by Tom Clancy
None of this was their “real” mission, but the training allowed the much weakened and reduced Special Forces to keep themselves tuned up and ready for when the call came again.
AN example of the kind of challenge they faced came in 1982. The 5th SF Group at Fort Bragg had been given the assignment to support the recently created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF)—which two years later became CENTCOM—in its planning for Southwest Asia. Iran was then a major focus. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviets could possibly roll down through Iran, grab its warm-water ports, and of course, its oil, thus affording them the strategic position to control the flow of all oil out of the Cuff. The RDJTF’s mission was to make sure that did not happen.
Operating in Southwest Asia meant deserts, of course, but as a consequence of the chaos after Vietnam, no one in Special Forces had desert training.
Jim Cuest, then the 5th Group commander, tells the story:
THE 5th was a big group. In 1982, we had fifty-four A-Detachments, but our entire training budget was only $350,000. Major General Joe Lutz, the commander of the JFK Center, told me, “I want you to train your group to go to war in the desert.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
But when I started checking into the realities of desert training, I realized that nobody in SF had actually trained there. I told General Lutz that we needed a site in the desert where we could start training the troops.
“We don’t have any money for that,” he told me. “But go ahead and do it, and we’ll find the money somehow.” And he did.
So we got started.
I sent a major and a couple of captains out west, and they found a post near Fort Hauchucha, Arizona, near Tombstone, where the local desert matched up pretty closely with the deserts in the Middle East; it was the harshest desert we could find. We then put a training unit out there.
At the same time, I commissioned a desert study, which concluded, “In Vietnam, the engagement range for the enemy was usually fifty to three hundred meters. In the desert, it starts at fifteen hundred meters. To fight there, you need bigger, more accurate weapons.”
Other important conclusions: First, you must prepare yourself psychologically to operate in such a strange and hostile environment . Second, mobility is a must. You need a vehicle. You can’t just walk in the desert very far and survive; the rough terrain nears you out. And you need something to carry water, equipment, and survival gear. In most other operational areas, we carry all this in rucksacks. But not in the desert. Third, you must be able to navigate by the stars, like ships at set. And then you also must know how to camouflage in the desert, how to estimate distances, how to make expedient repairs on vehicles and other pieces of key equipment (its a long way bach to your support).
Then we got the group together, and I told them right up front: “Most of you are veterans of Vietnam, where—unfortunately—we fought in the jungle. Now you’re going into the desert to learn how to fight there, because you don’t know how. That means we’re going to have to shift the total thinking of the group.”
We trained for seventy-six days, and the guys learned how to survive and navigate. Navigation is damned difficult. You either have a haze, which keeps you from seeing far enough to orient yourself, or if it’s clear, everything appears far closer than it actually is, and when you get off the post, it’s really harsh. We had a lot of trouble getting accustomed to navigating in the desert.
After four weeks of orientation and general learning, we put them out in the desert in A-Detachments, and took everything away from them—no food, no water—and they had to survive for two weeks. Live or die, it was up to them. (Of course, we had our own outpost to watch them.)
After they’d been out for a while, somebody came up to me and said, “You know, the guys out there look like that movie, Quest For Fire” (where cave-men roamed around a desert trying to survive.) He was right; they did. In the daytime, the sun was so hot they stayed under shelter, and when they had to go out, they tied rags around their heads, like Arabs. They hunted and traveled at night, with homemade spears, slingshots, anything they could get. And they hunted anything they could find—porcupines, birds, snakes.
Special Forces are very cunning. After they came back in, they told us, “As we wandered along the wadis, we kept seeing these little holes. ‘What the hell are they?’ we kept asking ourselves. And it finally dawned on us that they were rat holes. And that meant rattlesnakes were going to come out at night and hunt them. And that meant we could get them both.
“I don’t know how many rattlesnakes we killed and ate, but we depopulated some of those areas.”
After we found out about the rat holes, we always put guys in areas where there was a good supply of them.
The same thing went for water. We always put the guys in areas where they could find it. Before they went out, they’d study maps, which showed where they could dig down and get water; it would seep up under dried streambeds. In some places, little springs trickled up, but they had to be careful about these, because some of them were alkaline.
After we’d been doing this for a while, we realized we needed vehicles, not only for the reasons already mentioned but to use as weapons platforms for. 50-caliber machine guns and TOWs. Our area studies had convinced us that any enemy with the potential to hurt us in the desert would be mounted on vehicles—or, in some cases, camels.
We needed vehicles, but there was no money And since We couldn’t get anybody to give us anything, we took our own trucks, painted them desert brown (for camouflage), and cut their tops off. We had to do that so the trucks could be easily dismounted—but also so we could mount the weapons and have 360-degree observation on the move. In the desert, you need to see in every direction—especially for protection against surprise or helicopters.
“Cut the tops off very carefully,” I told our mechanics. “If we ever have to turn one of the trucks back in, we can just set it down and weld the top back on, and nobody’ll ever know.”
Sometimes we went to the Property Disposal Yard (the PDO yard) and picked up vehicles the army was throwing away or selling. We would take three or four broken-down and beat-up vehicles to a place our mechanics and maintenance people had set up out in the desert, and rebuild them ourselves. We cut two or three vehicles in pieces, and welded the good pieces together to make one workable truck.
A lot of people thought we were nuts, hut it was just Special Forces ingenuity once again.
The payoff came when we went on an exercise a year later with some elite Arab units, and it turned out that we were more at home in their desert than they were. We could navigate in the desert. We could live in the desert. And they couldn’t. They didn’t know how to live and fight there. In fact, we had to give them water. This gave us a great deal of confidence.
After the exercise, we asked them, “How do you guys get around in the desert when we’re not here?”
“Oh, we get the Bedouins to help,” they told us.
NEW LIFE
By the late 1970s, Special Forces funding stood at one-tenth of one percent of the total defense budget (it is now 3.2 percent)—and even this was an improvement over their earlier share of the pie. Training, tactical mobility, and optempo18 suffered; and there was no significant modernization.
The world was changing, however. Insurgencies were spreading and international terrorism was on the rise. Operational failures, such as the Desert One tragedy and the failed Mayaguez rescue,19 only emphasized the obvious: America was losing its ability to respond to unconventional threats, and something had to be done about it.
Actually, it wasn’t obvious to most in the military high command, but a few people saw the writing on the wall. One of them was General Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, the Chief of Staff of the Army during the early ’80s. In an article titled “The Challenge of Change,” in the 1980—81 Army Green Book, an annual publication reflecting the opinions of the senior leadership of the Army, he wrote:
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br /> “Today, the cumulative effect we seek for the U.S. Army is the speedy creation of the following: Forces with the flexibility to respond globally, in NATO or in other more distant locations; forces capable of sustained operations under the most severe conditions of the integrated battlefield; forces equally comfortable with all the lesser shades of conflict.” A graph showing the possible spectrum of conflict demonstrated why the last was particularly critical. Because “low-risk, high-leverage ventures, such as activities on the lower end of the spectrum, are the most likely military challenges to occur, [we need] forces that are created most wisely so as to make best use of our national resources.”
And General Meyer was as good as his word. Putting his muscle and prestige on the line, he instituted sweeping initiatives, which led to the following:1. Changes in the Special Operations command structure, to include all Army units with related capabilities—all Special Forces, Ranger, Psychological Operations, Civil Affairs, and Army Special Operations aviation units.
2. Immediate development of a Special Forces modernization action program, a Special Operations Forces Functional Area Assessment, and a United States Army Special Forces Master Plan.
General Meyer also ordered the activation of the Ist Special Forces Group, with orientation toward the Pacific region; gave instructions to upgrade the capabilities of psychological operations and civil affairs units; and directed that the authorized level of organization (ALO) for the other Special Forces units be upgraded to ALO-1 (the highest priority). This meant they were authorized to acquire the personnel and equipment they needed.
In Carl Stiner’s words: “As a result of his understanding of the complex nature of the challenges that our nation would face, as well as the capability of Special Forces for meeting these challenges, in large measure General Meyer is due the credit for bringing the SF back from their lowest point ever, as well as for the many critical missions they have performed since.”
IT was a good start, but much more was needed. At this point, Congress picked up the ball.
In 1986, spurred by the same real-world concerns that had inspired General Meyer, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. A sweeping work of military reformation, it strengthened the unified combatant commanders (such as the CINCs of CENTCOM or EUCOM) and the organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs the President’s chief military adviser, and in general integrated the forces of the different services more effectively.
That same year, Senators Sam Nunn and William Cohen proposed an amendment to the act to provide the same kind of sweeping changes to U.S. Special Operations. It passed, too—and the effects were stunning.
First, it established the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which was to be commanded by a four-star general and would include all active and reserve special operations forces stationed in the United States (outside the United States, such forces would normally be under the command of the CINC of a particular arca).
Second, it established an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflicts—ASD (SOLIC)—whose job was to supervise those areas, including oversight of policy and resources.
Third, it defined the mission requirements of special operations. These now included: direct action, strategic reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, civil affairs, psychological operations, humanitarian assistance, and other activities specified by the President or the Secretary of Defense.
Fourth, it gave the new USSOCOM its own funding and control over its own resources. A new major funding category was created—Major Force Program 11 1 (MFP-11)—which required the Defense Department to keep special-operations forces funding separate from general service funding. USSOCOM funding could be revised only by the Secretary of Defense after consultation with the CINC of USSOCOM.
Fifth, the amendment (and later follow-up legislation) specified in unusual detail the responsibilities of the new CINC and the Assistant Secretary of Defense, the control of resources in money and manpower, and the monitoring of SOF officer and enlisted promotions.
At long last, Special Operations had arrived.
THE devil, of course, was in the details. Congress could mandate, but it was the military that would have to implement.
To begin with, a brand-new command had to be set up—created and staffed pretty much from scratch—and opinions varied on how to do it. For instance, General James Lindsay, the new commander (in late 1986) of the U.S. Readiness Command (REDCOM), had one idea. REDCOM’s job was to prepare conventional forces to support the unified regional commands, a job that included deployment and contingency planning, joint training of assigned forces, and defense of the continental United States. Lindsay saw the mission of the new special operations command as similar to REDCOM’s, in its own way, and reasoned, “Why not combine the commands? And make the special forces component subordinate to REDCOM?” He further refined the idea by proposing that they both be combined into a new command, called USSTRICOM (U.S. Strike Command).20
Neither his original idea nor its revision worked, because they failed to take into account the mandate of the Nunn-Cohen legislation to create a broadly service-like organization commanded by a full, four-star general—(not a three-star subordinate to a REDCOM/STRICOM commander)—but they got people thinking ... and the result must have been a surprise to him.
In January 1987, Senator Cohen sent a directive to the JCS Chairman, Admiral Crowe, specifying that the new command had to be pure Special Forces and would have a “blank check. Subsequently, on January 23, the Joint Chiefs announced that it was REDCOM itself that would no longer be needed, and that SOCOM would be built on REDCOM’s foundation, using its facilities, resources, infrastructure, and any staff that could handle the assignment. It was formalized by the Secretary of Defense in March of the same year, and on April 16, SOCOM was activated in Tampa, at the former REDCOM headquarters—with General Lindsay as its first commander.
Now that the infrastructure was settled, the commands had to decide exactly who was going to be in it—who were the “special forces”? Predictably, there was no little debate about this, too. The Army part was easy. It passed to the new command all of its Special Operations Forces—the SF groups, the special operations aviation units, and the 75th Ranger Regiment (PSYOPS and civil affairs came later, during Carl Stiner’s tenure as CINC). For the rest, it was more complicated. The Air Force special operations forces, for instance, then under the Military Airlift Command (MAC), were transferred to USSOCOM, but the Air Force hoped to retain some control. The Marines had units that were labeled special operations—capable, but they had no actual special operations units. Though the Navy had never previously shown much love for its SEALs, it suddenly discovered that the SEALs were an indispensable part of the Navy family and tried to hold on to them—and their part of the special operations budget. The Navy managed to keep that debate going for the better part of a year, but it was a lost cause, and the SEALs went to USSOCOM. Finally, there was debate about whether the Joint Special Operations Task Force should become part of USSOCOM, or report directly to the national command authorities without the hindrance of an interim layer. In the end, it was placed under USSOCOM as a sub—unified command.
PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the “Functional Area Assessment” that General Meyer had inspired was beginning to produce results.
The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) had been tasked to conduct an in-depth analysis of how SF should be organized, manned, equipped, and trained. It was to answer the questions: “Where are we now? What is broken? How do we fix it? Where do we need to go in the future?”
General Maxwell Thurman, the vice chief of staff of the army, was the overseer of the analysis ; the TRADOC commander, General Bill Richardson, supervised it personally; and other outside generals—Mike Spigelmire, Tom Fields, Fred Franks, and Ed Burba—headed the panels
. The study was conducted by the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.
Thurman’s leadership gave the analysis particular force. Everyone involved reported to him, and everything they reported was put on the front burner. He listened to everybody, heard every problem and every solution, and put a time clock on it. This was not some committee report to be filed away somewhere and forgotten. At the end of the process, there would be an implementation plan—approved by Generals Thurman, Richardson, and Lindsay, and then done: no complaining, no foot-dragging.
When it was all over, the analysis proposed the following:
First, Army Special Forces could no longer exist in the wilderness; there would be a separate SF branch (like Infantry, Armor, or Aviation) and an NCO career-management field. That meant that SF troops and officers could have a career path within Special Forces itself; previously, they’d had to rotate among other parts of the military if they expected to get ahead. This goal was accomplished in April 1987; the commandant at the Special War Center and School became the chief of branch, just as the commandant at Fort Benning was the chief of branch for the infantry. “At this point,” Jim Guest remarks, “we went from being looked at as something kept in the dark and under the covers to sitting up at the head table with the rest of the big shots.”
Second, the Green Berets needed to become a major, three-star (lieutenant general) command. This allowed Special Forces to become masters of their own destiny, and to oversee and execute their own training and readiness programs. When a three-star commander sat down at a table with other three- and four-star commanders, he carried weight that one- and two-star commanders didn’t. Army Special Forces became a major command in 1989.