The Army’s Green Berets are among the best
known of America’s elite forces, but they’re hardly alone. Navy
SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, Army Rangers, Marine Corps
Raiders, as well as civil affairs personnel, logisticians,
administrators, analysts, and planners, among others, make up
U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF). They are the men and
women who carry out America’s most difficult and secret military
missions. Since 9/11, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM)
has
grown in every conceivable way from funding and personnel to
global reach and deployments. In 2015, according to Special
Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Special Operations
forces deployed to a record-shattering 147 countries -- 75% of
the nations on the planet, which represents a
jump of 145% since the waning days of the Bush
administration. On any day of the year, in fact, America’s most
elite troops can be found in 70 to 90 nations.
There is, of course, a certain logic to
imagining that the increasing global sweep of these deployments
is a sign of success. After all, why would you expand your
operations into ever-more nations if they weren’t successful?
So I decided to pursue that record of “success” with a few
experts on the subject.
I started by asking Sean Naylor, a man who
knows America’s most elite troops as few do and the author of
Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special
Operations Command, about the claims made by Army
Special Forces Command. He responded with a hearty laugh. “I’m
going to give whoever wrote that the benefit of the doubt that
they were referring to successes that Army Special Forces were
at least perceived to have achieved in those countries rather
than the overall U.S. military effort,” he says. As he points
out, the first post-9/11 months may represent the zenith of
success for those troops. The initial operations in the
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 -- carried out largely by U.S.
Special Forces, the CIA, and the Afghan Northern Alliance,
backed by U.S. airpower -- were “probably the high point” in the
history of unconventional warfare by Green Berets, according to
Naylor. As for the years that followed? “There were all sorts
of mistakes, one could argue, that were made after that.” He is,
however, quick to point out that “the vast majority of the
decisions [about operations and the war, in general] were not
being made by Army Special Forces soldiers.”
For Linda Robinson, author of
One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of
American Warfare, the high number of deployments is
likely a mistake in itself. “Being in 70 countries... may not
be the best use of SOF,” she told me. Robinson, a senior
international policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, advocates
for a “more thoughtful and focused approach to the employment of
SOF,” citing enduring missions in Colombia and the Philippines
as the most successful special ops training efforts in recent
years. “It might be better to say ‘Let’s not sprinkle around
the SOF guys like fairy dust.’ Let’s instead focus on where we
think we can have a success... If you want more successes, maybe
you need to start reining in how many places you’re trying to
cover.”
Most of the special ops deployments in those
147 countries are the type Robinson expresses skepticism about
-- short-term training missions by “white” operators like Green
Berets (as opposed to the “black
ops” man-hunting missions by the elite of the elite that
captivate
Hollywood and
video gamers). Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Special
Operations forces
carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET)
missions in as many as 67 countries, practicing everything from
combat casualty care and marksmanship to small unit tactics and
desert warfare alongside local forces. And JCETs only scratch
the surface when it comes to special ops missions to train
proxies and allies. Special Operations forces, in fact, conduct
a variety of
training efforts globally.
A recent
$500 million program, run by
Green Berets, to train a Syrian force of more than 15,000
over several years, for instance, crashed and burned in a very
public way, yielding just four or five fighters in the field
before being
abandoned. This particular failure followed much larger,
far more expensive attempts to train the
Afghan and
Iraqi security forces in which Special Operations troops
played a smaller yet still critical role. The results of these
efforts recently prompted TomDispatch regular and
retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich to
write that Washington should now assume “when it comes to
organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign armies,
that the United States is essentially clueless.”
The Elite Warriors of the Warrior
Elite
In addition to training, another core role of
Special Operations forces is direct action -- counterterror
missions like low-profile
drone assassinations and
kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-octane operators.
The exploits of the men -- and they are
mostly men (and mostly
Caucasian ones at that) -- behind these operations are
chronicled in Naylor’s epic history of Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), the secret counterterrorism organization that
includes the military’s most elite and shadowy units like the
Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force. A compendium of
more than a decade of derring-do from Afghanistan to Iraq,
Somalia to Syria, Relentless Strike paints a portrait
of a highly-trained, well-funded, hard-charging counterterror
force with global reach. Naylor calls it the “perfect hammer,”
but notes the obvious risk that “successive administrations
would continue to view too many national security problems as
nails.”
When I ask Naylor about what JSOC has
ultimately achieved for the country in the Obama years, I get
the impression that he doesn’t find my question particularly
easy to answer. He points to
hostage rescues, like the high profile effort to save “Captain
Phillips” of the
Maersk Alabama after the cargo ship was hijacked by
Somali pirates, and asserts that such missions might
“inhibit others from seizing Americans.” One wonders, of
course, if similar high-profile
failed
missions since then, including the SEAL raid that ended in
the deaths of hostages Luke Somers, an American photojournalist,
and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, as well as the
unsuccessful attempt to rescue the late aid worker Kayla
Mueller, might then have just the opposite effect.
“Afghanistan, you’ve got another fairly
devilish strategic problem there,” Naylor says and offers up a
question of his own: “You have to ask what would have happened
if al-Qaeda in Iraq had not been knocked back on its heels by
Joint Special Operations Command between 2005 and 2010?” Naylor
calls attention to JSOC’s special abilities to menace terror
groups, keeping them unsteady through relentless intelligence
gathering, raiding, and man-hunting. “It leaves them less time
to take the offensive, to plan missions, and to plot operations
against the United States and its allies,” he explains. “Now
that doesn’t mean that the use of JSOC is a substitute for a
strategy... It’s a tool in a policymaker’s toolkit.”
Indeed. If what JSOC can do is bump off and
capture individuals and pressure such groups but not decisively
roll up militant networks, despite years of
anti-terror whack-a-mole efforts, it sounds like a recipe
for spending endless lives and endless funds on
endless war. “It's not my place as a reporter to opine as
to whether the present situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Yemen were ‘worth’ the cost in blood and treasure borne by U.S.
Special Operations forces,” Naylor tells me in a follow-up
email. “Given the effects that JSOC achieved in Iraq (Uday and
Qusay Hussein killed, Saddam Hussein captured, [al-Qaeda in Iraq
leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi killed, al-Qaeda in Iraq eviscerated),
it's hard to say that JSOC did not have an impact on that
nation's recent history.”
Impacts, of course, are one thing, successes
another. Special Operations Command, in fact, hedges its bets
by claiming that it can only be as successful as the global
commands under which its troops operate in each area of the
world, including European Command, Pacific Command, Africa
Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Central Command
or CENTCOM, the geographic combatant command that oversees
operations in the Greater Middle East. “We support the
Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs) -- if they are
successful, we are successful; if they fail, we fail,” says
SOCOM’s
website.
With this in mind, it’s helpful to return to
Naylor’s question: What if al-Qaeda in Iraq, which flowered in
the years after the U.S. invasion, had never been targeted by
JSOC as part of a man-hunting operation going after its foreign
fighters, financiers, and military leaders? Given that the even
more brutal Islamic State (IS) grew out of that targeted terror
group, that IS was
fueled in
many ways, say
experts, both
by U.S.
actions and
inaction, that its leader’s rise was
bolstered by U.S. operations, that “U.S. training helped
mold” another of its chiefs, and that a U.S. prison served
as its “boot
camp,” and given that the Islamic State now holds a
significant swath of Iraq, was JSOC’s campaign against its
predecessor a net positive or a negative? Were special ops
efforts in Iraq (and therefore in CENTCOM’s area of operations)
-- JSOC’s post-9/11 showcase counterterror campaign -- a success
or a failure?
Naylor
notes that JSOC’s failure to completely destroy al-Qaeda in
Iraq allowed IS to grow and eventually sweep “across northern
Iraq in 2014, seizing town after town from which JSOC and other
U.S. forces had evicted al-Qaeda in Iraq at great cost several
years earlier.” This, in turn, led to the rushing of
special ops advisers back into the country to aid the fight
against the Islamic State, as well as to that program to train
anti-Islamic State Syrian fighters that foundered and then
imploded. By this spring, JSOC operators were not only
back in Iraq and also on the ground
in Syria, but they were soon conducting
drone campaigns in both of those
tottering nations.
This special ops merry-go-round in Iraq is
just the latest in a long series of fiascos, large and small, to
bedevil America’s elite troops.
Over
the
years,
in
that
country,
in
Afghanistan,
and
elsewhere,
special
operators
have
regularly
been
involved
in
all
manner
of
mishaps,
embroiled
in
various
scandals,
and
implicated
in
numerous
atrocities. Recently, for instance, members of the Special
Operations forces have come under
scrutiny for an
air strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in
Afghanistan that
killed at least 22 patients and staff, for an
alliance with “unsavory partners” in the Central African
Republic, for the ineffective and abusive Afghan police they
trained and
supervised, and for a
shady deal to provide SEALs with untraceable silencers that
turned out to be junk, according to prosecutors.
Winners and Losers
JSOC was born of failure, a phoenix rising
from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, the humiliating attempt
to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran in
1980 that ended, instead, in the deaths of eight U.S. personnel.
Today, the elite force trades on an aura of success in the
shadows. Its missions are the
stuff of
modern myths.
In his advance praise for Naylor’s book, one
cable news analyst called JSOC’s operators “the finest warriors
who ever went into combat.” Even accepting this -- with
apologies to the
Mongols, the
Varangian Guard, Persia’s
Immortals, and the
Ten Thousand of Xenophon’s Anabasis -- questions
remain: Have these “warriors” actually been successful beyond
budget battles and the
box
office? Is exceptional tactical prowess enough? Are
battlefield triumphs and the ability to batter terror networks
through relentless raiding the same as victory? Such questions
bring to mind an exchange that Army colonel Harry Summers, who
served in Vietnam, had with a North Vietnamese counterpart in
1975. “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,”
Summers told him. After pausing to ponder the comment, Colonel
Tu replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”
So what of those Green Berets who deployed to
135 countries in the last decade? And what of the Special
Operations forces sent to 147 countries in 2015? And what about
those Geographic Combatant Commanders across the globe who have
hosted all those special operators?
I put it to Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich,
author of
Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and
Their Country. “As far back as Vietnam,” he tells me,
“the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with
outcomes. Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb
tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of
progress made. Today, tallying up the number of countries in
which Special Operations forces are present repeats this error.
There is no doubt that U.S. Special Operations forces are hard
at it in lots of different places. It does not follow that they
are thereby actually accomplishing anything meaningful.”