[CDRODA396]

THE FUTURE….

When the National Command Authority sits down at the table and someone throws a mission folder on it and they pick it up, if it’s a Direct Action, one unit immediately comes to mind, No Brainer. If it’s an underwater infill to plant mines on the hull of a ship, or take down a gulf oil rig, one unit comes to mind, easy. If its surgical bomb strike in downtown Mog, the call is plain. But right now, what is it that we, SF, immediately come to mind when it’s dropped on the desk?

Until recently Special Forces had five primary missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, counterterrorism, and direct action. Not to long ago, two new missions, information operations and counter-proliferation were added to the mix. With the exception of UW, someone else can claim expertise equal to or greater than ours, and claim that their specialization at it makes them better than our “Jack of all trades” approach. Doesn’t make it true, but the argument can be made. Regardless, we don’t own sole responsibility for anyone of them, except UW.

Even UW doesn’t have the relevance it should. Even after the success of 5th Group in OEF, UW didn’t play near as important a roll in OIF as it could have. In the north, there was a much larger, better organized and motivated force, the Peshmerga, than you had in the Northern Alliance in AStan. Despite this resource, the mission in the north was to FIX even though a couple of key strategic targets lay just across the Green Line, Mosul and Kirkuk. Eventually these two cities were claimed by forces from the North, but more to keep the Kurds from raping them, especially the oil facilities at Kirkuk, than as pre-planned combat objectives.

And with UW, we all understand that it’s a long term commitment, built upon long term relationships and trust. Yet we rotate in/out of theater right now quicker than the conventional army. And when we rotate back in, there’s no guarantee the same team will be at the same location, or if it’s the same team, the same personalities will still be on the team. So the first part of every Transition of Authority is spent rehashing the same feeling out period. Right about the time a Team gets a handle on the personalities and players in an area, its time to start handing things over to their replacement.

So what needs to happen..? I Believe, we need to cut sling load on both OEF and OIF and let Big Army, the Air Force, Marines and the Navy have all the Counter-Insurgency/FID they can stand.

In my opinion, SF’s focus as a Force, that thing that immediately comes to the NCA’s mind when they see the requirement, should be the next fight, not the current one. Once the invasion is over, if Big Army wants FID and the Counter-Insurgent fight, give it to them, and let SF get busy preparing the future battlefields.

Each geographic region has a potential future fight, the Horn of Africa comes to mind, as does Indonesia, there are many. But we should be doing a combination of things to set the conditions for quick success once we get around to picking where is next, ....building strong relationships with those countries we feel will be allies, building "information" on those we don’t, training the Armies of those we see as futures ally’s NOW, not after we run off whomever the enemy is....

I BELIEVE the early successes in OEF were achieved years before, with Teams going abroad on JCETs, and building rapport building skills, interpersonal skills, cultural skills, and war fighting skills, and all of which came into play when 5th Group Teams infilled way back in '01.

One article I read stated that “THE GREEN BERETS GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO THE CAMPAIGN IN AFGHANISTAN CAME TWO YEARS BEFORE THE TERRORIST ATTACKS.” In 1999 President Bush’s Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni—then the four-star Marine general also responsible for the former Soviet republics in Central Asia—directed his Special Operations Forces in the words of Brig. Gen. Frank Toney, Jr., to use their “military-to-military peacetime engagement techniques to open up |the new Asian nations] for training with U.S. forces.” At a time when U.S. businesses and many diplomats viewed the region as a dangerous place best left to its own devices, Army Special Forces teams were conducting training missions in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, where they developed personal relationships that remain critically important in that part of the world.

When war came, the Uzbeks immediately offered their assistance. American transport aircraft were touching down on their soil barely a week after September 11, and a major base was quickly established at Khanabad, 130 miles north of the Afghan border. By mid-November the Tajiks had made available three bases from which offensive operations could be launched (of which the Pentagon chose one), and they were soon followed by the Kyrgys. Special Forces’ familiarity with each nation’s culture and topography, along with the mutual trust developed between the Central Asian and American soldiers, allowed combat operations to be conducted with stunning rapidity and effect.

We should be re-honing these skills while providing the Combatant Commander the necessary information NOW, to ensure victory LATER when ever the NCA gets around to getting it done. Right now we're just driving around the battlefield waiting for the next IED.

I also believe the longer we continue to work under a CJTF, they will continue to marginalize us until we are so far away from the center of gravity, or even main effort, that the argument, "what do we need them for anyway," will soon follow...and the Big Army will have an answer, and it scares me.