Pentagon Quietly Sending 1,000 Special Operators to Afghanistan in Strategy Revamp

[Team Sergeant]

Boy, this sure is quiet.....:rolleyes: 1000 Special Operations Soldiers, they must be sending all the Rangers....

It's amazing that Rowan Scarborough gets it right: special operations forces and NOT special forces.

Now Mr. Scarborough please define what an "operator" is...... a new Special Operations term?:rolleyes:

Team Sergeant

Pentagon Quietly Sending 1,000 Special Operators to Afghanistan in Strategy Revamp

The Pentagon is sending 1,000 more special operations forces and support staff into Afghanistan and is revamping the way its covert warriors fight the Taliban, military sources tell FOXNews.com.
By Rowan Scarborough

FOXNews.com

The Pentagon is sending 1,000 more special operations forces and support staff into Afghanistan to bolster a larger conventional troop buildup, and is revamping the way Army Green Berets and other commandos work to rid villages of the Taliban.

While much of the public focus has been on 24,000 additional American troops moving into the country this year, U.S. Special Operations Command is quietly increasing its covert warriors in what could be a pivotal role in finally defeating insurgents, military sources tell FOXNews.com.

The movement comes as Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a special operator who led successful manhunts in Iraq for Al Qaeda terrorists, is about to take command in Afghanistan.

McChrystal, who underwent a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing Tuesday, is expected to put more emphasis on using commandos in counterinsurgency operations and on finding or killing key Taliban leaders.

Underscoring that theme, McChrystal has asked two veteran special operators on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, which he directs, to accompany him to Afghanistan once he wins Senate approval for a fourth star. The two are Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed intelligence for the chief terrorist hunting unit in Iraq; and Brig Gen. Austin Miller, a Joint Staff director for special operations.

Military sources say Brig. Gen. Ed Reeder, who commands special operations in Afghanistan, went in-country earlier this year to revamp the way Green Beret "A" Teams, Delta Force and other special operators conduct counter-insurgency.

Green Berets, the same group that led the 2001 ouster of the Taliban from power, now primarily work out of fire support bases, often independently of conventional forces. They fight to control the Taliban-infested border with Pakistan, and train the Afghan army.

Critics within special operations have said the A Teams need to work more closely with conventional forces and with NATO counterparts. "This would give us a needed one-two punch," said a former operator who served in Afghanistan.

Reeder heads the new Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command. It is a mix of the more open Green Berets and Marine commandos, and the super-secret Delta Force and Navy SEALs who conduct manhunts.

The covert side works in task forces that are only identified by a secret three-digit number. They are aided by Army Rangers and a Joint Interagency Task Force made up of the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other intelligence units.

McChrystal is a former commander of Joint Special Operations Command, the home of Delta Force. He led the hunt in Iraq that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of Al Qaeda's leading terrorists in the Middle East, in 2006.

Those who worked with him talk of a tenacious warrior who worked to link his direct-action fighters with the intelligence operatives who provided crucial information on terrorist locations. McChrystal allowed Delta operatives at the troop level (akin to a conventional platoon) to call in Predator spy drones during a mission.

"We need a Predator on that house," is the way the former operative in Iraq described Delta's freer rein.

The increase in special operations forces is an attempt to rebalance commando presence there, after the demands of the Iraq War stripped some of its manpower in Afghanistan. The influx will bring the total special operations forces in Afghanistan to about 5,000, a spokesman at special operations command confirmed to FOXNews.com.

Usama bin Laden is believed to be hiding across the border in Pakistan, where U.S. ground troops are forbidden. But intelligence sources say if bin Laden is located, American commandos may be dispatched to kill or capture him.

Rowan Scarborough is author of "Rumsfeld's War: The Untold Story of America's Anti-Terrorist Commander," and "Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA."



http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/05/pentagon-quietly-sending-special-operators-afghanistan-strategy-revamp/

[Richard]

Sure sounds like the former CDR of the 75th Ranger Regiment is planning a BRAC and moving them OCONUS. ;)

Richard's $.02 :munchin

[Pete]

I wonder how many of the 1,000 were told "This is close hold, sensitive, don't tell anybody....."?

Of course, with the big units around here, their unit deployments to the box are in the local paper for months.

[Utah Bob]

....revamping the way Army Green Berets and other commandos work to rid villages of the Taliban.:confused:

[7624U]

Critics within special operations have said the A Teams need to work more closely with conventional forces and with NATO counterparts. "This would give us a needed one-two punch," said a former operator who served in Afghanistan. Translation: The A-Teams are not cool like us..

The covert side works in task forces that are only identified by a secret three-digit number Translation: You can tell who real operators are they have all kinds of cool gear unlike the A-Teams.

[Richard]

Ralph Peters weighs in on the change.

Richard's $.02 :munchin

AFGHAN GRAVEYARD: BURYING MILITARY REPUTATIONS
Ralph Peters, NY Post, 14 May 2009

The conflict in Afghanistan was a special-operations war in 2001, and it's a spe cial-operations war in 2009. Everything in between was deadly make-believe.

The latest casualty of our incoherent effort is Gen. David McKiernan. On Monday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates removed him from command of our Afghan operations after McKiernan objected to being sidelined.

If Congress approves, Gates will replace McKiernan with Lt. Gen. Stan McChrystal, a career-long special operator and a brilliant killer. McChrystal's special-ops fighters, such as the Army's Special Forces, Rangers and "black" elements, or the Navy's SEALs, do the violent, secret work that others fear or shun. Consistently, they've inflicted the key enemy casualties in our now-nameless struggle with terrorists.

Gates is doing the right thing -- but the human story illustrates how badly we've mismanaged Afghanistan.

Gen. McKiernan was and is a first-rate soldier. He argued from the beginning that we needed more troops for Iraq, then fought magnificently on the march to Baghdad. But for all his military virtues, he's a conventional thinker who trusts the system.

Dave McKiernan didn't fail the Army. The Army failed him. Sent to Afghanistan to herd NATO cats, he operated by the book. But the book the Army gave him was wrong.

That book -- our Counterinsurgency Manual -- was midwifed by Gen. David Petraeus, who did a dazzling job of turning around the mess Rumsfeld-era policies made in Iraq.

But Petraeus was nimble. When he hit the ground in Baghdad, he promptly surged beyond the prescriptions in his politically correct manual. Petraeus did what needed to be done. That included staying out of Stan McChrystal's secret fight against al Qaeda and other bad actors in Iraq. We turned the blood tide during the hours of darkness, while journalists snored in their bunks.

Of all the factors that enabled the turnaround in Iraq, the first was the speed with which al Qaeda alienated the locals. The second was the incisive, relentless elimination of terrorists by our special-ops forces: Killing works.

But Petraeus' deservedly lauded performance in Iraq appears to have inhibited his ability to think clearly about Afghanistan -- and Pakistan. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, he's backed the same tactic that worked in Iraq: surging troops to protect the population.

He doesn't seem to grasp that, while al Qaeda was a foreign and ultimately unwanted presence in Iraq, the Taliban's the home team in Afghanistan. Afghan tribesmen just don't share our interests. And Iraq's a state. Afghanistan's an accident.

We'd need hundreds of thousands of troops and decades of commitment to attempt to nation-build where there's no nation to build. Old-think counterinsurgency theory demands a lot of troops, plentiful resources -- and time.

But we haven't got the troops. Our resources are squandered. And time's running out, with the war-virgin brats on Team Obama squealing, "Are we there yet? When are we going to get there?"

One faction in our military believes that Gates fired McKiernan because he can't fire Petraeus -- yet.

Will McChrystal, our special operator without peer, be allowed to do what's necessary -- and to jettison huggy-bear programs that sound good but don't work? Can he focus on the destruction of our enemies? Can he throw away the book?

McChrystal's boss, Petraeus, remains the key. If this supremely talented man can overcome his preconceptions about the fight we're in, he and McChrystal may be the team that rescues another failing effort. But Petraeus has to think like a Pashtun tribesman, not a Princeton man.

As this column has pointed out repeatedly, Afghanistan's worthless in and of itself. Securing hundreds of premedieval villages means local progress at the cost of strategic paralysis. To fight a mobile enemy, we need to be hypermobile. The dirt doesn't matter.

That's where special-ops come in. Our efforts should concentrate on supporting our black-program professionals. It's their fight. We need fewer troops, but a clear vision and more guts.

McChrystal needs to question all the "givens." And he needs to dismantle the NATO pleasure-palace that only impedes the war effort. Our commitment must be streamlined, not fattened and diffused. We need to focus on what must be done, casting aside what just seems nice to do.

Getting it right in Afghanistan -- and across the frontier in Pakistan -- means digging fewer wells and forcing our enemies to dig more graves. I'll bet on McChrystal to get it right. If he's allowed to.

Afghanistan's long been called "the graveyard of empires." Today, it's becoming the graveyard of reputations. Worried by President Obama's campaign promises to "fix" Afghanistan, the administration's already looking for scapegoats as the situation worsens.

A good soldier sent on the wrong mission, Gen. McKiernan was only the first victim.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05142009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/afghan_graveyard_169185.htm?page=0

[Bad Tolz]

Translation: The A-Teams are not cool like us..

Translation: You can tell who real operators are they have all kinds of cool gear unlike the A-Teams.

I seem to recall a similiar change in strategy when the conventional units assumed command in RVN and seconded SF teams to their goals.

[The Reaper]

Well, a famous Special Operations General Officer did say that SF are not real warriors, like JSOC, but are the housekeepers.

TR

[PRB]

Ralph Peters makes some very valid points..in a nutshell Astan ain't Iraq.
Don't underestimate Petraeus, he has a limber intellect and I believe the ability to change his own set course if given a valid course of action.
Don't worry about the A teams not getting their fair share either...if anything, thay are overcommitted and they do have all of the 'cool gear' they need too.

[Richard]

And just six short months ago... ;)

Richard's $.02

Special ops ‘surge’ sparks debate

Critics: Afghanistan plan takes SF from usual training mission
Sean D. Naylor, Army Times, 20 Dec 2008

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to deploy three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over a proposed near-term “surge” of spec ops forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.

The National Security Council’s surge proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.

Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the so-called “war czar” whose official title is assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan policy and implementation. The rationale behind deploying more special ops forces to Afghanistan was that any decision to deploy more conventional brigades to Afghanistan would take at least several months to implement, whereas special ops units could be sent much more quickly, the Special Forces officer said.

To those in favor, the proposed deployment of additional Special Forces A-teams — the 12-man units also known as operational detachment-alphas — represented proof that the Bush administration was willing to take immediate action to reverse negative trends in the Afghan war, the Pentagon military official said.

However, the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies.

Most major special operations commands were opposed to the proposal, special operations sources said. The sources identified U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, headed by Michael Vickers, as all resisting the initiative.

Lute declined through a representative to be interviewed, as did spokesmen for SOCOM and Vickers’ office.

Special operations sources said that those opposing the “SOF surge” were generally against the idea on two grounds: that the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, has not requested them, and that the CJSOTF-A does not have enough “enablers” — such as helicopters and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets — to support the forces it has in-country now, let alone another battalion’s worth.

SOLUTION: Fire the Theater CDR and replace him with an SOF-oriented CG - send the MC-12W - and BTW, don't forget to send those SOF as originally planned.

A spokesman for McKiernan did not return a call seeking comment. An administration official denied Lute was trying to interfere with the theater commander’s prerogatives.

But the field-grade Special Forces officer said that the requests for forces generated by commanders in Afghanistan do not seem to comport to any overall plan for the theater.

“Commanders are asking for what they think they can get, rather than what they need,” he said.

However, the field grade Special Forces officer acknowledged that the NSC proposal had run up against stiff opposition among the special ops brass, including Vickers and leadership of SOCOM and USASOC. The officer said the brass did not want to deploy more forces without additional “dedicated enablers,” including helicopters, ISR assets such as Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and “more dedicated forward operating bases, more money for [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], the whole package.”

The short supply of helicopters in Afghanistan has been a constant problem for conventional forces and CJSOTF-A, the “white,” or unclassified, task force in-country. Unlike the secretive, “black,” Joint Special Operations Command task force, which is directly supported by elements of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, “white” Special Forces groups do not have their own dedicated aviation units and have to compete for helicopter support with the rest of the U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. CJSOTF-A is commanded by a colonel, whereas the other organizations are all commanded by flag officers.

The Pentagon military official said that the planned deployment of an additional 20,000 conventional U.S. troops, including three brigade combat teams, to Afghanistan would also include a lot of “enablers” that the special operations forces could use.

The Pentagon plan includes more helicopters being sent to Afghanistan, as well as the possibility of a one-star special operations flag officer to command “white” SOF forces in country, which would obviate the need to have “O-6s arm wrestling with O-7s and O-9s,” he said.

Special Forces mission debate
A field-grade officer in Washington who has been tracking the debate said that the “white” SOF leaders’ argument that their forces need more ISR assets and helicopters is a reflection of how Special Forces has veered from its traditional mission of “foreign internal defense” — training host nation forces to conduct counterinsurgency — in favor of the more glamorous direct-action missions.

The officer said Lute believes that special operations forces, particularly Special Forces, “are the right force” to send to Afghanistan because of their skills at teaching foreign internal defense.

This might explain the special operations hierarchy’s opposition to Lute’s surge proposal, the field grade-officer in Washington said. “This is an implicit criticism of what SOF has done for the last five years,” he said. “They haven’t been training indigenous forces. That may be what SOCOM is objecting to, is it’s implicitly a critique of SOF’s over-fascination with direct action.”

He noted that Special Forces A-teams in Afghanistan are partnered with Afghan commando units, not regular Afghan National Army battalions.

The senior special operations staff officer acknowledged that SF A-teams in Afghanistan do not routinely partner with conventional Afghan units, but said some of the blame lies in the fact that “the advisory mission is separate from the SF mission. That’s the fundamental problem with Afghanistan.” As a result, he said, “our ODAs are not being effectively employed.”

Under the Defense Department plan for Afghanistan, Army brigade combat teams and Marine regimental combat teams would be responsible for “mentoring” Afghan National Army units, but “white” special operations forces would also have a role in tougher training missions, according to the Pentagon military official.

“The framework is going to look a lot more like the framework did in Iraq over the last couple of years,” the Pentagon military official said.

Part of the debate over the feasibility of a special operations surge revolves around the perception by some surge proponents that special operations leaders are not making as many of their forces available as they might. “Lute for a long time has been talking about his deeply held belief from his time as the J-3 [director of operations on the Joint Staff] that the SOF are withholding a lot of their assets in order to preserve their op tempo and their retention numbers,” said the field-grade officer in Washington who has been following the debate.

This claim was flatly rejected by the senior special operations staff officer. Special Forces’ deployment ratio was less than a full day home for every day deployed, which is busier than the op tempo of conventional forces, who have at least a 1:1 ratio.

However, it’s not clear that any SOF surge would be made up entirely or mostly of Special Forces units. CJSOTF-A now includes a Marine Special Operations Command element in western Afghanistan, which is likely to grow, the field grade Special Forces officer said.

“The term that’s being bandied about is ‘ODA equivalents,’” he said.

The senior special operations staff officer scoffed at such talk. “There’s only SF,” he said. “There’s no SF equivalents. That’s idiocy. SEALs are not SF. MARSOC are not SF and SF are not SEALs. ... Those people who are throwing that [term] around certainly don’t understand what they’re talking about.”

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/12/army_sofsurge_122908w/