Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Following Marcinko’s departure from SEAL Team Six, the Navy decided to clean up the unit. A formal personnel selection process replaced Marcinko’s personal whims and trials of beer swilling. But Marcinko’s braggadocio and criminal activities left a lingering distaste for SEAL Team Six on the tongues of the other special operations units for years to come. One SEAL Team Six veteran lamented, “I came in a decade after Marcinko and I completely felt that we had the Marcinko stink on us.”

  WHILE JSOC WAS struggling to attach its bridle to SEAL Team Six, the Special Forces were galloping off to their next overseas conflict, in El Salvador. Cuban-backed Communist guerrillas had spread across the Salvadoran countryside in 1980 by promising to liberate the peasantry from the nation’s cruel and corrupt security forces. Ten days before President Carter left office, the Communists launched what they hoped would be a decisive offensive, in the belief that Carter would be much less inclined to intervene on behalf of the Salvadoran government than would his staunchly anti-Communist successor. “It is necessary,” the insurgents asserted, “to launch now the battles for the great general offensive of the Salvadoran people before that fanatic Ronald Reagan takes over the presidency of the United States.”

  The offensive did not attain the intended objective of overthrowing the government, but it did heighten American concerns about the state of affairs in the Central American nation. Racing to strengthen the Salvadoran security forces before the Communist rebels could overrun the cities, President Reagan authorized an increase in the small US Special Forces presence in March 1981. Beholden to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, he could raise the number of American advisers in El Salvador to only fifty-five, and these advisers could not accompany Salvadoran forces in the field.

  The Special Forces advisers set out to reform the Salvadoran officer corps, in combination with US military instructors at Fort Benning, who trained Salvadoran officers sent on temporary assignment to the United States. Appalled by the low work ethic and lack of initiative among Salvadoran officers, the Special Forces taught them the American way by example. They advised the Salvadorans to desist from indiscriminate violence against villages suspected of harboring insurgents, in order to obtain the popular support needed to win the war.

  Over a period of several years, the Americans succeeded in altering the organizational culture of the Salvadoran armed forces. Salvadoran officers replaced their forty-hour workweek with an intensive wartime schedule. Instead of waiting for orders from on high, they acted on their own initiative. Military proficiency soared, putting an end to easy insurgent military victories, and sharp declines in human rights violations eliminated the principal grievance of the rural peasantry. These improvements rescued the Salvadoran government from what had seemed like imminent defeat and set the conditions for transition from military rule to liberal democracy.

  A much more intense, if also much briefer, conflict awaited America’s special operators in Grenada, a 133-square-mile mound of volcanic ash in the eastern Caribbean. The island was home to 110,000 people, and to the peaks and craters of the volcanoes that had brought it out of the seafloor 2 million years earlier. In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist Maurice Bishop had seized control of the island’s government by coup d’état, and thence had become a recipient of Soviet and Cuban military largesse. Although Bishop’s hostility to the United States was plain, he permitted American faculty and students to remain at St. George’s University Medical School, an institution established by four American entrepreneurs to serve Americans who had failed to gain admission to medical schools in the United States. Approximately six hundred Americans were at the school when the crisis erupted in October 1983.

  The war, if it could be called that, sprang from a coup at the beginning of October. While Prime Minister Bishop was visiting socialist brethren in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, one of his Communist rivals, Bernard Coard, convinced members of the Grenadian Party Central Committee to turn against him. Upon Bishop’s return, the committee stripped him of his powers and put him under house arrest. Ten thousand of Bishop’s supporters showed up at his house, compelling the guards to hand the prime minister over, but then a column of armored military vehicles drove into the mob and gunned their way to Bishop, whom they executed.

  The new regime rounded up suspected enemies and imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew. Americans at the medical school were confined to their dormitories, their communications with the outside world severed by the snipping of telephone wires. To President Reagan, it had all the makings of another Iranian hostage crisis. Unlike Carter, whose fear of provoking others always inclined him toward diplomacy rather than force, Reagan had few qualms about responding in the way that leaders of great powers traditionally responded when challenged by an ant-sized adversary in their own neighborhood—squashing the ant under a boot heel.

  Reagan directed the Pentagon to invade Grenada in just a few days’ time. The ultimate objectives, the White House stated, were the rescue of the Americans and the replacement of the Communist government with a democratic one. Owing to uncertainty about the strength of the Cuban and Grenadian soldiers defending the island, American planners decided that the operation demanded more than just special operations forces. US Atlantic Command created an ad hoc organization, Joint Task Force (JTF) 120, to command an admixture of 7,300 special and conventional forces. The task force staff made a concerted effort to assign the special operators missions that capitalized on their special capabilities, tasking Delta Force with rescuing hostages, SEALs with scouting beaches for amphibious landings, and Rangers with surprise assaults on hardened targets. The “Nightstalker” airmen of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, a unit created in October 1981 to provide the dedicated air assets for special operations that had been sorely missing in Eagle Claw, were slated to make their combat debut in Grenada.

  Hours before the invasion began, at the final briefing for Joint Task Force 120 commander Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf, representatives from the State Department demanded a change to the operational plan. The task force, they said, needed to seize the island’s Richmond Hill Prison during the invasion’s first hour, rather than later in the day as originally scheduled. By launching the operation at the very beginning of the invasion, the diplomats explained, the United States would deny the Grenadian government time to move or harm the inmates. Under questioning by military planners, the State Department’s representatives could not say who was incarcerated in the Richmond Hill facility or who was guarding it.

  General Scholtes, the JSOC commander, recommended delaying the operation by twenty-four to forty-eight hours in order to gain more information on the prison. The State Department overruled him. An intelligence briefer assured the task force that the island defenders would put up little resistance, characterizing the whole invasion as a “walk in the park.” They could expect that the locals would “wave at them” as they flew into the country.

  Early in the morning of October 25, at an airfield on Barbados, Delta Force boarded nine Black Hawk helicopters of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion for the assault on the prison. The helicopters were supposed to depart at 1 a.m. so that they could reach the target well before sunrise and take it down under cover of darkness. They did not take off until 6:30 a.m. An official government account attributed the delay to “chaotic planning, last-minute inter-service bickering at senior levels, and Air Force delays.” Given the assurances about the weakness of enemy defenses, though, the delay did not seem especially important.

  By the time the Black Hawks had covered the 160 miles between Barbados and Grenada, the Caribbean was glistening sapphire blue under the morning’s tropical sun, and the denizens of the volcanic island were wide awake. The helicopters had nearly crossed the one mile of ground between the sea and Richmond Hill when shell bursts from ZU-23 antiaircraft guns interrupted the steady swishing of helicopter blades. From positions that American reconnaissance had not had time to locate, the Grenadian gunners hit
the first six helicopters in quick succession. On board the Black Hawks, smoke billowed from damaged engines and fuel spurted from punctured hoses. One helicopter crashed in flames. In the face of this wholly unexpected resistance, the mission commander ordered the remaining helicopters to turn tail. The American special operators sustained twenty-four wounded and one killed during the abortive raid.

  At this same time, two companies of Rangers were assaulting the airfield at Point Salines on the southwestern tip of the island. Their transport aircraft also encountered unexpectedly fierce antiaircraft fire, but most of the Rangers were able to leap from the aircraft and parachute safely onto the airfield. Forming into squads and platoons on the tarmac, the Rangers composed themselves before they had to fight the airfield’s Cuban military construction troops. The Cuban troops were not exactly prime military specimens—many of them were overweight and over forty years of age—but they did bring to bear BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, recoilless rifles, and machine guns. With attack aircraft from the carrier USS Independence providing close air support, the Rangers overpowered the airfield’s defenders in a few hours, taking 250 Cubans prisoner. They then rescued 138 American medical students from campus buildings near the airstrip.

  Reinforcements from the 82nd Airborne Division arrived by air at Point Salines to begin the push toward St. George’s, the capital city. Conventional forces took most of their planned objectives over the next two days. They were not, however, able to reach the enemy barracks at Calivigny as quickly as high authorities in Washington desired. At noon on the 27th, the Pentagon notified Admiral Metcalf’s headquarters that the barracks had to be taken before dark. According to intelligence reports, the barracks served as the nerve center of the Cuban military forces on the island, and was guarded by six hundred crack Cuban troops and six antiaircraft cannons. Although the task was better suited to conventional infantry, Metcalf had to call upon the Rangers because all of the conventional infantry were tied up. The Rangers, who had been relaxing at Point Salines in expectation of an imminent return to the United States, hustled aboard Black Hawks for a late afternoon assault.

  As it turned out, the much-feared barracks were empty. In the process of landing in the narrow streets, though, three helicopters were lost to collisions or faulty landings. Three Rangers were killed and nearly two dozen wounded.

  Tallies taken after the nine-day war revealed that special operations forces accounted for a disproportionate share of American casualties, including thirteen of the nineteen American fatalities. General Scholtes blamed his command’s losses on ad hoc organization and the misuse of special operations forces by conventional commanders. Scholtes advocated a new joint combatant command with permanent standing capabilities and authorities of sufficient size to handle a Grenada-sized crisis on its own. His arguments made a strong impression on several US senators who met with him in closed-door session.

  The problems of Grenada served as ammunition for a small but influential group of officials at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill who were campaigning to increase the size and authorities of special operations forces. Within the Pentagon, the reformers encountered the coalescence of opposition at every turn, so they eventually concentrated all of their efforts on Congress. A burgeoning “SOF Liberation Front,” consisting primarily of former SOF officers in the Defense Department or on congressional staffs, pressed the case for change to sympathetic congressmen. The neglect and mishandling of special operations forces, asserted the cadres of the Liberation Front, demanded that Congress create a joint SOF command with a separate SOF funding line.

  Under normal circumstances, the chances that former captains and lieutenant colonels would sway Congress against the opposition of four-star generals and admirals were about as low as the chances of retired parish deacons changing the Catholic Church in the face of objecting cardinals. But their campaign happened to coincide with a broader congressional initiative to overhaul the military, which culminated in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Written in reaction to coordination problems among the armed services at Desert One and Grenada, Goldwater-Nichols reorganized the military into regional joint commands that compelled the services to work together. Senators Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) and William Cohen (R-Maine), two of the congressmen most favorably disposed toward special operations forces, believed that SOF reform would further the objectives of Goldwater-Nichols, and they recognized that reform legislation could gain traction by riding the act’s coattails.

  Nunn and Cohen, ably assisted by the clandestine information campaign of the SOF Liberation Front, convinced their congressional colleagues to pass a SOF reform package that became known as the Nunn-Cohen Amendment. The legislation created the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), with a four-star commander responsible for training and equipping all special operations forces. Command of operational units, though, would remain in the hands of the four-star regional combatant commanders. To enhance the attractiveness of SOF in the eyes of the combatant commanders and the White House, Nunn-Cohen assigned special operations forces a discrete mission set, which consisted of direct action, strategic reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, civil affairs, psychological operations, counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance, and theater search and rescue. The amendment gave SOF a dedicated funding line, Major Force Program 11, and established the position of assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict to give SOF stronger representation inside the Pentagon.

  The Army, Navy, and Air Force put their special operations forces under SOCOM. The Marine Corps, however, refused to contribute any personnel. The Marine generals of the mid-1980s, like their predecessors, were loath to transfer some of their best Marines to elite units under the command of non-Marines, fearing that it would degrade the Marines as a whole. To ward off accusations that they were not playing their part in special operations, the Marines touted their newly formed “special operations capable” units. Trained in certain highly specialized operations, these units had been created by the Marine leadership to satisfy the appetite of higher authorities for SOF without surrendering control of any Marines. Special operations personnel from other services derided the program as less than special. Bickering over Marine abstention from SOCOM and over the validity of the “special operations capable” Marine units would poison relations between the Marines and special operators for the remainder of the century.

  At the inaugural ceremony for SOCOM on June 1, 1987, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral William J. Crowe Jr. entreated special operators to “break down the wall that has more or less come between special operations forces and the other parts of our military, the wall that some people will try to build higher.” In the months that followed, his prophecy about building the wall higher was fulfilled by individuals on both sides. Diehard SOF proponents argued that special operations forces should take advantage of their newfound powers to concentrate on irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and other activities in which they would be the main show, instead of activities that supported or complemented conventional forces. The Special Forces formed their own separate branch within the Army, which allowed soldiers to remain in the Special Forces to the end of their careers and extricated them from a personnel system that had treated service with the Special Forces as a temporary and career-inhibiting diversion.

  Some conventional military officers and Defense Department officials were content to let the special operators go their own way, so that they were not poking their noses into the play yards of the big divisions and fleets. To limit the influence of the new Special Operations Command and distance it from its congressional supporters, the Pentagon leadership put the new organization far from Washington, at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base. Representatives Dan Daniel, John Kasich, and Earl Hutto, three of the leading SOF proponents in Congress, denounced the Defense Department for placing SOCOM “as far away from the rest of the US government as is possible without setting sail out to sea.”

 
The striving of the Special Forces to separate themselves from the rest of the Army did not sit well with the Army’s top leaders. Acting swiftly and forcefully, they halted the addition of bricks to the wall and started knocking bricks off. Brigadier General Jim Guest, commandant of the Army Special Warfare Center and School at the time, credits the decisive action to General Maxwell Thurman, the four-star commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

  “I’m tired of having to apologize for Special Forces,” Thurman wrote to Guest in a letter that reverberated across the Special Forces world. “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.”

  The threat had the intended effect. As explained by General Guest, the letter forced the leadership of the Special Forces to recognize 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.” The message also brought home the point that “we can’t mess around any longer outside the Army system; we’ve got to do things inside it.”

  Guest raised the standards for incoming Special Forces personnel. He established a new two-week selection course to identify individuals who could withstand high levels of stress and ambiguity, and who could both operate on their own and serve as part of a team. Troublemakers and slackers were plucked out and recycled into the regular Army or terminated from the service. “Jim Guest did more to enhance the Special Forces and make them the significant force they are today than any other general officer,” observed Brigadier General Richard W. “Dick” Potter, who was himself one of the main standard-bearers of the reform movement.