Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces sic-3

by Tom Clancy

  General Meyer also ordered the activation of the Ist Special Forces Group, with orientation toward the Pacific region; gave instructions to upgrade the capabilities of psychological operations and civil affairs units; and directed that the authorized level of organization (ALO) for the other Special Forces units be upgraded to ALO-1 (the highest priority). This meant they were authorized to acquire the personnel and equipment they needed.

  In Carl Stiner's words: "As a result of his understanding of the complex nature of the challenges that our nation would face, as well as the capability of Special Forces for meeting these challenges, in large measure General Meyer is due the credit for bringing the SF back from their lowest point ever, as well as for the many critical missions they have performed since."

  It was a good start, but much more was needed. At this point, Congress picked up the ball.

  In 1986, spurred by the same real-world concerns that had inspired General Meyer, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. A sweeping work of military reformation, it strengthened the unified combatant commanders (such as the CINCs of CENTCOM or EUCOM) and the organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs the President's chief military adviser, and in general integrated the forces of the different services more effectively.

  That same year, Senators Sam Nunn and William Cohen proposed an amendment to the act to provide the same kind of sweeping changes to U.S. Special Operations. It passed, too — and the effects were stunning.

  First, it established the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which was to be commanded by a four-star general and would include all active and reserve special operations forces stationed in the United States (outside the United States, such forces would normally be under the command of the CINC of a particular arca).

  Second, it established an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflicts — ASD (SOLIC) — whose job was to supervise those areas, including oversight of policy and resources.

  Third, it defined the mission requirements of special operations. These now included: direct action, strategic reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, civil affairs, psychological operations, humanitarian assistance, and other activities specified by the President or the Secretary of Defense.

  Fourth, it gave the new USSOCOM its own funding and control over its own resources. A new major funding category was created — Major Force Program 11 1 (MFP-11) — which required the Defense Department to keep special-operations forces funding separate from general service funding. USSOCOM funding could be revised only by the Secretary of Defense after consultation with the CINC of USSOCOM.

  Fifth, the amendment (and later follow-up legislation) specified in unusual detail the responsibilities of the new CINC and the Assistant Secretary of Defense, the control of resources in money and manpower, and the monitoring of SOF officer and enlisted promotions.

  At long last, Special Operations had arrived.

  The devil, of course, was in the details. Congress could mandate, but it was the military that would have to implement.

  To begin with, a brand-new command had to be set up — created and staffed pretty much from scratch — and opinions varied on how to do it. For instance, General James Lindsay, the new commander (in late 1986) of the U.S. Readiness Command (REDCOM), had one idea. REDCOM's job was to prepare conventional forces to support the unified regional commands, a job that included deployment and contingency planning, joint training of assigned forces, and defense of the continental United States. Lindsay saw the mission of the new special operations command as similar to REDCOM's, in its own way, and reasoned, "Why not combine the commands? And make the special forces component subordinate to REDCOM?" He further refined the idea by proposing that they both be combined into a new command, called USSTRICOM (U.S. Strike Command).[20]

  Neither his original idea nor its revision worked, because they failed to take into account the mandate of the Nunn-Cohen legislation to create a broadly service-like organization commanded by a full, four-star general — (not a three-star subordinate to a REDCOM/STRICOM commander) — but they got people thinking… and the result must have been a surprise to him.

  In January 1987, Senator Cohen sent a directive to the JCS Chairman, Admiral Crowe, specifying that the new command had to be pure Special Forces and would have a "blank check. Subsequently, on January 23, the Joint Chiefs announced that it was REDCOM itself that would no longer be needed, and that SOCOM would be built on REDCOM's foundation, using its facilities, resources, infrastructure, and any staff that could handle the assignment. It was formalized by the Secretary of Defense in March of the same year, and on April 16, SOCOM was activated in Tampa, at the former REDCOM headquarters — with General Lindsay as its first commander.

  Now that the infrastructure was settled, the commands had to decide exactly who was going to be in it — who were the "special forces"? Predictably, there was no little debate about this, too. The Army part was easy. It passed to the new command all of its Special Operations Forces — the SF groups, the special operations aviation units, and the 75th Ranger Regiment (PSYOPS and civil affairs came later, during Carl Stiner's tenure as CINC). For the rest, it was more complicated. The Air Force special operations forces, for instance, then under the Military Airlift Command (MAC), were transferred to USSOCOM, but the Air Force hoped to retain some control. The Marines had units that were labeled special operations — capable, but they had no actual special operations units. Though the Navy had never previously shown much love for its SEALs, it suddenly discovered that the SEALs were an indispensable part of the Navy family and tried to hold on to them — and their part of the special operations budget. The Navy managed to keep that debate going for the better part of a year, but it was a lost cause, and the SEALs went to USSOCOM. Finally, there was debate about whether the Joint Special Operations Task Force should become part of USSOCOM, or report directly to the national command authorities without the hindrance of an interim layer. In the end, it was placed under USSOCOM as a sub — unified command.

  PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

  Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the "Functional Area Assessment" that General Meyer had inspired was beginning to produce results.

  The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) had been tasked to conduct an in-depth analysis of how SF should be organized, manned, equipped, and trained. It was to answer the questions: "Where are we now? What is broken? How do we fix it? Where do we need to go in the future?"

  General Maxwell Thurman, the vice chief of staff of the army, was the overseer of the analysis; the TRADOC commander, General Bill Richardson, supervised it personally; and other outside generals — Mike Spigelmire, Tom Fields, Fred Franks, and Ed Burba — headed the panels. The study was conducted by the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.

  Thurman's leadership gave the analysis particular force. Everyone involved reported to him, and everything they reported was put on the front burner. He listened to everybody, heard every problem and every solution, and put a time clock on it. This was not some committee report to be filed away somewhere and forgotten. At the end of the process, there would be an implementation plan — approved by Generals Thurman, Richardson, and Lindsay, and then done: no complaining, no foot-dragging.

  When it was all over, the analysis proposed the following:

  First, Army Special Forces could no longer exist in the wilderness; there would be a separate SF branch (like Infantry, Armor, or Aviation) and an NCO career-management field. That meant that SF troops and officers could have a career path within Special Forces itself; previously, they'd had to rotate among other parts of the military if they expected to get ahead. This goal was accomplished in April 1987; the commandant at the Special War Center and School became the chief of branch, just as the commandant at Fort Benning was the chief of branch for the infantry. "At this point," Jim Guest remarks, "we went from being looked
at as something kept in the dark and under the covers to sitting up at the head table with the rest of the big shots."

  Second, the Green Berets needed to become a major, three-star (lieutenant general) command. This allowed Special Forces to become masters of their own destiny, and to oversee and execute their own training and readiness programs. When a three-star commander sat down at a table with other three- and four-star commanders, he carried weight that one- and two-star commanders didn't. Army Special Forces became a major command in 1989.

  Third, the academic center, schools, and training facilities were upgraded, and the selection, assessment, and training made more professional and tough.

  And, fourth, an equipment-acquisition plan was instituted to upgrade all of the SF communications, weapons, aircraft, and training facilities in order to meet mission requirements.

  The modern Special Operations force was now ready to go.

  MAKING PROFESSIONALS

  Or almost ready to go. As previously noted, one of SF's problems was that many of the generation that emerged from Vietnam, or who came into the force after Vietnam, failed to attain the high levels of professionalism expected of men who make up a force that calls itself elite. In Vietnam, they'd operated out on the end of a string without much supervision. Others — recruited after the Army drawdown in the '70s — were not the best group of men to begin with. Some of them had simply been looking for greater freedom and intrigue than they could get in conventional units, and had found their way into SF. Meanwhile, back then SF did not give a strong enough professional orientation to its younger officers. As a consequence, some of them picked up "outsider" attitudes, simply because that was what was in the air.

  On the other side of the coin, it was hard for them to get promoted, and that also didn't help their attitude any. Normally, if you were good, you moved through key positions in a variety of conventional units. Your performance and potential were recognized by people who counted, and in due course you were selected for promotion and for attendance at Leavenworth and later the War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or one of the other high-level service schools. Promotion and selection boards were composed exclusively of officers with conventional backgrounds.

  Back in the '70s and the early '80s, however, most officers were dead-ended in Special Forces. The personnel assignment people in Washington were content to drop them there and "forget" about them. In many ways, assignment to SF was career suicide, and so it was small wonder that some officers just figured: To hell with it. Such people simply reinforced the perception that special operators were not "real" Army.

  All of this came to a head soon after the passage of Nunn-Cohen, during Jim Guest's tenure as head of the Special Warfare Center and School. The four-star TRADOC commander sent Guest the following message: "I'm tired of having to apologize for Special Forces," he announced in no uncertain terms. "I am tired of their reputation. I am tired of having to deal with their lack of professionalism. Are they in the Army or not?

  "If you don't do something about this, I am going to relieve you. I will run you out of the Army."

  Jim Guest says:

  So that caught my attention. That's when I realized that we couldn't let things go on the old way, and that's when we started saying, "Hey, we can't mess around any longer outside the Army system; we've got to do things inside it. We've got to make ourselves more knowledgeable of it. That means, first of all, that we've got to convince the senior generals that we are professionals, that we are capable of doing special missions, and that we're not just a camp of thugs."

  At the same time, we started retiring the soldiers who did not or could not meet the new standards, or who refused to meet them. Some looked at the future and decided that they did not want to be in a more structured force.

  After that, we raised the standards. We wanted smarter people, so we established an IQ level — a high one. If you wanted to come into Special Forces, you had to have an IQ of at least 120.

  Then we had to do something about training.

  In those days, when someone volunteered for Special Forces and was chosen to take the Q Course, he received a permanent change of station to Fort Bragg. In other words, he was ours. If he dropped out, something had to be found for him at Fort Bragg. This caused problems: We had more washouts than people who made the grade, and we had to find places for all those people at Bragg. Second, we had a lot of money invested in these folks. We needed to find a way to reduce the initial investment while making sure we let the good ones come through. Finally, we were being used by a lot of people who simply wanted a ticket into the 82nd Airborne Division or somewhere else at Bragg, so they would volunteer for Special Forces and then immediately drop out of the training, some by voluntarily terminating themselves, some by just flunking it somewhere along the line. That had to stop.

  What we did was persuade General Vuono, the Army Chief of Staff, to institute a new selection and assessment program that would come in before the Q Course. We'd recruit the new people, then they'd sign up and come to Bragg TDY (temporarily, not permanently) and go through a two-meek selection drill that would pinpoint those men who could operate on their own but could also subject themselves to a team for a mission. "Our idea," as we explained to the Chief of Staff, "is to give them zero training — absolutely none. We want to get them out there and make them as uncomfortable as we can, put them through situations that are as ambivalent as we can make them, and stress them as much as they can bear. Then we want them to make a choice. Do I really want to be Special Forces or not?"

  The course we came up with was designed by one of the men who had put together the selection course for our top special missions units. The volunteers were always in unbalanced situations. They never knew what to expect. They never knew what was going to happen to them. They'd think they were stopping for a meal break, and would get a mission two minutes before they were going to eat. "Move. Report here,"which might mean five miles of hard marching with heavy rucksacks.

  We never told them where or why or how far they were going. We never said, "You're going from here, and you'll end up over here. "Only, "You start here and go in that direction." Then they'd march until they met somebody else, who'd send them on another leg of the journey.

  People who can't deal with ambiguous situations will fall out when they're out there alone and confused in the country, particularly when we've got them under physical stress.

  We didn't harass them, the way they do at places like Jump School. We didn't have to. Sure, one morning we gave them push-ups and things like that, just to show them, "yes, we can do that to you if we want to. But that's not how we're going to do it. We're going to tell you what we want you to do and then see if you attempt to do it."

  At the end of the course, we had a thirty-mile forced march, and that pretty well tested them out. We had people who quit just doing that — both officers and NCOs.

  Some men we flunked. Some of them could do everything we asked for physically, but we took them, out for psychological reasons. Some men were loners and could not handle the stress of operating in a team.

  We were looking for solid men of character and integrity, motivated for all the right reasons — men of maturity and sound judgment, with the inner strength to do whatever was required under all conditions and circumstances, and who did not have to be "stroked" to do their best.

  It worked. We truly began to get the very best men. On top of that, we'd begun indoctrinating them into Special Forces right up front. They were paying a price to be in Special Forces. They'd made a real investment, and it was going to mean something to them. The result was that we were able to fill our slots with quality replacements, who were soon recognized by the Army by receiving promotions faster than their peers in the conventional Army did.

  Next, we rebuilt and upgraded our training facilities at Camp MacKall (adjacent to Fort Bragg), where we did the Q Course and some of the other courses. During World War II, the Army had trained nearly all of their a
irborne units there, but everything was left over from then — Navy Quonset huts, an old mess hall, and a latrine. We needed a new sewage and water system, new buildings, and new training facilities; and General Thurman made sure we got all this when he was TRADOC commander.

  As for integrating an awareness of special operations into the service schools, such as the infantry school at Benning or the armor school at Knox, and at the advanced courses at Leavenworth or the War College, not as much has been done there. I don't see in their curriculum any focus on Special Forces, Civil Affairs, PSYOPs, and Special Operations Aviation and how they can be integrated on the battlefield. That was a major failure we set about to correct, and which still needs work.

  We've got to put an advanced training and education slice into all those schools. We've got to make sure those folks are being taught an appreciation of SF, because sitting in those audiences are future CINCs, senior staff officers, senior planners, and senior subordinate commanders for the CINC — and they need to know what we can do.

  We've done a lot to make Special Forces even more professional. Now the Army has to learn how to use then? most effectively.

  CARL STINER-BETWEEN THE WARS

  Meanwhile, Carl Stiner was progressing through several key assignments: a tour with Army headquarters in Washington; a battalion command with the 82nd Airborne Division, where he was also division operations officer; study at the Army War College, and a Masters degree in public administration; a tour in Saudi Arabia, as the assistant project manager for training and modernizing the Saudi National Guard-a Special Forces — type assignment; brigade command at Fort Benning, Georgia; and in 1979, he and twenty-two other handpicked officers were sent to Saudi Arabia and Yemen to help the Saudis put out the civil war between North and South Yemen — another SF-type assignment.