by Mark Moyar
Rumsfeld’s emphasis on manhunting was one of several factors that led the white special operations forces to take on the counterterrorism mission at the expense of the counterinsurgency and advisory missions that were nearer to their skills and traditions. The white forces could see the money and resources for surgical strikes flowing from Defense Department spigots and found the allure of those riches difficult to ignore. The widespread perception that the United States could get out of Iraq as soon as it decapitated Saddam’s Baath Party, moreover, led Americans to believe that developing Iraqi capabilities was unimportant and that participating in combat was a fleeting opportunity. Most of the white SOF operators had accumulated years of experience in assisting others, but few had stared the demons of combat directly in the eye, and they were, for all their talk of helping others, the type of men who wanted their shot at kicking down doors and gunning down terrorists.
The white SOF did spend time working with Iraqi security personnel from the outset, mainly because they needed people who could provide information on Iraqi culture and serve as intermediaries with Iraqis during raids. A secondary objective was the administration of training to these Iraqis, most of it of the “on-the-job” variant. In 2004, as it became clear that the war would be long, the weight of the training effort shifted to a newly formalized organization, the Iraqi Special Operations Forces. In time, the Iraqi SOF were to reach a strength of 4,100 troops, enough for two Iraqi SOF brigades and an elite Emergency Response Brigade.
Among the US Special Forces, worries mounted that the Pentagon was interested solely in counterterrorism operations and the units that conducted them. Demands for participation in surgical strikes, it was argued, were frittering the Green Berets away on activities that were less special and less valuable than traditional Special Forces activities. Mark Haselton, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel, told reporter Sean Naylor, “If we spend the rest of our lives ‘capturing and killing’ terrorists at the expense of those SF missions that are more important—gaining access to the local population, training indigenous forces, providing expertise and expanding capacity—we’re doomed to failure.”
The black SOF of JSOC were even more focused on surgical strikes during the early years of the Iraq War. In 2002, Rumsfeld had tasked JSOC with taking out Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and the other countries to which it had dispersed after 9/11, in the belief that decapitation was the most efficient way to destroy Al Qaeda. The secretary of defense enlarged JSOC and infused it with a wealth of resources. Bob Andrews, the acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said of Rumsfeld, “Once he fastened on the manhunt thing, he looked at that as the silver bullet against terrorism and he built a unit [JSOC] that can do manhunts.”
To give JSOC better access to information for the manhunts, Rumsfeld granted the JSOC commander operational control over the Gray Fox intelligence organization, which had hitherto been a strategic asset available to the regional combatant commanders. Rumsfeld compelled conventional forces to provide greater support to JSOC by altering the relationship between its higher headquarters—SOCOM—and the regional commanders. Whereas SOCOM had been a “supporting command” since its creation, meaning that it existed solely to support the regional commands, Rumsfeld declared that SOCOM would now “function as both a supported and a supporting command.” Thus, regional commanders would at times be required to use their forces to support SOCOM’s operations. In other words, the special operators would now get to play the lead role some of the time, and the conventional forces would have to take their turn in bit roles.
After the fall of the Iraqi regime, JSOC Commander Dell Dailey wanted to remove his organization from Iraq and take it back to Fort Bragg, where it would practice for the next war and prepare to deploy small manhunting teams to dozens of countries where Al Qaeda was incubating. Rumsfeld, however, insisted that Dailey keep forces in Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein, who had fled in a white Oldsmobile when US forces entered Baghdad on April 9, and other top figures from the regime. Delta Force set up a headquarters at a former Baath Party compound in the Green Zone, a section of central Baghdad along the Tigris River that the Americans had cordoned off as the nerve center of the new political order. Luxurious by military standards, the headquarters facility had a pool, gym, and large bedrooms. The D-boys, though, would have little time for lounging poolside or shooting hoops, for the hunt started at one hundred miles per hour and never slowed down.
The surgical strikes that were carried out beneath the marquee of counterterrorism were often construed as entirely separate from counterinsurgency, particularly by critics who alleged that counterterrorism was “enemy-centric,” and hence incongruent with counterinsurgency, which was said to be “population-centric.” Some even alleged that the counterterrorism operations actually undermined counterinsurgency, asserting that killing members of the local population would invariably turn their relatives into insurgents.
This distinction between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, which was to feature prominently in strategic discussions in Washington, was both inaccurate and misleading. Effective counterinsurgency had always consisted of a mixture of “enemy-centric” and “population-centric” operations, and it remained so in Iraq. Operations to capture or kill enemy personnel—whether they were surgical strikes or regular military operations—were essential to the protection of counterinsurgent personnel and the population. It was true, though, that if those operations were not coordinated with operations aimed at securing and governing the population, they could cause more resentment among the population than they were worth.
That type of coordination was often absent in the early stages of the Iraq War. Special operations forces did not always feel obliged to provide advance notice to the regular Army and Marine Corps commanders in whose operational areas they conducted raids. Appearing out of thin air in the middle of the night, they shot uncooperative Iraqis inside houses or hauled preeminent citizens away in handcuffs before vanishing as quickly as they had come, leaving behind physical and political messes for the regular commanders to clean up. Aggrieved conventional commanders complained that these unannounced raids interfered with their own counterinsurgency activities, not to mention violating the principle of unity of command and evidencing the prima-donna character of special operations forces. The conventional forces, moreover, resented that the special operators had gained control over a large fraction of the Predator drones and other overhead reconnaissance platforms, scarce assets that battlefield commanders had come to prize as “unblinking eyes” keeping watch over the battlefield.
To assist the forces that were chasing down the remnants of the ancien régime, occupation authorities issued decks of playing cards containing the faces of high Baath Party figures. The higher the card, the more important the individual was considered to be. Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades, and his sons Uday and Qusay were the aces of clubs and hearts. Some coalition leaders believed that eliminating the high cards, especially Saddam and his sons, would suffocate the insurgency.
On July 22, Task Force 20 and soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division surrounded a house in Mosul where Uday and Qusay were reported to be located. The brothers and their bodyguards fired AK-47s at the special operators, so the Americans stepped back and discharged seventeen TOW antitank missiles into the building, killing both brothers. Bremer announced that the deaths of Saddam’s sons demonstrated that “these Baathists have no future” and thus would “help reduce the security threat to our forces.”
The apprehension of Saddam Hussein in December sparked predictions that the fever of insurgency had at last been broken. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who was now the top US military commander in Iraq, told the press that while he did not expect Saddam’s detention to end all hostile activity immediately, “I believe that we are now much closer to a safe and secure environment here.” Jalal Talabani, Iraq’s foremost Kurdish politician, went further, a
sserting that Saddam’s arrest “will put an end to terrorist acts in Iraq.”
Yet neither the elimination of Saddam and his sons, nor that of the other Baath Party leaders in the deck of cards, nor that of religious extremists, slackened the pace of insurgent depredations. Drawing upon hundreds of thousands of former soldiers as well as foreign volunteers, the insurgents were able to replace the leaders whom the Americans removed from the scene. Insurgent fighters terrorized the Iraqi government and Iraqi civilians who abetted it, and they used ambushes and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to disrupt US forces that tried to fill the security gaps left by the ineffectual Iraqi army and police. American casualties climbed in 2004 while American public support for the war slid.
The strategic ineffectiveness of the decapitation strikes gnawed at the man who replaced Dailey as JSOC commander at the end of 2003, Major General Stanley McChrystal. A tall and exceptionally fit man of forty-nine years, McChrystal hailed from a family that was as military as they came. His father, Herbert J. McChrystal Jr., had fought in Korea and Vietnam, attaining the rank of major general. All four of Herbert’s sons had joined the Army, and his daughter had married an Army officer. As a boy and young man, Stanley idolized his father, intent on being just like his old man when he grew up.
Stanley McChrystal arrived at West Point in 1972. During his first two years, he struggled academically, particularly in math and science, which he found far less interesting than his military history classes and the biographies of great military leaders that he read in his spare time. He racked up demerits for drinking alcohol in his room and for general rowdiness. The one area in which he consistently scored highly was peer ranking—a prime indicator of leadership aptitude.
At the end of his second year, McChrystal applied for one of the few positions reserved for West Point cadets at the summer session of the Ranger School. He was turned down on account of his poor academic and disciplinary scores. Sobered by the rejection, he became a much more serious student during his remaining two years, bringing up his grades and putting an end to his demerits. He did well enough that when the day of branch selection came, with all of the cadets seated together to pick their branch in order of class ranking, he was not among the bottom tier of cadets who got stuck in the infantry after all other jobs had been taken. When McChrystal’s turn came, nevertheless, he chose infantry for his branch.
From West Point, McChrystal went to the 82nd Airborne Division. Two years later, he entered the 7th Special Forces Group. Serving a tour in Thailand, he taught Thai Army officers how to shoot the Dragon antitank missile system, which the Thais thought they might need in the event that the Vietnamese Communists followed their conquest of South Vietnam with an invasion of Thailand. McChrystal learned that the demoralization and indiscipline that had infected the regular Army in the 1970s was present in the Special Forces as well. He saw one sergeant yanked off a stage for lecturing while intoxicated. McChrystal’s company commander was fired for mooning someone at an officers’ club, and McChrystal had to relieve his own team sergeant for laziness.
Returning to the regular Army in 1980, McChrystal served in a mechanized infantry division until joining the newly formed 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1985. He spent four years in the Rangers and then moved over to the JSOC staff, where he delighted in his liberation from the shoe shining and rule books that encumbered the Rangers and the rest of the Army. Graeme Lamb, a British officer who later attained the exalted position of commander of the Field Army, met McChrystal during his first year at JSOC and was amazed by his flourishing intellect. “McChrystal was the sharpest, fastest staff officer I had ever come across,” Lamb remembered.
In 1991, McChrystal shared the disappointment of most JSOC officers at the meager involvement of JSOC in Desert Storm. The episode convinced him that JSOC needed to improve its organizational and personal linkages to the conventional forces. As he later explained, he came to the conclusion that to better those ties, “we’d have to open up more, educate conventional leaders about what we did, and importantly, we had to avoid even the appearance of elitist attitudes or arrogance.”
Later in the 1990s, McChrystal commanded the 2nd Ranger Battalion, and then the entire 75th Ranger Regiment. He also held fellowships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Council on Foreign Relations. “I’d expected Harvard to be full of antimilitary sentiment,” McChrystal recalled, “but instead we received compelling questions and thoughtful looks, as if we were rare animals they’d never seen up close.”
In the summer of 2002, McChrystal received an assignment to the Joint Staff, his first job at the Pentagon. For his preceding twenty-six years in uniform, he had worked hard to avoid a posting at the Pentagon or anywhere else in Washington, leery of the rice-bowl politics and slow-footed bureaucracy of the nation’s capital. The Pentagon lived up to his low expectations. Decisions that could have been made after a short conversation were instead put through the bureaucratic wringer, subjected to inflexible processes and senselessly long meetings. McChrystal yearned for command of the 82nd Airborne Division as his next position, but in the end he was plucked from Washington by an offer to command JSOC.
From his post in Washington and then from the forward JSOC headquarters near Baghdad, McChrystal watched Iraq’s insurgents withstand one decapitation strike after another. The enemy’s staying power drove him to the conclusion that the middle and lower levels of insurgent leadership had to be destroyed if the insurgents were to be defeated. Decimating those leaders through surgical strikes would require an exponential increase in the number of fruitful operations. McChrystal believed that JSOC could and should achieve such an increase. Some of his subordinates were skeptical about the mass production of surgical strikes, however, noting that no one in history had been able to do anything like it. Others objected that employing JSOC against the lowest ranks of the insurgency was as wasteful as using a world-class neurosurgeon to treat skinned knees. McChrystal, finding the objections less than compelling, pressed ahead.
The most difficult part of a surgical strike was locating the enemy. It was the reason why no one had been able to mass-produce surgical strikes in the past. What made industrial-scale production of surgical strikes possible now was the arrival of the information revolution in Iraq. The American occupation facilitated explosive growth in the numbers of cellphones, computers, and other personal electronic devices, many of which came into the possession of insurgents who had little understanding of how to encrypt or otherwise conceal their information. The resultant opportunities for collecting intelligence knew no precedent in human history.
Task Force 714, which had succeeded Task Force 20 as JSOC’s manhunting command in Iraq, was in a relatively primitive technological state when McChrystal took charge. Operators raiding a site dumped cellphones, computers, and papers into empty sandbags, burlap sacks, or trash bags and sent them to a warehouse in Baghdad. Seldom did anyone have time to process the contents of the bags and transmit information back to the operators while the information was still useful.
By happenstance, Congress had doubled the SOCOM budget for equipment just before McChrystal’s arrival. As a result of the successes achieved by special operators in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress had been tripping over itself to give additional money to SOCOM and its components. A report from the House Armed Services Committee in the middle of 2003 asserted that SOCOM “is clearly a treasured national asset in the war on terrorism and our best asset in disrupting the enemy in foreign lands.”
Flush with congressional cash, McChrystal raked in new gadgets that could comb the call logs and computer files of detainees in a matter of minutes. He and his intelligence chief, Colonel Mike Flynn, hired hundreds of Arab linguists and intelligence analysts to translate captured documents and interrogate prisoners. The information from one raid could now be used for a raid the following night, or even the same night if the stars aligned. McChrystal pushed the JSOC task force in each of Iraq’s regions to conduct at least one
raid every night, in order to ratchet up pressure on the enemy and generate further targeting information.
Overcoming the rice-bowl predilections of the government’s bureaucracies, McChrystal gained access to the raw intelligence information of the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. He convinced the agencies to send representatives to the massive clamshell-shaped hangar at Balad Airbase, north of Baghdad, where he had set up JSOC’s global headquarters. “McChrystal had a remarkable ability to bring everybody inside the tent and make them feel like a team player,” said a Special Forces colonel. “He’d co-opt them so in some respects when they went back to [their] agency they became his ambassadors and advocates.”
The Balad operations center had two cavernous rooms, each the size of a basketball court, separated from one another by a plywood wall. Staff from a multitude of agencies and functional areas sat at desks with computer workstations, facing a wall of large plasma televisions that displayed surveillance feeds, intelligence information, and lists of the day’s missions. Some denizens of the facility referred to it as “Battlestar Galactica.” Others called it “The Death Star,” because, in the words of one onlooker, it conveyed the impression that “you could just reach out with a finger, as it were, and eliminate somebody.”
