Special Forces (Ss) (2001)

by Tom - Nf Clancy

  Next we proceeded down a hallway into what had been a gymnasium, but was now the Battlestar control center, the heart of the upcoming R3 operation. What was once the basketball court was now partitioned with plywood walls, all covered with maps, photographs, charts, and a variety of graphics useful to the personnel who would spend the next three weeks in this cyber-rustic workspace.

  Stepped back a short way from the front of the large area that was the actual Battlestar control center were three semicircular rows of folding tables, now covered with computers, printers, networking equipment, and a variety of other high-tech paraphernalia. And in front of all that were four large-screen television projectors, which could be programmed to show a variety of programming and materials. While we were visiting, the screens were programmed with:• A continuous loop of satellite cloud activity over the eastern U.S, downlinked from a National Oceanic Administration (NOA) GOES-series weather satellite. This provided everyone there with an up-to-date pictorial depiction of the weather situation.

  • A computer-generated display of the eastern United States and adjacent waters, showing the location of ships and aircraft involved in the coming exercise. This display was being fed from a joint system, which displayed the information in real-time, making it a useful tool for keeping track of the overall strategic situation in the JTFEX 99-1 exercise, as well as units assigned to R3.

  • A high-resolution ground map of the southeastern U.S., covering the area of operations for the SOF units involved in R3. Overlaid onto this were ground and air unit symbols, which could be moved and controlled from a small computer in the Battlestar center.

  • CNN Headline News, a source of continuous study for everyone in the room. With the 1999 NCAA basketball playoffs only days away, every sports junkie there was keeping one eye on game highlights.A number of other programs and displays could also be shown, including classified feeds from intelligence agencies, and several hundred channels of commercial programming from a DSS satellite dish in back of the center.

  Tying everything in the building together was a state-of-the-art Intranet system, with feed-out to various classified networks, and even the commercial Internet. All of the data sources were fed through a commercial Cisco Systems network router, so that to the operators in the Battlestar and other parts of the building, everything they saw on their computer screens looked like conventional World Wide Web sites or pages.

  After my Battlestar tour, I returned to my hotel rooms to prepare for the following day’s briefings ... and to enjoy some local barbecue.

  Camp McCain, Mississippi, February 22nd

  This Monday morning began early, so I could attend the morning shift change briefing at 0700, which would bring me up to speed on the R3 scenario, and the units involved. After I gathered up my badge at the security checkpoint and grabbed a cup of coffee, I was escorted into the Battlestar center where I was given a seat in the front row between Colonel Phillips and his command sergeant major.

  Promptly at 0700, everyone came to attention, and the briefing commenced. One at a time, the various staff section heads went to a podium and presented a slideshow about their area of concern on one of the large screens. Like most present-day electronic briefings, each presentation was mastered in Microsoft PowerPoint.107 Computers have so deeply imbedded themselves in our military that major planning can’t get off the dime until the PowerPoint slides are done; and the most powerful and valuable person on a headquarters staff is often an officer called the “PowerPoint Ranger” (the “producer-director” of briefings, who integrates text, graphics, photos). Colonel Phillips had his own PowerPoint Ranger (a very bright and skilled young SF captain on the 7th SFG staff) who produced his briefings.

  This day’s briefings covered a wide range of topics, most of which centered on the R3 scenario. While technically R3 was already underway, the most intensive parts were still almost two weeks in the future.

  Meanwhile, the larger exercise it was part of, JTFEX 99-1, was in many respects a restaging of the various JTFEXs I had observed over the past four-plus years. Since this one was taking place in wintertime, the deep-water segments (designed to test and certify the Navy and Marine components) were taking place in the warm waters near Puerto Rico, while the main thrust of the exercise was an Iraqi-style invasion of a hypothetical country in the “Gulf of Sabini” (the coastal waters of the Carolinas). Marines from the 26th MEU (SOC) were rushing up from Puerto Rico to evacuate civilians from the danger zone, and the Theodore Roosevelt CVBG was moving into the area to support the operation. Simulated enemy SCUD missiles were raining down on Philadelphia, and more were being prepared in denied territory in Florida. Navy and British SAS SOF units were scouting the area around Cape Canaveral, where the missiles were being assembled (the enemy inventory of SCUDs was assessed at over a hundred). At the same time, a U.S. Navy Aegis cruiser, the USS Vicksburg (CG- 69) steamed into the Gulf of Mexico to provide ballistic missile defense for the island of Cortina, if the enemy fired any that way.

  Right now, the R3 units were only playing on the periphery of the action, but that would change in a few days. So for the time being, the pace of operations in the Battlestar remained brisk but calm.

  Once the briefing was done, I headed over to an excellent breakfast cooked by the 7th SFG sergeants. Since the regular cooks and support troops work long hours putting meals on the table, the group NCOs take over the job one day out of seven. The rib-sticking, Southern-style meal they laid out was a wonderful way to combat the unusually cold weather.108

  After breakfast, I spent the rest of the day poking into the other centers of activity within the JSOTF headquarters.

  Later, as the sun was sinking into the west and I was about to head back to Granada and my hotel, I got a surprising invitation from Colonel Phillips. “Why don’t you join us for the COA briefing tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Sure, I’d love to,” I answered in a shot.

  The Course of Action (COA) briefing would decide the operation plans for the CTF 958.1.1 at Fort Polk. Such briefings, even during exercises, are usually highly classified. It was a great honor.

  I had a lot to look forward to the next day.

  Camp McCain, Mississippi, February 23rd

  Next morning I again attended the shift change briefing at 0700. Taking my place at the front table near Colonel Phillips, I sipped coffee and took in overnight developments during JTFEX 99-1, where most of the activity still centered on the carrier and amphibious groups, which were beginning to enter the Gulf of Sabini.

  The R3’s part of the briefing was more interesting.

  Colonel Phillips ran these sessions with a pleasantly relaxed, yet forceful style. He’d enter a room with a basketball under his arm and set it down on the table next to him. Whenever anyone screwed up his briefing—by being muddy or by missing a vital point—Phillips called out, “You’ve got the ball!” and heaved the ball at the briefer. Penance for screwing up was to carry the ball until the next briefing, and—more important—to make good on the shortcomings and be ready to brief the material again if asked.

  Such antics offered more than just comic relief and a goofy way to handle mistakes. They were a significant element in Phillips’s command style. His easygoing, nonthreatening, yet tough, technique helped him build deep-seated loyalty among his SF soldiers. Nobody wanted to “get the ball,” yet getting it hurt a lot less than other ways of pointing out screwups. And it was not a bad way to motivate others to give their best effort, either.

  As for the R3 itself: The units assigned to JSOTF were beginning to move to their assigned exercise locations. A C-17A Globemaster III transport aircraft from the 437th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, South Carolina, had picked up eighty Bolivian soldiers, and was moving them to Fort Polk via Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. The lead elements of 1st/7th SFG had arrived in Louisiana the day before with seventy-two SF soldiers, and had begun to build FOB 71 in the same complex where JRTC 99-1 was played a few months earlier. The 1st/20th SFG
also began to move, and would establish FOB 201 at Fort McClellan a few days later. R3 was beginning to move, and you could feel the energy building inside the Battlestar.

  A few hours later, I was escorted into a small room for the COA briefing for what was now being called Operation Marauder (the overall name of the operations to be conducted at Fort Polk). I was about to get a look at something rarely seen—the process of deciding just how a military operation would be run in the field.

  This particular COA would be unusual for a number of reasons. For starters, to test Battlestar’s power and comm capability, only Colonel Phillips and his immediate 7th SFG staff from the Battlestar would be physically present. Unlike normal briefings of this type, the various unit commanders who would actually carry out Marauder were all miles away. Having already made their inputs via the satellite uplinks to the Battlestar Intranet, they would be informed of the JSOTF’s intentions via e-mail and video teleconference.

  Now a quick overview of what Marauder would involve:

  The basic scenario centered on a small-town complex in the Peason Ridge area on the Fort Polk live-fire range. Known as Merrill Village, the complex has a dozen or so small buildings, where Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training is normally conducted. For the purpose of R3, Merrill Village represented a sort of rural county seat, with several dozen inhabitants. As the R3 scenario opened, these civilian personnel had already been driven from their homes by Koronan insurgents, who wanted to use the village as a base to fill chemical munitions with mustard gas. The goal of Operation Marauder was to reverse this situation. Five phases were planned:• Phase I—SF ODAs and other reconnaissance assets put the village complex (called Objective Frank) under surveillance, and maintain the effort until an assault force can be inserted.

  • Phase II—Air Force Special Operations AC-130 Spectre gunships and three MC- 130 Hercules transport aircraft deliver A Company of the 1st/75th Rangers by night parachute drop near the village. The Rangers will then assault Objective Frank, killing or capturing as many of the Koronan insurgents as possible.

  • Phase III—Once Objective Frank is secured, a ground task force of SF soldiers from the 1st/7th SFG and the Bolivians (operating as a multinational coalition force) relieves the Ranger company and takes over control of the village. This will be followed by the repatriation of the villagers from a displaced persons’ camp elsewhere on Fort Polk.

  • Phase IV—To help bring life in the village back to normal, a civil affairs team will be assigned to provide relief, and a rebuilding effort will be initiated. At the same time, the combined SFBolivian task force will establish a security perimeter to protect the complex for the duration of hostilities.

  • Phase V—When hostilities cease, the security/civil affairs teams will be withdrawn, and hopefully normal life in the village will resume.

  If all its elements worked, Marauder would generate important results for the JTFEX 99-1 commander off of the Carolina coast. It would eliminate a major WMD problem for the 26th MEU (SOC), which would soon invade in the Gulf of Sabini; and it would provide a significant political advantage in the overall scenario, which translated into more time for the Navy and Marines to act in the primary action along the Atlantic coast.

  While the basic plan seemed fairly straightforward, there were some important decisions to be made. Key among these was the guidance that would be given to combat units assigned to accomplish Phase II, arguably the most difficult part of the operation, as much for the many interlocking parts that had to be synchronized as for the potential combat power of the insurgents at the objective.

  The overriding question: How will the units approach and assault the village, with a minimum of friendly casualties and collateral damage?

  The briefing, which was run by the 7th Group Operations Officer (S-3), began with a short talk about the area where Marauder would take place.

  Peason Ridge is mostly rolling, wooded terrain, but with a number of open, grassy meadows. Though rising fairly high out of the swamplands of the Louisiana low country, much of the area is still soggy. Merrill Village is located on the edge of a wooded ridge, running northwest to southeast. The area around it is lightly wooded, dropping down to an open meadow to the north. Numerous hard-packed dirt roads run throughout the area, and there is lots of ground cover.

  The key issue discussed at the briefing was this: Should the Ranger company handle both the assault and their flank/drop zone (DZ) security, or should one or more of the other ground elements join them in the assault and relieve them of some of these problems?

  Before the briefing, various courses of action had been proposed for the recapture of Merrill Village. These had been distilled into four assault plans by the S-3 (operations) Battlestar staff. And then the S-3 shop had laid out for each assault option a set of Mission Essential Tasks Lists (METLs) and scored each according to standard Army success/risk criteria. These options were then presented to Colonel Phillips and his staff, who discussed them seminar-style. Presenting all the materials and analyzing the options took several hours.

  In the end, a consensus was reached that matched up with Colonel Phillips’s command judgment, and the option was chosen that placed the bulk of the security and assault responsibilities upon the Rangers.

  There were several reasons for this decision: First, it seemed to offer the best chance to fully utilize the Rangers’ well-known ferocity and combat power. (Rangers are not subtle; they light their cigars with blowtorches.) Second, it offered a good likelihood that blue-on-blue casualties might be avoided in the confusion and darkness of the assault. Third, it offered the greatest chance of catching the insurgents by surprise, which was vital to the successful taking of the village.

  The plan had weaknesses: The assault plan called for them to maneuver from their DZ north of the village around to the west and then an attack from the south. In that way surprise should be maintained and the most likely enemy escape route would be cut off (if they tried to move north, they’d have to cross meadows exposed to the Air Force Spectre gunship). Therefore, failing to follow the plan risked losing surprise ... and losing the insurgents.

  Given the limited forces available, Colonel Phillips felt that the plan’s strengths outweighed its weaknesses, and he ordered his staff to send the battle plan out over the network to the various R3 CTF commanders. At his insistence, it was going to be an intentionally tough exercise, fraught with risks and some chances for foul-ups. Though some of the leaders and planners were worried that the absence of a full-scale dress rehearsal by all the units together might cause serious problems, it was hoped that the teleconferencing, networking, and other capabilities being tried in R3 would make up for that. In Phillips’s view, making the scenario easy, and going less than all the way with the experiment, would corrupt the testing process. You have to admire his intellectual honesty.

  Time would tell if he was right.

  After the meeting, I was escorted into the room where the Rock Drill terrain model was being built. Already the contours of the Peason Ridge area were taking shape. Scattered around the worktables were the many small replicas of the Merrill Village buildings, as well as trees and other terrain features. Clearly, the model would be an excellent briefing tool for the planners and leaders when they gathered for their conference the following weekend.

  My own plan was to leave the exercise for a few days and return when the action got hot. I wanted to be there for the Ranger assault on Objective Frank.

  When I returned, I was informed, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Adams 1st/7th and Mike Rozsypal’s JRTC Special Operations Training Detachment (SOTD) Observer/ Controller personnel would be ready for me.

  Main Post, Fort Polk, Louisiana, Friday, March 5th

  After my many visits over the past four years, Fort Polk was starting to feel very familiar. In the morning, I drove to the post public affair office to meet my old friend Paula Schlag (the Fort Polk/JRTC PAO) for instructions, maps, and briefing materials.

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nbsp; It was a clear and beautiful late winter day, with only a touch of breeze in the cool air. All around, you could see and hear the hum of activity. Coincidentally with R3, a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) was coming in for their annual rotation. The exercise they were to take part in, JRTC 99-3, would overlap the JTFEX 99-1/R3, making this one of the busiest times in the history of the center.

  As she passed over the instruction packet, Paula asked me to report to the Special Operations Training Detachment (SOTD—the SOF O/C organization) headquarters, just across the street from where the 1st/7th SFG had FOB 71. I then drove the few miles over to SOTD, where I met up with old friends from JRTC 99-1, Lieutenant Colonel Rozsypal and Major Bill Shaw. Rozsypal’s big news was his promotion to full colonel; he would soon be turning over command of SOTD to Lieutenant Colonel Joe Smith (who’d been commander of 2nd/7th SFG during JRTC 99-1).

  It was a good and cheerful moment, but inevitably attentions turned to the coming operations.

  The day-to-day R3 roleplaying had not, in fact, generated many changes. Already three SR teams from 1st/7th SFG were watching the area around Peason Ridge, passing along their observations to FOB 71 and the JSOTF. Two of these were assigned to watch Objective Frank (Merrill Village), while the other was to provide surveillance of the Ranger DZ, known as Burma.

  Plans had the Rangers dropping onto DZ Burma at 2100 the next evening (Saturday, March 6th), with the assault on the objective an hour after that. Assuming that all went well, the link-up with the ground relief force, known as Task Force Sparrow (after Major Bernie Sparrow, the commander of the SF company that made up part of the force), would take place the following morning around 0900. This would be followed by a hand-off from the Rangers to Task Force Sparrow, who would then take over control of the village. The Rangers would then maneuver back to an exfiltration site to the north, where the MC-130s would land and pick them up for the flight home.