by Mark Moyar
In contrast to Dailey, McChrystal decentralized decision-making and encouraged risk-taking and innovation. Junior officers received extraordinary freedom to make decisions without obtaining prior permission from higher headquarters. “As long as it is not immoral or illegal, we’ll do it,” McChrystal told his officers. “Don’t wait for me. Do it.” JSOC was at last released into the wild.
Instrumental though McChrystal was, these changes were facilitated by a shift in mood within the Department of Defense and the White House. Ever since Gothic Serpent, Washington had been loath to send JSOC units abroad for extended periods, and when it had deployed them, it had demonstrated a marked tendency for risk aversion and micromanagement. As is often the case in war, only a sense of desperation, resulting from unremitting bad news out of Iraq, led the national leadership to open the cage doors and desist from long-distance second-guessing.
By tapping new intelligence sources and shifting to small operations with decentralized command, McChrystal increased the number of Task Force 714 operations from ten per month in 2004 to three hundred per month in 2006. The influx of information from US intelligence agencies ensured that the preponderance of operations hit pay dirt. To maintain this extraordinary tempo, McChrystal drove his JSOC subordinates hard. The general, who ran seven miles a day, ate only one meal, and slept only four hours a night, wanted everyone in JSOC to share his monk-like devotion to work. When one commander attempted to get some time at home for his men, McChrystal retorted, “I need them to realize that they don’t have a life—this is their life.”
McChrystal’s expectations exceeded the capacity of some of his charges, particularly those who had been worn down by the physical and psychological stress of four or five or more combat tours. To some observers, pushing subordinates to the breaking point was as natural a part of wartime leadership as studying terrain and moving supplies. Many of history’s finest generals, from Alexander the Great to Viscount Slim to Chesty Puller, had prevailed by marching their troops farther and higher than their opponents. To other observers, including some within the command, McChrystal pushed too hard. One of his own task force commanders remarked, “That dude’s hard as fucking nails and probably the best war-fighting general we’ve had… since Patton. But his shortcoming there was he expected that out of everybody, and he didn’t realize that not everyone… [had] the drive to perform at that level.”
The upsurge in JSOC operations led to an upsurge in JSOC casualties. In May 2004, Delta Force suffered its first killed in action in more than two years, and then lost two more men in June and three in August. Insurgents had learned to fortify hideouts and pre-position automatic weapons for maximum effect. During one Delta squadron’s three-month tour, close to 50 percent of its men were wounded. The mounting casualties sapped JSOC’s enthusiasm for capturing targets, leading them instead to pound enemy positions with heavy weaponry from a distance before searching the rubble for the body parts of the targets.
American and coalition special operations forces took out a staggering number of insurgents from 2004 to 2006. To the surprise of many who knew the full extent of these secret operations, the insurgent groups remained on their feet. Retaining control over much of the Iraqi population, the Sunni and Shiite insurgents continued to obtain new recruits to offset their losses. The war’s outcome, it turned out, would ultimately depend on the counterinsurgency operations of conventional forces, for only those operations could establish permanent control over the populous territory and prevent the insurgents from siphoning the population’s resources.
By 2006, most of the special operators had come to recognize that their counterterrorism operations were not enough to defeat the enemy, and that everyone on the American side stood to gain by integrating the surgical strikes of special operations forces with the population-security and area-security operations of conventional forces. SOF officers worked more closely with the conventional commanders, keeping them informed of upcoming operations or working directly under their authority. They conducted raids in areas where the conventional forces were coming under heavy attack, and put snipers in hidden observation posts to pick off insurgents who sought to ambush conventional forces on patrol. Conventional commanders reciprocated by turning over information obtained during their routine interactions with locals. At times, conventional units deliberately acted as “safari beaters,” traipsing noisily into neighborhoods to stir up enemy communications and movements that would allow SOF to target the insurgent leaders.
ONE MIGHT HAVE expected all the high marks on the special operations report card to imbue the father of manhunting, Donald Rumsfeld, with the deep and calming satisfaction of a parent whose child has been named valedictorian. Rumsfeld, however, evidenced more concern with what had not been accomplished. While special operations forces were concentrated in great numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, their presence ranged from minimal to nonexistent in most of the other fifty-eight countries where Al Qaeda cells were believed to exist. Only in the Philippines were large numbers of special operators active against Al Qaeda affiliates, and the task force in that country consisted of Special Forces soldiers who were helping improve Philippine counterinsurgency capabilities, rather than launching raids themselves.
General Bryan D. Brown, who had succeeded Charles Holland as SOCOM commander in late 2003, had accepted the previously declined invitation from Rumsfeld to give SOCOM the power to execute counterterrorism operations, establishing a Center for Special Operations in Tampa for that purpose. That center, though, had not been able to ramp up operations beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. “Essentially what we have is a two-country solution to a 60-country problem,” concluded Mike Vickers, a leading special operations thinker, after performing an official review for Rumsfeld in 2005.
During an October 2005 meeting with Vice Admiral Eric Olson, the SOCOM deputy commander, Rumsfeld bemoaned the lack of small manhunting teams in the fifty-eight countries. “What have you guys been doing for the past few years?” the secretary of defense demanded. SOCOM leaders explained that deploying forces beyond the active conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan depended upon cooperation from the regional military commanders, ambassadors, and civilian agencies, who in many cases were choosing not to cooperate. The demands of two wars, moreover, had stretched special operations forces thin.
Rumsfeld was able to do more about the second problem than the first. To free up additional special operations manpower, he expanded the existing forces and redoubled a push for the Marines to create SOF units. Several years earlier, Rumsfeld had begun calling for Marine special operations forces, to which the Marine leadership had responded with a decided lack of enthusiasm. As in decades past, Marine generals believed that Marines were inherently special in terms of aptitude and activities, and that trying to make part of the Corps extra special would drain too much talent away from the core of the Corps. Further undermining the push had been the fact that Rumsfeld himself did not have a clear vision of what Marine special operations forces would do, but simply wanted some of the Marines to become special operations forces because he foresaw a greater need for special operations forces down the road. “Exactly how they fit in, I assumed would evolve,” Rumsfeld said later. “I wasn’t in a position to look at that from a micro standpoint.”
The 9/11 attacks had created some momentum within the Marine Corps for the creation of new units along the lines Rumsfeld wanted. Shortly after 9/11, Marine Corps Commandant General James Jones offered SOCOM a Marine Force Reconnaissance platoon. But, as often happens with the bright ideas of generals, the concept hit snags when it came time for the colonels to implement it. The Navy’s Special Warfare Command resisted the addition of Marine SOF, because Marine capabilities overlapped with the those of the Navy SEALs and their supporting units. Naval special operators, moreover, still resented the Marines for refusing to sign up for SOCOM in the 1980s, and for claiming to possess units that were “special operations capable.”
At the end of 2002, after
a year of bureaucratic wrangling, the Marines set up a pilot special operations unit, Detachment One, composed of thirty reconnaissance specialists. Activated in June 2003, the unit went through nine months of training before deploying to Iraq the following April. Like the white SOF of the Special Forces and SEALs, Detachment One was assigned to the mission of eliminating enemy leaders, and it received enough intelligence to keep its men busy around the clock on surgical strike operations, albeit oftentimes against youthful gunslingers or bomb makers who did not amount to “leaders” by most definitions.
In May, after the inconclusive First Battle of Fallujah, elements of Detachment One were reassigned to Fallujah to advise an Iraqi militia unit in that city. Labeled the Fallujah Brigade, the unit was supposed to secure the city without help from US combat units. The special operations Marines spent months advising and assisting the militiamen as they attempted to subdue the thousands of insurgents who were prowling Fallujah’s streets.
Their time and effort would come to naught. The Fallujah Brigade had to be disbanded in September after it failed to respond to attacks on Marines and was implicated in the murder of a pro-American Iraqi leader. Pacifying Fallujah would end up requiring the services of six American combat battalions, replete with armor and air support, in a high-intensity battle that lasted six weeks and claimed six hundred American casualties.
Detachment One returned to the United States after a six-month tour. Its commanding officer, Colonel Robert J. Coates, briefed General Brown of SOCOM and the Marine Corps commandant, General Michael Hagee, on the unit’s experiences. Mustering every fiber of salesmanship in his body, Coates informed the generals that the prototype was worthy of mass production, because the unit had thoroughly distinguished itself in Iraq and possessed capabilities found nowhere else in SOCOM. At the end of the briefing, General Brown pronounced that SOCOM did not need Detachment One or any other Marine special operations unit. General Hagee concurred.
Just when Marine special operations forces seemed to have been killed off, Donald Rumsfeld reappeared, stepping in with new directions that the generals had no choice but to obey. The secretary of defense ordered Brown and Hagee to study the concept of a Marine Special Operations Command and get back to him with concrete proposals for creating one. During the ensuing deliberations, Colonel Coates lobbied for the use of Detachment One as the model for the new command, but officers of greater clout squeezed him out of the planning and arranged for the deactivation of Detachment One. In its place, the Marine Corps proposed the formation of the 1st and 2nd Marine Special Operations Battalions under a new Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC). Rumsfeld signed off on the proposal straightaway.
The Marine Corps filled the new battalions with Marines from its Force Recon Battalions, which it then dissolved and replaced with smaller reconnaissance units. MARSOC did not receive a separate career track, so it had to rely on the temporary rotation of Marines from other career tracks, as had been the case with the Army’s Special Forces in their infancy. Because Marine promotions were heavily influenced by time spent in an individual’s occupational specialty, Marines of high ambition were unlikely to sign up for a stint in the new units.
The Marines assigned only 2,600 troops to MARSOC, leaving it a runt in a Marine Corps barnyard of 180,000 troops. Army Special Operations, by contrast, had reached a strength of 28,500 personnel in an Army of 500,000, and unlike their Marine counterparts, most of these troops were permanently segregated from the rest of the Army. The growth of Army Special Operations since 9/11, stimulated by Rumsfeld’s interest in manhunting, was eliciting complaints that they were too large to be considered “elite” any longer.
In Iraq, as perhaps never before, the adverse consequences of concentrating top talent in the Army’s special operations forces reared their heads. Counterinsurgency demands leaders who are risk-tolerant and capable of improvising in uncertain and changing conditions. The Special Forces attracted these types of individuals in large numbers, by virtue of an organizational culture that rewarded those who took risks and thought outside the box. Yet, in Iraq, Special Forces ended up focusing on surgical counterterrorism strikes rather than the broader mission of counterinsurgency. Because of the gravitation of maverick officers to the Special Forces, the leadership of the rest of the Army—which bore most of the responsibility for counterinsurgency—was heavily skewed toward the other type of officer, the one who strives to avoid risk, adheres strictly to rules, and relies on standard operating procedures to get the job done. A 2009 survey of Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency veterans found that only 28 percent of Army respondents believed their service encouraged risk taking. By comparison, 58 percent of Marine respondents said the same. For the Army, the consequences of risk-averse and conformist leadership included ineffectiveness in the field and needless American casualties.
The Iraq War turned in favor of the counterinsurgents in 2007, with the arrival of a US troop surge and a new commander, General David Petraeus. Repudiating the earlier policy of seeking maximum Iraqi participation, Petraeus increased participation by US conventional forces. Petraeus and US ambassador Ryan Crocker used their diplomatic clout to induce the purging of incompetent and rapacious leaders from the Iraqi security forces. The insurgent groups lost control of territory and population, facilitating the rise of the “Sons of Iraq,” counterinsurgent militia units that Sunni tribes had begun forming the previous year. By the middle of 2008, the Iraqi government had suppressed the main insurgent groups, Sunni and Shiite alike.
The government’s newfound strength tempted the Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to squash the Sunni politicians who had joined with the government in fighting the insurgents, using Iraqi Special Operations Forces as his instrument. In August 2008, he directed those forces to arrest Sunni leaders on trumped-up charges of supporting terrorism. The United States caught wind of Maliki’s machinations and used the threat of suspending aid to forestall the arrests.
Barack Obama, who came to office in January 2009 promising to get the United States out of Iraq, was less willing to blow the whistle on Maliki for such infractions, and less willing to use America’s remaining military assets to rein in Shiite militias that were persecuting Sunnis. In the spring of 2009, the Obama administration acquiesced to a demand from Maliki that American special operations forces no longer target Shiites without first clearing the operations through him. Two years later, by which time the Obama administration was on a path to withdrawing all US forces from Iraq, Maliki purged the leaders of the three Iraqi special operations brigades and discontinued all operations against Shiites. In another of his self-aggrandizing schemes, Maliki imposed stringent new restrictions on US special operations forces. This measure, however, had the unintended side effect of alleviating pressure on the Sunni insurgents. Maliki’s oppression of Sunnis, his coddling of Shiite militias, and his shackling of American special operators were to facilitate the resurgence of Sunni extremism in Iraq.
ALTHOUGH AFGHANISTAN’S TALIBAN government fell more than a year before Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, American counterinsurgency in Afghanistan would peak several years after the high-water mark of counterinsurgency in Iraq. In the first years following the Taliban’s overthrow, Afghanistan had largely been at peace. The Bush administration maintained 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, most of them conventional, and assigned the conventional forces responsibility for training the Afghan National Army. A small special operations task force built outposts near the Pakistani border, which served as bases for combined operations with Afghan militias. The Americans and their Afghan allies chased small groups of extremists around the border region and attempted to intercept those transiting from Pakistan into Afghanistan.
Events were to reveal that the quietude had been the result of enemy calculation rather than incapacity. After licking their wounds in Pakistan for a few years, the Taliban and Al Qaeda returned in force in 2005 to wage an insurgency. Employing the Maoist model of insurgency, the Taliban and
Al Qaeda intermingled with the rural population and mobilized them for progressively more intensive forms of warfare. By recruiting impressionable youth from Pashtun tribes with long-standing ties to the Taliban, the insurgents built up guerrilla forces that could count on local populations for support. The American special operators attacked the insurgents repeatedly and often successfully, but could not prevent them from gaining control over large sections of southern and eastern Afghanistan. Neither European forces, which arrived in 2005 for what they had expected to be a peacekeeping mission, nor the nascent Afghan national security forces were able to turn the insurgents back.
Colonel Edward Reeder, the commander of America’s joint special operations task force in Afghanistan during 2006 and 2007, started wondering whether the concentration of special operations forces on finding and killing extremist fighters made sense. “How many times had Special Forces done this?” he asked himself after one smashing of Taliban forces in 2007. “To what end?” Reeder, who had served several previous stints in Afghanistan, lamented, “It seems like every time I come back here, the security situation is worse.”
In 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama was preoccupied with an ambitious domestic agenda, but he did have to devote significant time and attention to the Afghan War. Although he had run for president on a platform of withdrawal from Iraq, he had at the same time vowed to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He had staked out a tough position on the Afghan War—which he called “the good war”—to reassure centrist voters that his opposition to the “dumb war” in Iraq did not signify a knee-jerk aversion to the use of force.
On the advice of top defense officials, Obama made General Stanley McChrystal the commander of all US forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal was the first US special operator ever entrusted with command of an entire war, but his success at JSOC had been so spectacular that few raised the questions about a special operator’s suitability that would otherwise have proliferated. In August 2009, the newly installed McChrystal submitted a proposal for an enlarged counterinsurgency campaign. He recommended deploying an additional 40,000 US troops to Afghanistan for counterinsurgency operations, a measure backed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the Joint Chiefs.
