconstituted as the OSS. I am curious as to your thoughts on this. I am sure that this has potential to be lively.

[TrooperT]

I don't think the conventional military (to include JSOC) or CIA would go for it. They would use the same arguments they use against establishing any unconventional or elite unit.

It takes our best troops...
They are cowboys that are not accountable...
They'll drain funding from our service...
They are amateurs and not intelligence professionals...

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

[Backwoods]

OK forgetting the parochialism that will most assuredly occur and if in the forming of a new OSS the CIA and SF were both placed under the same umbrella.

[Backwoods]

OK. I didn't post the whole thing but it is worth the read. Below is the link:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2006_hr/060629-boot.pdf



An Unconventional Warfare Command?
The question is, what to do about this? Is it possible to get SOCOM to refocus more on Unconventional Warfare and less on Direct Action? Probably not. Already SOCOM has transferred most of its psy-ops and civil affairs capabilities—areas of scant interest to most Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, or Delta Force operatives—to the regular army. And, as Naylor noted, of the eight top flag officers at SOCOM’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, not one spent his career in Special Forces. (General Bryan “Doug” Brown, the SOCOM commander, once served on an A-Team as an enlisted man many decades ago, but his specialty as an officer has been special operations aviation.) The institutional culture of SOCOM is so firmly fixed in favor of “kicking down doors”—and so much of its funding is directed for such purposes—that it is doubtful that any amount of outside pressure, even from this
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Committee, will change the dominant mindset very much, especially when the Office of the Secretary of Defense remains so fixated on such missions.
For this reason there is growing interest within the U.S. Army SF community in creating a new Joint Unconventional Warfare Command within SOCOM—a UW equivalent to the Joint Special Operations Command which encompasses units like Delta Force (a.k.a. 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta) and Seal Team Six (a.k.a. Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru), and focuses on Direct Action missions. An Unconventional Warfare Command could bring together Army Special Forces, civil-affairs, and psy-ops by essentially expanding the role of the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. According to a paper commissioned by the Army Special Operations Command Futures Center, this new command “could fight the GWOT [Global War on Terror] by organizing, training, equipping and/or leading indigenous assets to conduct subversion, sabotage and intelligence activities directed against groups practicing terrorism or against nation-states supporting terrorism directed against U.S. interests throughout the world.”
This strikes me as a good idea, but I would also urge the Committee to consider going further and removing the Unconventional Warfare mission from SOCOM altogether. I would like to conclude my testimony with a bold idea for how this could be accomplished: by resurrecting the Office of Strategic Services that was created in 1942 to gather and analyze intelligence as well as to conduct low-intensity warfare behind enemy lines in occupied Europe and Asia.
OSS Redux
OSS was disbanded after World War II; both the Green Berets and the CIA trace their lineage to this august ancestor. My proposal is to re-create OSS by bringing together under one roof not only Army SF, civil-affairs, and psy-ops but also the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division, which has always been a bit of a bureaucratic orphan at Langley (and which is staffed largely by Special Operations veterans). 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. Like SOCOM, it would have access to military personnel and assets; but like the CIA’s Special Activities Division, its operations would contain a higher degree of “covertness,” flexibility, and “deniability” than those carried out by the uniformed military.
One of the key advantages of OSS II is that it would be able to employ indigenous personnel on a much larger scale than is practicable today. There is currently a legal prohibition on recruiting into the U.S.
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armed forces anyone who is not an American citizen or permanent resident (Green Card holder). The CIA also looks askance upon non-American officers (as opposed to agents). These are considered “security risks.” But the greater risk is that we will lose the war on terror because we don’t have enough understanding of the societies in which terrorists operate. Such knowledge can be acquired in one of two ways: either by long-term immersion in foreign societies or by simply recruiting from the societies in which we fight. OSS II could facilitate both approaches, in the first place by junking the military’s overly restrictive personnel rotation policies, and in the second place by junking its overly restrictive citizenship requirements.
The Green Berets recruited non-citizens in the 1950s when the Lodge Act allowed the enlistment of Eastern Europeans who were considered vital for operations behind the Iron Curtain. Something similar should be tried today to recruit from Muslim societies around the world, starting with the Middle Eastern immigrant community right here in the U.S. (The most reliable recruits would probably be ethnic or religious minorities within Muslim societies—Egyptian Copts, Moroccan Jews, Lebanese Druze, Iranian Azeris, Saudi Shiites, Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, etc.—just as the U.S. has previously made use of minorities such as the Philippine Macabebes and the Vietnamese Montagnards.) I bet there would be plenty of high-quality recruits who would be willing to serve in return for one of the world’s most precious commodities—U.S. citizenship.
It might even make sense to create an entire brigade or even a division of foreign fighters led by American officers and NCOs. Call it the Freedom Legion, in homage to the French Foreign Legion. Such units have been successfully raised by every great power in history. Think, for example, of the Gurkhas who still serve in large numbers, and with considerable distinction, in the British and Indian armies. Some Americans may recoil from the idea of enlisting “mercenaries” but these men and women would be a lot more useful and a lot more disciplined than most of the “security contractors” we employ en masse today in places like Iraq. More specialized indigenous units could be formed specifically to work in areas like Somalia, Syria, North Korea, and Iran, where there is either no effective local government or the government is hostile to the U.S. OSS II would be a natural repository for such outfits, considering the success of the original OSS in running indigenous forces such as the Kachin tribesmen who battled the Japanese in Burma.
It would be a bit more of a stretch to designate OSS II as the primary repository of nation-building expertise within the U.S. government, but given the unwillingness of other agencies, civil or military, to fill this yawning gap, this might be the most convenient expedient. The new OSS could cultivate a corps of experts, civil and military, coming from both government and the private sector, who would be skilled in the difficult task of rebuilding stateless or war-torn societies in cooperation with other federal departments, international agencies, American allies, and non-governmental organizations. These skills are
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closely related to those needed for counterinsurgency, because the most effective way to counter any insurgency is not to kill a bunch of guerrillas but to create an effective government that can provide for the needs of the people better than can the guerrillas’ shadow government. We have paid a heavy price in Iraq for not having such a nation-building (or, more accurately, state-building) capacity on tap; Jay Garner’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and Jerry Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority were last-minute expedients that could not possibly have succeeded because they did not spend nearly enough time preparing for the daunting task of running a country of 25 million people.
I realize that the creation of a new OSS is a radical notion that could not be implemented tomorrow. It would require the most sweeping legislation since the 1987 Nunn-Cohen Amendment that created SOCOM in the first place. Obviously such a step needs a good deal more study and discussion. But if we are to be successful in the Long War, we need to think outside of the traditional bureaucratic boxes, because the U.S. government as currently set up—and that most assuredly includes SOCOM—simply is not adequately configured for the tasks ahead. Given the potential threat posed by our enemies—a threat of which we were reminded by news of an Al Qaeda plot to release poison gas on the New York subway—that could turn out to be a very dangerous deficiency.

[mark46th]

I have been saying for years that Special Forces needs to get away from SOCOM. It's nice to have an articulate ally...

[exsquid]

It is an interesting proposition. Ultimately I do not think there will ever be enough support for it. I think the conditions during WWII that allowed for the SOE & OSS were a one time occurrance.

x/S

[Calvengeance]

I just finished reading Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and this is very interesting to me.

Backwoods, do you have anything more current than June 2006 regarding this?

Thank you.

Calvin

[frostfire]

It is an interesting proposition. Ultimately I do not think there will ever be enough support for it. I think the conditions during WWII that allowed for the SOE & OSS were a one time occurrance.

x/S
:( I am all for this proposition. Probably my last chance for a life of servitude in SF.

[Comsmith22]

I have a Bad Feeling that when the powers to be start Segregating the units out they will start to de-fund and deactivate them ...

It will be the best way to cut the military down even more...
We all saw that the Clinton régime did to the Military and the incoming "Crew" will look for any way they can to cut the military to nothing more than a limited amount of National Guard Units for the use by their individual States.

[mark46th]

The Liberals always try to do away with the Military. That is until they realize that there really are monsters out there in the real world that can't be dealt with diplomatically or with reason. The problem is how long it takes them to realize they are in over their head and alll the innocents that are killed waiting for help....

I submit Jimmy Carter watching Pol Pot murder 3,000,000 of his own people...

[D9 (RIP)]

I love this idea.

If there was one component of the military that probably would NOT be eliminated in an administration like the current one, it would be the component most closely associated with Civil Affairs.

Whatever they call it, OSS Redux, whatever....

If it was funded, it would be a more sensible organization than the current one.

[swpa19]

In my own humble opinion, I believe that the primary mission of the OSS was to act as a "force mulitiplier". After Viet Nam this role in SF was down-graded, until it was brought to the fore in El Salvador and other points south.

It would be and interesting concept to see just what type of a unit the "New" O.S.S. would be though.

Again, this is just MHO.

[LawOfTheSea]

I would promote this just to see what the new incarnation of the OSS would develop as far as TTP's and SOP's, considering what innovative pioneers the original OSS were(The Jedburgh Isoscoles Shooting Stance, just as one example).

[Bill Harsey]

I never knew what kind of experience was afforded me by making and designing some knives over a 14 year period for one Col. Rex Applegate, a core founding members of the OSS as hired on by one Bill Donovan.

Col. Applegate was an Oregon "boy" who lived within easy driving distance of here.

The one lesson that sticks in my mind from Applegates overview of this era is that the politics of the job always nearly screwed up the work that needed to be done. It was only when things got most desperate they were allowed to do the work it took to help win the war.
My editorial comment here is that the OSS's job was not simple and much was risked in order to do it.

I wish Rex Applegate was still around to comment on this conversation. For sure he would find it of interest.

[Razor]

If the USG were to reconstitute an OSS-like organization (ignoring for now the inevitable cries of foul from various intel agencies and specialized mil units), what do folks think about returning to the practice of heavily recruiting from the civilian workforce? There are lots of folks not in uniform with specialized skills required by such an organization. Do we recruit their services as civilians, do we try to get them to join as soliders, do we hire them as instructors to try to impart their skills to existing soliders, etc?

[TrooperT]

I think anyway that you could get the people with the right skills and knowledge into the program would be the way to do it. That's one of the reasons the WWII OSS worked as well as it did. Locking into a purely military pool doesn't do much for finding creative solutions to a problem. Diversity of experience and thinking is a plus in this application.

As overused as the saying "thinking outside of the box" is, the conventional military isn't much for that sort of thing and locking into that source exclusively would be counterproductive.

What I liked about SF was that it drew so many free thinkers that didn't necessarily always fit into the big-Army mold into the regiment. I'd probably be a little less "Ivy League" in any 21st century incarnation of OSS, though.

Torres
McMurray, PA

[Richard]

Reconstitute the Office of Secret Squirrels? Another bureaucracy competing for the same scarce resources seems a bit unrealistic to me. Personally, I can't see reinventing a wheel whose component pieces already exist--somebody just needs to be able to have the power and experience to be able to pick and choose from the tool bin to put together that better mouse trap when it is needed to do the job. We used to 'cross over' between agencies as necessary just for that purpose--why can't that happen again? :confused:

Richard's $.02 :munchin

[Gaff11]

Not sure if i am stepping out of lane by posting or contributing something that has already been mentioned but this article came up on CICenter and army times yesterday.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/03/army_sfhearing_030509w/

edit. just noticed this in another part of this forum

[TrooperT]

(SNIP) this article came up on CICenter and army times yesterday.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/03/army_sfhearing_030509w/

Interesting article. I can't see it ever happening. The Army has a long memory and didn't like SF doing CIA stuff in SE Asia. Granted that there are not a lot of VN era general officers left but the institutional memory remains...

[Backwoods]

If the USG were to reconstitute an OSS-like organization (ignoring for now the inevitable cries of foul from various intel agencies and specialized mil units), what do folks think about returning to the practice of heavily recruiting from the civilian workforce? There are lots of folks not in uniform with specialized skills required by such an organization. Do we recruit their services as civilians, do we try to get them to join as soliders, do we hire them as instructors to try to impart their skills to existing soliders, etc?

Sorry fellas. I started this post and then promptly went to Africa... you know the usual operation Bronze Warrior, collecting TDY, getting the African love (latrine time), having my medics dose me so that I couldn't talk straight and they taking pics of me, dealing with 3rd world leaders....the usual JOB we all signed up for, but I digress.

Razor, actually I would argue that the 18X program we currently have in place looks, smells, tastes a lot like the OSS recruiting push in the 40s. Currently I have 6 blokes that are products of the Xray program. Of those guys 4 have degrees, 1 is close, the other has a vast amount of life experience. I would say that this is portion of the OSS is currently underway.

[Backwoods]

Good article. I just read it and the principle sounds good (ie briefs well) but needs some work. What the LTC forgets is that an ODA actually has MOS s that do certain jobs and detailing a CIA person to the team or (and I shudder) a DoS person would require them to go through the course in order to insure they had that skill set A-N-D were mentally and physically able to perform the mission.

In addition, how would that person be on the food chain of the ODA? What about if they were put on an ODA like my current one where "GASP" a Warrant Officer is the Det CDR? Would a GS-13 or 14 let themselves be told what to do by the team daddy? Lots of good questions that the good LTC probably didn't think about because he forgot the dynamics of the ODA.

disclaimer notes: If you served under this LTC and he is a great guy, I am not questioning his ability as an officer, member of a group, or ability to command the 5th Carthaginian hoard with the mental capacity of a Jedi master. What I am saying is he is drinking the good idea fairy kool-aid.