Modern American Snipers

by Chris Martin

  A master practitioner of low-visibility operations and practically all relevant forms of armed combat, McPhee may very well be every bit as deadly when unarmed, as evidenced by the 2005 Budweiser World Cup Super Heavyweight Jiu-Jitsu Championship. Further emphasizing that notion is the fact that Shrek served as a one-on-one room instructor with the Unit, actively training other operators in hand-to-hand combat. That position is not assigned—it is earned. A prospective teacher must first defeat five fighters in a row before being awarded the role. And there’s no concern an instructor will act like a tenured professor once he’s in as that same standard is required to retain the position.

  McPhee retired in 2011 following more than twenty years of service. More than a decade of that was spent in combat during a period marked by the most intense special operations campaign in military history.

  The vast majority of McPhee’s work over those years remains completely unknown outside the smallest of circles, but even the slivers that have come to light are worthy of modern-day folk hero status.

  * * *

  Once selected for duty with a recce team, a newly minted JSOC sniper doesn’t so much change careers as he accepts additional tasking and responsibilities.

  The reconnaissance aspect of the position in particular requires an extra layer of maturity and savviness, and that drives the multiyear process.

  However, a fortuitous by-product of this grooming system is that the sniper teams are loaded up with operators who rank as some of the preeminent assaulters and close-quarter combat experts in the world, fresh from years of training and experience operating at the highest level.

  Shrek explained, “The recce troops recruit the guys who are good at everything. When I was an assaulter, I didn’t want to be a sniper. I thought they were the fat, old guys. But once I was drafted, I learned in a hurry that these were actually the best guys in the Unit at CQB [close quarters battle]. No one in the world can touch them in combat marksmanship.

  “All that matters is training and experience. Your average assaulter has two years of experience at that level. Most guys in a recce troop have five or six years in the Unit, and a team leader there usually has more than a decade.”

  This reality has earned Delta’s snipers an alternate designation—“advanced assaulter”—that presents an entirely different mental image.

  Vickers added, “They want guys over there on the sniper side of the house who are still assaulters at heart.”

  Not only are those CQB skills retained, they are continually refined. While perhaps originally just a secondary consideration (at best), the snipers’ expertise in this regard pays significant dividends during direct action missions, and in multiple ways.

  When tasked with overwatch duty—covering the raid from a nearby position as the assault team hits an objective—the snipers’ intrinsic knowledge of this exacting and highly dangerous science allows for tighter integration. This is true even when doors are breached and bullets are slung in confined spaces while the sniper is on the glass of magnified optics from afar.

  “You need to be an assaulter first so that you understand what they do—what they are going through and what they are thinking,” ex-DEVGRU sniper Sawyer explained. “When you are covering them, you can do it much more effectively. The better you understand them, the more effective sniper for them you can be.”

  While somewhat removed from the fray, direct action overwatch is a critical task and one taken very seriously by the snipers who are charged with watching over their teammates’ safety. Sawyer said, “I’ll tell you what … having been there, I always wanted to carry the biggest, most powerful weapons I could as a sniper to make sure I covered for my brothers against any potential threat.

  “It was a heavy responsibility and one that I appreciated and was glad to be able to provide to cover my brothers as they solved problems in the worst possible circumstances—halfway around the world in the middle of the night in enemy territory where you stirred up a hornet’s nest and they’re all coming to get you. The snipers’ job is to keep people off of the assaulters and eliminate any threats upon initiation of the hit and afterward. It’s definitely a heavy responsibility, but one that I welcomed.”

  Additionally, a sniper’s assaulter background may need to manifest itself at a moment’s notice as the overwatch assignment transitions into something else in a fast-moving raid. According to the former SEAL Team Six sniper, “At any moment, you may need to perform that room clearance to unite directly with the main assault team to work in with them. And it happens often. It always remains a part of your job.”

  And these sharpened talents are frequently called upon in an even more direct manner. The snipers are not confined to overwatch duty during takedown operations. In fact, to maximize its effectiveness at shredding through enemy networks, the Unit exploits the prodigious door-kicking and room-clearing skills of its snipers “every night, every assault,” according to McPhee.

  “Every operator in the Unit is an assaulter—that’s job one,” he continued. “The next thing is your specialty. If your specialty is needed on a given night, you’ll do it. Otherwise, you’re in the stack and hitting the building right alongside the rest of the assault element.”

  * * *

  It’s not only outsiders who have a misperception of what snipers are and what they do, especially in Tier 1 units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.

  In many ways, the basic assaulter role is the glamour position of these DA/CT-centric units. Not every established assaulter aspires to move to a recce role and some assaulters tend to view the snipers as too far removed from “the mix”—a more passive and solitary gig.

  And in general—despite the undeniably vast experience and training contained within the recce ranks—the assaulters don’t particularly look to the snipers with any sense of awe.

  When asked if other operators admire the Unit’s snipers, McPhee, the same former Tier 1 commando who considered the recce troop the “fat, old guys” before he became one himself laughed and said, “Fuck no. They’re only worried about themselves and doing their job—which is how it should be. They’re just looking to improve. When I was there, I was only worried about me, just trying not to get fired. You can’t worry about anyone else’s bullshit.

  “The assaulters get pissed when they have to wait on the snipers for five minutes to hit a target. Well, we just hiked in here from twenty kilometers away at record pace—you can wait five minutes.”

  There is something of a cultural divide separating the two sides of the house within SEAL Team Six as well. The assaulters tend to face more logistical obstacles, with larger groups and regular meetings to deal with. Meanwhile, the snipers have less equipment to haul around and operators to coordinate. Rather than sit around the table, DEVGRU snipers can brief in a team truck en route.

  “Back in my day, the assaulters called us the Rod and Gun Club,” Sawyer said. “They were under the impression that all we did was lie in the dirt and shoot at our leisure, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. But we had nicer equipment and we had more responsibility and more leeway in training.

  “The culture is more that you’re detached and it’s more of a ‘big boy rules’ kind of thing. We had a lot more leniency to do things our own way, and that’s resented by the assaulters, you know. They want to be the tip of the spear—and they are the tip of the spear—but if there’s somebody that’s allowed better equipment and more autonomy and more control over their training—their existence—that’s of course resented by those who are not. It’s just human nature.”

  * * *

  But perhaps most valued of all are a JSOC sniper’s ability to conduct exceptionally high-risk reconnaissance and surveillance operations. It is certainly the most sensitive and unique, and the one that, when overlapped with their multifaceted offensive skills, separates them from any other solution the United States can bring to bear.

  This matrix of talents weaves across distinctions that typical
ly separate black military ops and pure espionage work. It may involve operating from safe houses or conducting close target vehicle reconnaissance while in disguise, such as the work Black Team performed in Mogadishu, or traversing mountain peaks the way B Squadron’s recce teams did in advance of Operation Anaconda, or even blending in among locals and then stealthily creeping through villages like McPhee to pinpoint the location of an HVT. And as Delta Force and DEVGRU gained the operational experience and confidence that came with the faster and faster tempo at which they began to work, these specialists became even more audacious and adept. Eventually, it was the norm that more than one of their three primary functions—the sniper, the advanced assaulter, and the recce operator—would be tapped into simultaneously, as B Squadron would demonstrate down the line in Iraq.

  To effectively blur the lines between warrior, assassin, and spy, these assets often operate in very small elements. They regularly separate from their squadrons to deploy to the most dangerous corners of the world in teams of six or less. They are then given perversely difficult tasks and granted considerable autonomy with the expectation they will complete them.

  DEVGRU will readily scale its recce teams down to as few as two. “We try not to go any less than two men for redundancy purposes,” Sawyer explained. “There’s a benefit of teamwork, you know? Two guys can move and shoot and cover each other out of a bad situation but one guy has got nobody to cover him. Especially if he medically goes down or something like that.”

  As evidenced by McPhee’s operational history, under the right conditions and with the right man at its disposal, Delta Force has been known to push even lower. While the one-man army is more Hollywood legend than real-world ground truth, the Unit does in fact task some of its most skilled recce operators with singleton missions.

  Shrek explained, “Rangers are most effective at the company size. With SEALs, they’re best as a sixteen-man platoon. Special Forces, it’s the twelve-man ODA. In the Unit, it’s one; you’re the lone wolf and the jack of all trades. And that one has to be able to do everything the SF team can do. In the recce troop you have to be good at everything, because when you’re out there alone, there’s no one else to help.

  “To teach someone to be able to do this, I’d make them go out and steal something every day—go to the gas station and steal bread,” he added. “People always ask the same questions: ‘What if you’re out on a singleton op someone tried to grab you and you have to shoot them?’ Well, you fucked up if you’re in the situation in the first place. You should never get to that point. There’d have to be eight doors locked behind me before that would happen. You need to have 360-degree total situational awareness.

  “There is no recce mind-set. Training is everything. And it’s the system someone is trained in that matters, 100 percent.”

  While an outstanding illustration of the enormous capabilities contained within the recce troop, McPhee was not the only “Kingpin” in its ranks, as the looming First Battle of Fallujah would so clearly illustrate.

  6

  Tex

  Afghanistan and Iraq were not the only parallel wars being waged by special operations forces. While that particular divide was obvious, the separation in the other was more subtle, more nuanced, and more philosophical.

  Collectively, JSOC and its subordinate units are sometimes termed the National Missions Force—a pacified way of saying they exist largely outside the typical military bureaucracy. JSOC is freed up by an abbreviated chain of command, tying it directly to the highest levels of the government.

  In a way, that has been true since its inception, as the impetus for creating the Joint Special Operations Command was the emergent requirement for surgically precise units that could conduct politically sensitive operations in response to terrorist actions, such as rescuing hostages on foreign soil. Any mission of that sort would quite naturally necessitate the president’s direct input.

  However, following 9/11, the concept of terrorism and the options for combating it radically expanded. And with that, so too did JSOC’s reach.

  In the wake of the 2001 attacks, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initially showed his ignorance of JSOC’s capabilities when he wistfully yearned for the sort of force needed to counter al-Qaeda. What he described—to a collection of JSOC officers no less—was precisely what he already had in the Delta Force and DEVGRU.

  Once Rumsfeld became better educated as to the assets at his disposal—and later saw what they were capable of once the results began to roll in—he empowered and unleashed them.

  The Global War on Terror would be waged by a global fighting force, largely unshackled by increasingly obsolete notions of geographic areas of operation and enabled by nearly unlimited budget and support.

  Rumsfeld signed into effect a series of secret directives (the Al Qaeda Network Execute Order being of particular prominence) that freed JSOC so that it could more proactively combat global terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda.

  In addition to the more narrowly defined war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC was allowed to deploy its trigger pullers to such exotic locales as Pakistan (and did so as early as ’02), Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Madagascar, and Iran, following nation-specific constraints.

  While Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) may have technically managed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, JSOC did not answer to either of them. The Command operated inside those nations semiautonomously and with impunity as part of its larger, global campaign, and did so with varying degrees of coordination with those entities.

  * * *

  The descriptor “Tier 1” signifies the role of Delta Force and DEVGRU as the principle direct action components of this National Missions Force.

  Units that either belong directly to JSOC or are freely borrowed from SOCOM and regularly utilized to directly support the efforts of the Tier 1 units are considered Tier 2.

  The Intelligence Support Activity—the shadowy specialized signals intelligence (SIGINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT) collection unit—was absorbed by JSOC shortly after 9/11. Rumsfeld sought ways to maneuver free from reliance on the CIA during what had become a heated turf battle between the DoD and the Agency, and bringing the ISA under JSOC’s authority helped toward those ends. One of the most tightly secretive units in the American military, the exploits of “The Activity” have largely been left to the imagination, although a number of its wide assortments of aliases—including the Mission Support Activity (MSA), TORN VICTOR, CEMETERY WIND, and GRAY FOX—have found their way into the public.

  The ISA serves as an example of a Tier 2 unit, as one of its core functions is securing actionable intelligence for Delta and DEVGRU.

  Similarly, the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron is also considered a Tier 2 entity. The unit’s PJs and CCTs regularly attach to Delta Force and DEVGRU elements in training and in the field. This is so much the case, in fact, that these top-tier USAF Air Commandos actually take part in the initial training pipeline alongside their Tier 1 counterparts so they’ll later be able to operate together seamlessly.

  The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, home to the crack Army pilots known as the Night Stalkers, are also considered Tier 2. The pilots are admired throughout the military for their tremendous courage and aptitude in placing their tricked-out helos into the tightest spots under even the most compromising of conditions.

  Not technically a JSOC unit, the 160th SOAR is one of the aforementioned “borrowed” assets, as is the 75th Ranger Regiment, another Tier 2 organization that regularly details its soldiers to JSOC.

  These tier labels have become progressively blurred over time. For example, The Activity’s priority level, budget, and ability to operate independently are more indicative of a Tier 1 outfit—and thus it has been referred to as such in some quarters. Meanwhile, others term it as a “Tier 2 unit performing Tier 1 functions.”

  Similarly, while the Rang
ers were not asked to undertake the full spectrum of mission sets tasked to the Tier 1 units in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Regiment began to operate more along the lines of an equal partner as the pace quickened. It routinely planned and executed its own direct action missions to cut down HVTs in Iraq and rotated command and operations with ST6 in Afghanistan.

  Buried even deeper behind a curtain of classification is a wide assortment of supporting commands either owned or controlled by JSOC, some of which help secure or decipher intelligence by specialized and technical means, while others serve as streamlined procurement offices that rapidly usher emerging technologies from the drawing board into the field.

  Yet another term that is frequently used to describe JSOC and its missions is “black,” as in “black special operations.” This refers to their covert nature and classified, sometimes unacknowledged existence (even if the wink-wink, nudge-nudge denials can at times strain credulity).

  The flipside to this are the so-called white SOF—the unclassified special operations forces such as the regular “vanilla” SEAL Teams and the Army’s Special Forces. Considered Tier 3, they traditionally answer to, and are directed by, regional combatant commanders. Although the rising influence of SOCOM has altered this dynamic somewhat, it often means that the unique capabilities of these particular forces are called upon in support of wider conventional campaigns.

  While JSOC’s HVT hunter-killer task forces took on an ever-shifting set of generic, largely numeric designations as the war in Afghanistan continued and the war in Iraq kicked off, the wider (and whiter) special operations forces were organized under the umbrellas “Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Arabian Peninsula” (CJSOTF-AP) and “Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Afghanistan” (CJSOTF-A).