by Mark Moyar
Congressional displeasure with the lack of communication from SOCOM led Jennifer Miller, a staff member at the House Appropriations Committee, to probe further into the SOCOM Washington office, the Global SOF Network Campaign Plan, and McRaven’s other new initiatives. Miller, who was known to have a low tolerance for obstructionism, began to scrutinize the SOCOM budget for anything that did not fit within the parameters of Major Force Program 11, the designated special operations funding line. Budgetary documents revealed that SOCOM was shelling out large sums for graduate education as well as for the Human Performance Program, which hired physical therapists, dieticians, and conditioning coaches to help troops deal with the mental and physical wear and tear of unending deployments. Miller and others on Capitol Hill believed that these expenses were the responsibilities of the armed services, not SOCOM. Pentagon officials who were frustrated with SOCOM’s lack of transparency, and who knew that budgetary authority left Congress as one of the few remaining entities with any power over SOCOM, complained to their congressional contacts that SOCOM was paying for these items as part of a power play to become a fifth armed service.
The anti-SOCOM coalition leapt into action in the spring of 2013. Members of the House Appropriations and Armed Services Committees decided to axe several SOCOM budget items, including the Washington office, and to put a $1 million cap on expenses for graduate education. The committees inserted unusually harsh language into the 2014 Defense Appropriations Act, chiding SOCOM for failing to make clear the purpose and capabilities of the Washington office.
These rebukes, however, failed to convince the SOCOM leadership of the need to show deference toward Congress. In the spirit of wartime expediency, McRaven proceeded to spend money on graduate education beyond the $1 million. When Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, eventually figured out what was going on, he called McRaven onto the carpet in a closed hearing. In the ensuing Defense Appropriations Act, Congress blasted SOCOM for initiating “significant new programs, contracts, and activities that were not previously identified or explicitly justified in budget justification materials,” and for waiving funding restrictions “in a manner inconsistent with existing Department of Defense directives and regulations.”
Congressional exasperation with the SOCOM leadership led to additional slashing of budget items that appeared to fall outside of SOCOM’s purview. Through the withholding of money, the House forced SOCOM to abort plans for multinational coordination centers that were integral to the Global SOF Network Campaign Plan. Congress also denied SOCOM the authorities and funds it had been seeking to transform its Joint Special Operations University from a training center into a world-class research institution. It was a stunning reversal of fortune for an organization that for so long had received everything it wanted from Congress and more.
During McRaven’s final months in command, Pentagon leaders who had seethed with rage at SOCOM’s intrusions into strategic planning slow-rolled the Global SOF Network Campaign Plan, in anticipation of scrapping it once McRaven left office. The Global SOF Network team would be disbanded shortly before McRaven’s retirement at the end of August 2014, its formerly privileged members tossed to the wolves of the previously marginalized SOCOM headquarters staff. McRaven’s successor, General Joseph Votel, would be so engrossed in repairing relations with Congress and the Pentagon that he would back away from the Global SOF Network Campaign Plan and other controversial initiatives.
Votel’s retrenchment, along with his low-key demeanor, restored a degree of trust within the legislative and executive branches. But Congress continued to poke its nose into the business of SOCOM in ways that some elements of the special operations community found deeply vexing. At the beginning of 2016, members of Congress pressured Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to rescind the promotion of Rear Admiral Brian L. Losey, head of the Naval Special Warfare Command. The congressional opposition derived from an inspector general’s determination that Losey had retaliated against several subordinates on suspicion of submitting anonymous whistleblower complaints against him. The case, however, was less than clear-cut, for many of Losey’s actions against his accusers appeared to have been the result of their poor performance or misconduct. Secretary Mabus had decided that Losey deserved the promotion because the inspector general had provided insufficient evidence to support the accusations. But when Congress learned of the Navy’s decision to promote Losey, a number of congressmen interpreted it as evidence that the military was unwilling to discipline its own leaders or protect whistleblowers. Ultimately, the congressional complaints convinced Mabus to overturn the promotion, bringing Losey’s career to an abrupt end.
From his retirement perch at the University of Texas, William McRaven penned an op-ed in defense of Losey. The individuals who had leveled accusations against Losey, stated McRaven, were simply “a few guys fighting to maintain their comfortable life at a time when others were at war and needed their support.” As SOCOM commander, McRaven continued, he had initiated a separate investigation that ultimately cleared Losey of wrongdoing. McRaven characterized the rescinding of the promotion as yet another example of Congress wrongly punishing the military for political purposes. “Over the past decade I have seen a disturbing trend in how politicians abuse and denigrate military leadership, particularly the officer corps, to advance their political agendas,” the retired admiral wrote. In words that could not have been fully appreciated by a public unaware of his brush with Representative Frelinghuysen, McRaven asserted, “During my past several years in uniform, I watched in disbelief how lawmakers treated the chairman, the service chiefs, the combatant commanders and other senior officers during Congressional testimony. These officers were men of incredible integrity, and yet some lawmakers showed no respect for their decades of service.”
When Votel assumed command of SOCOM in the summer of 2014, special operations forces were phasing out their participation in Village Stability Operations and most other activities in Afghanistan, as part of the contraction of the US military presence in the country to 10,000 troops. Concomitant with this change, Army Special Forces leaders were fighting to downgrade what was now commonly termed the “direct approach” of surgical strikes—conducted directly by US forces—in favor of the “indirect approach” of working “by, with, and through” foreign partners. It was an effort to divest the Special Forces from a shrinking business and return them to traditional missions such as counterinsurgency and the development of partner forces. “We have, in my view, exquisite capabilities to kill people,” asserted Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland, commander of US Army Special Operations Command. “We need exquisite capabilities to manipulate them.” Cleveland emphasized the value of the indirect approach in preventing conflicts from heating up to the point that large-scale American intervention became necessary.
Even Naval Special Operations, which had always been more inclined than the Special Forces toward the direct approach, called for emphasis on indirect missions. A new edition of its core doctrinal publication, NWP 3-05, issued in May 2013, paid homage to Admiral Eric Olson’s remark that “direct action is important, not decisive; indirect action is decisive.” The shift signified recognition that the SEALs, like the rest of SOF, would soon be spending most of their time outside of active war zones, in countries where they could not raid homes on a nightly basis.
New opportunities to test the indirect approach soon appeared. In the middle of 2014, special operations forces were summoned back to Iraq in response to the capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Following the withdrawal of all US military forces from Iraq at the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had accelerated the persecution of Sunni politicians and the purging of Sunni officers from the security forces, which rekindled the Sunni population’s interest in supporting Islamic extremists. At the same time, Maliki had sidelined the American civilians whom the Obama administration had h
oped would carry out counterterrorism operations in lieu of US military forces. With Baghdad now in danger of falling, Obama rushed several thousand US troops to Iraq, a large percentage of them special operators.
The White House tasked the newly returned troops with advising and assisting Iraqi forces, but forbade them to leave the bases where they were stationed. During the heat of battle, Iraqi forces had to direct American air strikes on their own, a process for which they were ill prepared. Obtaining American concurrence to an Iraqi request for a strike often took an hour, by which time ISIS fighters had usually moved someplace else. For the next year, ISIS continued to seize territory in Iraq’s Sunni areas, including the critical city of Ramadi in May 2015.
The accumulation of ISIS victories ultimately led Obama to loosen restrictions on American participation in operations. He made the change without notifying the public, but it came to light in October 2015, when an ISIS gunman killed a Delta operator, Master Sergeant Joshua L. Wheeler, one of thirty Americans from Delta Force who had joined Iraqi Kurdish forces in raiding an ISIS facility near Kirkuk. News of Wheeler’s death, the first American fatality from hostile fire in Iraq since the return of US forces, infuriated liberals as well as conservatives, doves as well as hawks, who pointed out that it contradicted repeated White House assertions that US forces in Iraq had no combat role. The Obama administration, it appeared, was exploiting the secrecy surrounding special operations forces to involve the United States more deeply in Iraq than it was saying publicly, much as Lyndon Johnson had done in Vietnam fifty years earlier.
The allegations provoked a series of convoluted and contradictory verbal contortions from Obama administration spokespersons, which only exacerbated the doubts about the government’s candor and policies. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook initially attempted to explain away the raid by describing it as a onetime event, a “unique circumstance” driven by urgent battlefield necessity. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter then backed away from that argument, conceding, “We’ll do more raids.” Carter proceeded to explain that US involvement in the raid “doesn’t represent us assuming a combat role. It represents a continuation of our advise and assist mission.” When pressed on the administration’s parsing of words, Carter admitted that “this is combat.”
The White House also gave special operations forces the task of training 5,000 rebels to fight ISIS inside Syria, where a vicious civil war dating back to 2011 had facilitated the growth of Sunni extremist movements. To fund the program, Obama asked Congress for $500 million, or $100,000 per Syrian rebel, which seemed a steep price at the time. According to the administration, the force was intended merely to secure select areas and facilitate a diplomatic resolution of the civil war, not to wipe out ISIS, as that task would have required much larger forces.
Congress approved funding for the training program in September 2014, and the search for recruits began soon thereafter. The barriers to organizing Syrian rebel forces proved immense. Past American reluctance to support rebel factions had allowed Syria’s government and Syrian extremist groups to destroy or co-opt the moderate nationalist elements of the opposition, leaving few people on the Syrian dance floor whom the Americans did not find repulsive. Because most of the remaining oppositionists inside Syria were extremists or closely tied to extremists, the White House restricted recruitment of the new force to Syrians in exile, but even many of the exiles turned out to carry the taint of extremism. Furthermore, a narrow White House focus on the ISIS threat resulted in a stipulation that the rebels should combat only ISIS, not the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which turned off many resistance elements, for whom the Assad regime was the most loathsome enemy.
One year into the program, CENTCOM commander Lloyd Austin reported that just fifty-four rebel fighters had been trained. The total number operating in Syria, he disclosed, was “four or five.” Derisive press reports noted that the program’s costs, which in total had risen to $580 million, came out to nearly $10 million per trained fighter. The White House terminated the program in October 2015.
Backsliding also occurred in Afghanistan. In the hurry to extricate the United States from a war that was more difficult and less popular than originally anticipated, the Obama administration had taken the training wheels off the Afghan forces too soon. As US troops had pulled out of Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014, the insurgents had inflicted staggering casualties on Afghan security forces, to include the Afghan Local Police. The task of preventing the Afghans from landing face-first on the pavement went to the dwindling number of special operations forces remaining in the country. Those forces, which were supposed to have turned everything over to their Afghan counterparts by the beginning of 2015, were still going on six to ten missions with the Afghans per week in the middle of that year. Forty times per week, Americans were providing the Afghan special operations forces with intelligence, logistical support, air cover, or other assistance. Some American special operators continued to launch unilateral raids against Al Qaeda and other high-priority targets.
This residual American support for the Afghan government failed to prevent the insurgents from regaining control of much of the countryside during 2015. Several dozen districts came entirely under Taliban sway. Insurgents overran the city of Kunduz in September 2015 and held it for several days before elite Afghan forces, supported by US troops, arrived to drive them out. The situation so alarmed Obama that he decided on October 15, 2015, to cancel his plans to remove all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of his second term.
In January 2016, American special operators deployed to Helmand Province to prevent the Taliban from overrunning the besieged provincial capital and help Afghan forces retake territory lost in 2015. Insurgent control of the population put the Afghan government forces and the American special operators at serious disadvantage, as the citizens were likely to tip off the insurgents of approaching adversaries, and unlikely to divulge the location of insurgents or their IEDs. On January 5, hostile forces killed Sergeant Matthew McClintock of the 19th Special Forces Group and wounded two other American special operators.
News of an American special operator killed in combat again raised complaints that US troops were more heavily engaged than the president was admitting publicly. According to the official White House line, America’s “combat mission” in Afghanistan had come to a “responsible conclusion” at the end of 2014. In October 2015, Obama had said that US forces in Afghanistan “remain engaged in two narrow but critical missions, training Afghan forces and supporting a counterterrorism mission against the remnants of al-Qaida.” Most of the enemy combatants in the area where Sergeant McClintock died, however, belonged not to Al Qaeda, but to the Taliban.
“Light-footprint” counterterrorism fared even worse in the other countries where it was applied, for in those countries a number of conditions that had aided in the success of surgical strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq were absent. The possession of 100,000 conventional US troops, and the diplomatic clout that goes with such a presence, had prevented the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq from imposing severe constraints on American strike teams. In most other countries, the government refused to give foreign special operators carte blanche to break into houses and handcuff suspects. Threats from the Pakistani government deterred American SOF operations into Pakistan after the Bin Laden raid. The Libyan government forbade American raids after an operation in October 2013 in which American special operators had abducted a terrorism suspect on Libyan soil. In Yemen, where Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plotted sophisticated bombing attacks that nearly downed several international airliners, the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh rejected the Obama administration’s requests to let American special operators target extremists in the nation’s hinterlands.
Such governments were generally more receptive to American offers to train their forces in counterinsurgency operations, for expansion of their control over national territory held greater appeal than sporadic raids against individuals whom the Amer
icans deemed threatening. American special operators assisted the Pakistanis in counterinsurgency—until they were kicked out in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid. Libyan authorities reached agreements with the United States and other countries to train security forces that would reclaim ground from fractious militia groups, though the United States was slow to follow through on its training promises, owing to security concerns and the theft of equipment from a base where Americans had begun training a small counterterrorism force.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the enormity of the US military presence had given the Defense Department a privileged position in internecine bureaucratic swordfights, a reality that led many in uniform to believe that the military could do as it pleased in any foreign country. In most other nations, however, the Defense Department had to gain concurrence from the State Department before taking actions, and the State Department often refused to concur. Special operators who showed up in third-world countries expecting to employ skills honed on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan found themselves put on indefinite hold by diplomats who viewed the proposed actions as unnecessary and reckless. Civilian officials obstructed SOF interaction with foreign military personnel through the use of the Leahy Amendment, which prohibited training of units alleged to have committed human rights violations. When State Department diplomats became sufficiently fed up, they employed their authority over the entrance of US government personnel into foreign nations to deny special operators permission to set foot in a country.
One of the most serious clashes between special operators and the State Department took place in the West African country of Mali. During early 2012, special operations forces warned of a growing Al Qaeda presence in northern Mali and recommended more robust military support to the Malian government. The US ambassador to Mali dismissed the warnings as unwarranted alarmism and rejected the recommendations. Subsequent Al Qaeda advances against poorly supplied Malian Army forces sparked accusations among Malian military officers that a corrupt civilian government had let the army down, leading to a military coup d’état on March 21.
