OK. I didn't post the whole thing but it is worth the read. Below is the link:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...60629-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
5
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.
6
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
7
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.
Hybrid Mode
