[Warrior-Mentor]

The Tucker and Lamb book "is a great synopsis of all the water-cooler talk in Special Forces," said an SF officer at the Naval Postgraduate School. However, he said, a briefing produced by a team of NPS students contains another variant on the idea of pulling Special Forces out of SOCom, by combining the seven SF groups with the CIA's paramilitary forces and some diplomatic elements. "There's no getting around the fact that a lot of the stuff you do for unconventional warfare just doesn't fit DoD, in the simplest sense that they always want us in uniform, yet doing clandestine work amongst a civilian population. As long as we're trying to have one foot in the covert world and one foot in the overt world, we're not going to be very good at either, and we could potentially endanger our operators and the mission."

Although the voices calling for taking the military's indirect-action forces out of SOCom are mostly civilian, the proposal to create a UW equivalent to JSOC inside SOCom originated in the heart of the indirect-action community.

"It was generated at USASFC," said a field grade SF officer who has followed the issue closely. USASFC is the U.S. Army Special Forces Command, the two-star headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., responsible for training and equipping the SF groups. "People were asking the question why we have this big repository of subject-matter experts, both civilians and military people, in unconventional warfare, and we have just this Title X nondeployable headquarters," he said. Many in Special Forces thought the solution was to turn SF Command from a Title X administrative headquarters into an operational UW headquarters.

Most sources agree that the driving force behind this concept was now-retired Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert, who commanded Special Forces Command from September 2001 to July 2003. Lambert said SOCom's prioritization of the direct-action units had regrettable consequences for the military's ability to wage unconventional warfare.

"With senior-level advocacy and improved resourcing, all the indirect expertise wouldn't have been forgotten by DoD and left floundering at the U.S. Army JFK Special Warfare Center and School and U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne)," Lambert said.

"If there had been equitable investment in all SOF, instead of just fixing Desert One for the last 20 years, where do you think counterinsurgency and occupational doctrine, human intelligence networks, cultural training, language training and language technology, indigenous technical equipment, the art of caches, biometric and historical contact records (all lost from earlier SF involvement in Afghanistan), and general-purpose force understanding of irregular warfare would have been by 9/11?" he asked. "I know the fight in Kosovo and Iraq would have been different."


POLITICAL-MILITARY CHALLENGES
Lambert, who was scheduled to speak at the Sept. 20 seminar, said the utility of a UW command "would be to handle the nagging, intractable" political-military challenges that don't require the deployment of overwhelming conventional military forces, providing unconventional warfare advice "and tailored command and control as required.


"It could support the regional component commands with indirect support over long periods of time. Supporting U.S. Pacific Command in the Philippines for the next 20 years might be one of its responsibilities. Does that mean the headquarters deploys frequently, like some SOF commands do? No – each requirement would have a tailored response.

"In the U.S., the headquarters would serve as a standing advocate for unconventional and indirect warfare activities and solutions."

Lambert advocated using SF Command headquarters as the base for an unconventional warfare command. Some versions of this proposal referred to the putative new organization as Standing Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force.

"The furthest we got was the Standing Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force," said the field-grade SF officer who has followed the issue closely. This would have performed roughly the same role for indirect action that JSOC does for direct action, except that it was a "task force; ... it would not be as permanent" as a command, he said. "It would have been a task force at first, but after you employed it, you get some successes, you get out there, the long-term [plan] was it would eventually become a permanent command. ... The ultimate goal was ... that, essentially, under SOCom you would have had the Army, Navy and Air Force [Special Operations Commands], then JSOC and a UW command, co-equal."

After being endorsed by SF Command's higher headquarters, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), "that thing made it all the way up to SOCom and it was annihilated by SOCom," the field-grade SF officer said. "Basically, you're getting your foot in the door, but the door was slammed shut so hard the foot got amputated, because JSOC saw that as a direct threat," the field-grade SF officer said.

"They did float the proposal," the retired SF colonel confirmed. "Brown killed it."

Other special operations sources provided similar accounts. But a statement from USASOC's public affairs office disputed this version of events. "USASOC has never sought USSOCOM's approval for a plan breaking out [Army special operations forces] elements to develop a separate unconventional warfare command," the statement said. "Creating a separate UW command from existing assets would only degrade USASOC's overall response capability and limit operational options to those commanders and ambassadors for whom USASOC is tasked to support. USASOC has discussed concepts that emphasize UW and the indirect approach, including discussions with SOCOM, but USASOC has never made a recommendation to build a force structure to focus solely on one dimension."

FROM BRIEFING TO ACTION
But the idea wouldn't die. Versions of it surfaced repeatedly in the 2004-2006 timeframe. "By the time I saw it [in spring 2006], it was at a point where they were briefing it to higher as a course of action," said an officer who served at USASOC headquarters. In that briefing, the USASFC commander, a two-star, would command the operational headquarters while the deputy commander, a one-star, would take over the command's force provision responsibilities if the headquarters deployed under the two-star. "It was heavy on interagency," the officer said. "They were actually calling it a JIUWTF, a joint interagency UW task force."

The UW task force idea was floated in a 2005 Army War College paper by then-Lt. Col. Chris Haas, a Special Forces officer who commanded 1st Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, during the opening phase of the war in Afghanistan and now, as a full colonel, commands 3rd Special Forces Group. "Clearly, the time has come for restructuring U.S. Army Special Forces Command," Haas wrote in his paper, "A Standing Unconventional Warfare Task Force to Combat Insurgency in the 21st Century." "[R]estructuring Army Special Forces Command into a standing, deployable Unconventional Warfare Task Force charted to conduct long-term, unconventional warfare offers DoD the most immediate and viable response to the current security environment."

In May 2006, another SF officer, Maj. Michael James, advocated transforming SF Command into an "'indirect' sub-unified command" — JSOC is also a sub-unified command — in a monograph titled "Special Operations: Achieving Unified Direction in the Global War on Terrorism" that he wrote at the School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Doing so, James wrote, would "raise the importance and influence of indirect SOF within USSOCOM, the larger military, and the US government in general."

The statement from USASOC's public affairs office states that "[i]t is USASOC's strong studied opinion that our current force structure is optimum and our approved and programmed growth is essential." But several SF officers said the creation of a UW command would enjoy broad support among their peers. "Operationalizing SF Command is probably the best of the three courses of action out there," said a special operations officer in the Pentagon. The other two courses of action were to take the UW assets out of SOCom, as per Tucker, Lamb and Rothstein, or stick with the status quo, he said. "Obviously, status quo's not the right answer," he quickly added.

"That's the right move, and give them that type of authority and autonomy to do an indirect action, UW-type mission," agreed Maj. Jamie Alden, an SF officer at the Naval Postgraduate School. "USASFC has the units that are trained and have the organizational culture to execute the UW mission. The problem is that USASFC is not given the authorities, etc., to execute such a mission."

Tom O'Connell, who served as the assistant secretary of defense from July 2003 to April 2007, was dismissive of the UW command concept, particularly as outlined by Tucker and Lamb.

"A separate UW command, to me, virtually has no value," O'Connell said. "I don't know that we need another headquarters. We man too many headquarters right now, in my view. I don't want to call the authors incapable or not experienced. But let's look at their track record of experience. Just because they've been in some policy office writing up wish lists and making grand pronouncements doesn't mean they have any real experience on the ground."