by Mark Moyar
These efforts have been undercut by the overlap between the purported SOF roles and missions and the actual activities of conventional forces. Further weakening the viability of definitions and mission sets has been their irrelevance to real-world decisions on the assignment of roles and missions. Throughout the history of special operations forces, the evolution of roles and missions has been guided not by conformance to a particular definition or list, but rather by the determination of political or military leaders that the military needed new capabilities to keep pace with evolving tactical or strategic requirements. Eager to participate in the nation’s wars, special operations forces have tailored their roles and missions to make themselves attractive to the holders of executive and budgetary authority.
The roles and missions for which the special operators trained often ended up bearing little resemblance to what the nation ultimately demanded of them. During World War II, the training of most special operations forces concentrated on raiding behind enemy lines, but few opportunities for such raids presented themselves, so the units ended up fighting as line infantry, a task for which they were not sufficiently equipped. The Rangers went through the same experience in Korea, where the war shifted from one of fluid front lines to one of fixed defensive positions before most of the Rangers were ready to commence raiding.
The preparation of OSS special operations forces for supporting resistance forces proved a better match to the operational requirements prevailing at the time when the forces came off the assembly line. The effective utilization of OSS special operators in World War II inspired the creation of the US Army Special Forces in 1952 and the designation of unconventional warfare as their main mission. For their first decade, the Special Forces were trained to support resistance forces in Eastern Europe during a world war that was never to be.
President Kennedy’s insistence that SOF take a leading role in counterinsurgency and expand beyond Europe put an end to nearly a decade of peace for the special operators. The largest special operations program in Vietnam, the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, began as a counterinsurgency initiative, though it morphed into an unconventional warfare program as time wore on. In Vietnam, the Special Forces also entered the business of covert reconnaissance in enemy territory, and the SEALs began their tradition of unilateral surgical strikes.
For several decades after Vietnam, changes in the global security environment steered the evolution of SOF roles and missions. The rise in hostage taking in the 1970s led to the revival of the Rangers and the creation of Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and JSOC. Opportunities to rescue hostages were scarce, inducing the special operators and their civilian overseers to search for other tasks. The Rangers delved into air assault, while the Special Forces worked further on reconnaissance, enabling both to participate in the invasions of Grenada and Panama. JSOC developed surgical strike capabilities that it put to use in Colombia and Somalia.
Technological advancement spurred changes in SOF roles and missions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The advent of precision bombs afforded new opportunities to direct firepower in support of conventional forces, a task the special operators performed so well in Afghanistan in 2001 that the Northern Alliance vanquished the much larger Taliban in nine weeks. The information revolution enabled SOF to collect and exploit information on insurgent personnel to a degree never before seen. These developments, it should be noted, did not simply fall into the lap of special operations forces, but were instead driven by proactive and creative leadership, and also by high funding levels and acquisition authorities that put the new technologies in the hands of operators much more quickly than the plodding military acquisition bureaucracy normally permitted.
The new opportunities for surgical strikes fueled demand for special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, ending a three-decade period in which the supply of special operations forces exceeded demand. This turn of events relieved SOF of the task of conjuring up new missions to justify their existence, and instead necessitated choices as to which roles and missions they would perform and which they would not. In Iraq, the emphasis on surgical strikes kept the “white SOF”—all those besides JSOC—out of the population-security operations of counterinsurgency, which had traditionally been one of their strengths. White SOF moved back into that mission in Afghanistan with the Village Stability Operations program, rotating personnel in from all regions of the world to work with the Afghan Local Police. They sought to continue in that direction as they pulled out of Afghanistan, but their attempts to support foreign governments in counterinsurgency, in places like Yemen and Guatemala, encountered stiff resistance from the White House and the State Department, which were leery of deepening US involvement in armed conflicts. White SOF, moreover, were needed to shore up security forces in the countries that the US government had intended to leave—Iraq and Afghanistan.
The downsizing of America’s presence in Iraq and Afghanistan brought an end to the era of ten raids per night, which forced JSOC to look elsewhere for opportunities. But outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign governments and the US State Department restricted their activities. Escalating strife and turmoil in the Middle East and Eastern Europe during Obama’s second term, however, ensured that JSOC would still have extremists to hunt, hostages to rescue, and partners to train.
Today’s SOF should expect that changing administrations and changing circumstances will require SOF to take on new roles and missions. Although the future is in many respects unpredictable, SOF will be better prepared if they devote some attention now to potential trouble spots. Once the 911 call comes in from the White House, they will likely have little or no time for further study of places, people, or tasks.
The White House’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance ruled out preparedness for large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns in the belief that the United States would not need to fight such wars in the future. But in neither Afghanistan nor Iraq did the United States expect or want to get involved in prolonged counterinsurgency. It is not difficult to imagine the United States getting sucked into another large counterinsurgency in a country from which a devastating terrorist attack has been launched on the United States, such as Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia. There is also reason to believe that the United States could get drawn into prolonged operations in a host of other unstable countries, such as North Korea, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, Panama, Ukraine, or the Baltic States. Special operations forces therefore ought to resist the urge to put their counterinsurgency capabilities in the attic.
Counterinsurgency skills are worth keeping not just for the sake of counterinsurgency, but also for the sake of insurgency, since the two require most of the same skills. The United States is already supporting insurgents in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Next could be Iran, Pakistan, or the Baltic States.
Because linguistic and cultural proficiencies are highly valuable assets in counterinsurgency and insurgency, SOF would be well advised to maintain those proficiencies. Individuals and units will need to be prepared for a broad range of languages and cultures, considering the unpredictability of future conflict. In the period leading up to 9/11, it should be remembered, the Special Forces had learned the languages of a lengthy list of countries where they expected to operate, and yet the list had not included Afghanistan.
Although nuclear deterrence has greatly reduced the likelihood of war between large powers, recent events have given reason to believe that a war could still break out between the United States and either China or Russia. The United States could also find itself in a conventional war against a smaller power, such as Iran or North Korea. In the event of a conventional conflict, large numbers of special operations forces could be needed to help organize resistance movements, conduct strategic reconnaissance, guide bombs, serve as combat advisers to allied forces, or raid targets in the enemy’s rear. The odds of a conventional war remain sufficiently low, though, that training in specialized skills for such wars should be re
served for a relatively small subset of SOF.
There already exists a strong need for SOF to advise partner forces in small-scale conventional warfare, as a result of deteriorating security in Afghanistan and Iraq and the rise of hostile armies in failing or failed states such as Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. These are the latest of many unforeseen cases in which SOF have ended up training conventional forces in combined arms warfare. In the past, special operations forces have not always been sufficiently prepared for this type of work, and given their many other roles and missions, they probably will not be able to keep enough troops versed in this capability to meet the demand. It is one of several activities for which conventional forces can and should take over some of the burden.
Whatever else happens, SOF are certain to remain heavily engaged in training and educating a multitude of foreign partners, in everything from surgical strikes to guerrilla warfare to combat policing to forensics. Having allies do the heavy lifting is almost always less expensive, politically as well as economically, than having Americans do it. But training and educating allies is easier said than done. SOF must obtain State Department and White House concurrence for most of these activities, and difficult decisions must be made on which countries and which organizations within those countries are the optimal partners.
EFFECTIVENESS
Because decisions on SOF resources, roles, and missions have been based heavily on perceptions of SOF tactical and strategic effectiveness, special operators have worked hard to make the case that they are highly effective, and their detractors have likewise labored to paint them as ineffectual. Assessing tactical success is relatively straightforward, and SOF, by virtue of superior talent and special training, have usually excelled tactically, albeit with some significant exceptions. In strategic terms, however, SOF contributions have usually been disputed, for strategic consequences are often opaque or ambiguous. The strategic impact of special operations has usually been constrained by the parameters of the strategic environment, the small size of SOF, or flaws in the overall strategy.
The Rangers and Forcemen, like the British Commandos that inspired them, were originally conceived as strategic raiding forces whose raids against Nazi Germany would obviate a massive invasion of Western Europe. When the United States and Britain changed their minds and decided to invade Europe with 2 million men, raiding forces became bit players in a contest between titanic conventional armies. Frequently fighting as regular infantry, the Rangers and Forcemen lacked adequate heavy weaponry, which largely offset the tactical advantages accruing from the superiority of their personnel. In the Pacific, the tactical effectiveness of Marine Raiders and Merrill’s Marauders was likewise undermined by insufficiencies of heavy equipment. In both theaters, opportunities for raiding and other specialized missions suited to their capabilities were so scarce that the units were disbanded before war’s end.
The successes of OSS special operations forces in supporting resistance movements in France and Burma were momentous enough to influence military events at the strategic level, though they were always secondary in importance to the labors of heavy divisions and heavy bombers. OSS special operators attempted to exert strategic influence in the war’s latter days by managing resistance groups that aspired to run their countries after the war, at times without consulting senior US military or civilian officials. This influence was mainly by accident rather than by design, a by-product of the fact that the OSS operators were the only Americans working directly with the resistance leaders. Untutored in local politics, they dabbled in political affairs so amateurishly that their actions often undermined American interests, as in the cases of Yugoslavia and Indochina.
In the European and Asian theaters of World War II, and also in later conflicts where special operations forces attempted to support resistance movements, the effectiveness of resistance organizations depended more on the insurgents, counterinsurgents, and civilian populations already on the ground than on the foreign special operators who showed up to assist. The armed strength of Axis security forces varied widely from place to place, in some areas being so potent as to deter or destroy any would-be resistance. The willingness of local civilians to abet resistance movements figured heavily in the results achieved by those movements.
In Korea, the Rangers made significant tactical contributions by executing especially difficult infantry missions. The strategic gains of those operations were modest, however, and they came at the expense of the quality of US front-line units that had lost personnel to the Rangers. American special operators who organized resistance forces in North Korea met with unequivocal tactical success, necessitating the diversion of enemy forces from the front lines, although not in quantities sufficient to affect the strategic outcome.
The geographic expansion of SOF beyond Europe, which began under Kennedy, had far-reaching effects for the training and educating of foreign military personnel, providing initial investments in countries where the United States would need friends decades down the road. The results of these efforts have varied enormously. The most effective took several decades to reach fruition, because that amount of time was needed to influence the culture of a generation of officers in its formative years and develop that generation as it rose into senior leadership positions. Short-term training, of which SOF have done a large amount, has generally been insufficient because it does not change cultural attitudes.
The relatively small size of special operations forces has put major limitations on their training of foreign forces. Lacking the manpower to train a nation’s entire armed forces in a short period of time, the special operators have often focused on training elite forces, which are small and typically have missions similar to those of their American counterparts. But the meager size of those elite forces usually prevents them from working strategic changes in a country. A few elite companies cannot keep insurgents out of any country larger than Liechtenstein. American special operations forces have made the most of small numbers when concentrating their personnel at a government’s central institutions of training and education, because it has enabled them to influence much of that government’s leadership.
Ever since President Kennedy’s immersion of special operations forces in counterinsurgency, the strategic value of their participation in counterinsurgency has been constrained by scale. The mobilization of South Vietnam’s tribal minorities through the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program helped America’s allies in South Vietnam gain control over territory and combat infiltrators from North Vietnam, but it was limited to one part of the country. Counterinsurgency, moreover, became secondary in strategic importance when Hanoi upped the ante by introducing North Vietnamese Army divisions, which could be stopped only through conventional warfare.
In Afghanistan, the commitment of a large share of SOF global manpower to Village Stability Operations yielded patches of tactical success. It was not enough, however, to make the program into a decisive strategic player, because the Afghan Local Police never constituted more than a small percentage of the Afghan government’s security forces. Had the Afghan government authorized much larger numbers of Local Policemen, US conventional forces would have been obliged to provide most of the manpower for Village Stability Operations, since they had far more troops than SOF did, and hence the program would have become a conventional one, with conventional officers calling most of the shots.
America’s special operations forces could attempt to overcome the limitations of size by growing further. But they have already increased from 38,000 to 70,000 since 9/11, while the rest of the military is in the midst of a protracted downsizing, a state of affairs that has necessarily lowered SOF selectivity. Another expansion of special operations forces would dilute the quality of those forces still further while depriving conventional forces of much-needed talent. Given the dependence of special operations forces on recruitment from the regular forces and the persistence of threats requiring conventional remedies, the best solution at the prese
nt time would be to expand conventional forces rather than special operations forces.
In the period after the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, the independent special operations funding line permitted quantitative and qualitative improvements in ground special operations forces as well as the creation of air forces dedicated to special operations. It also led to growth in the number of people who believed that SOF were a strategic instrument in their own right, rather than merely a supporting arm to conventional forces. This belief inspired the use of Delta Force in Operation Gothic Serpent. The failure of that operation resulted in the withdrawal of the entire US military from Somalia and the shelving of the idea of SOF as an independent strategic actor for the remainder of the decade. The idea returned early the next decade on account of the SOF role in the defeat of the Taliban. That brief war demonstrated the high strategic potential of combat advising in an era of precision munitions. It also showed, however, that the effectiveness of combat advising was still contingent upon the quality of the leaders who were being advised. The advising of the Northern Alliance succeeded in large measure because Northern Alliance commanders were adept at organizing and leading large ground operations, whereas the advising of Afghan militias at Tora Bora was unproductive because those militias had inept leaders.
Donald Rumsfeld further advanced the concept of strategically decisive SOF with his manhunting campaigns. The “light-footprint counterterrorism” of the Obama administration took it further still, moving surgical strikes to the top of the nation’s list of counterterrorism tools. Surgical strikes inflicted far more damage on insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan than in any prior war, yet they did not win the war in either place. They could and did play a large part in defeating insurgents when undertaken in tandem with counterinsurgency operations that permanently secured the population. When they were not undertaken in such a manner, as in the early years of the Iraq War and the latter years of the Afghan War, the insurgents continued to prosper. The Obama administration’s strategy of suppressing Yemen’s terrorists with only surgical counterterrorism failed spectacularly, as insurgents were able to overrun the government and eliminate Yemeni and American counterterrorism capabilities. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden alienated Pakistan to such a degree that the Pakistani government ceased cooperation with the United States on numerous fronts, including counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda.
