The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army
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Instead of three operations every two weeks, JSOC was able to increase its operations tempo (or “optempo”) significantly, sometimes raiding five or six places a night. This completely bewildered insurgents and al-Qaeda sympathizers, who had no idea what was going on. In April 2004, according to classified unit histories, JSOC participated in fewer than a dozen operations in Iraq. By July 2006, its teams were exceeding 250 a month. McChrystal’s operations center was open for fifteen hours a day, regardless of where he was. There is a strong correlation between the pace of JSOC operations, the death rate of Iraqi insurgents and terrorists, and the overall decline in violence that lasted long enough for U.S. troops to surge into the country and “hold” areas that used to be incredibly dangerous.
In Lamb and Munsing’s thesis-length assessment of intelligence in Iraq, Flynn’s “pivotal” efforts at fusing intelligence and operations, developing real-time reach back to analysts, and the flattening of authority are lauded as “the secret weapon” behind the surge—not some special weapon, as Bob Woodward has hinted. Notably, Flynn is rendered in the piece as “General Brown,” and the authors were not permitted to mention that his team was actually JSOC. Such is the nature of the Defense Cover Program—Flynn himself was (and is) a target for terrorists and many nation-states.
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The Bush administration showered attention and resources on JSOC, and as the mission in Iraq wound down and the United States elected a new president who, it seemed, would take counterterrorism in a different direction, the Command prepared itself for an uncertain future. There were whispers of a Justice Department investigation into JSOC’s financial and operational practices. This appears untrue, although the Senate Armed Services Committee did conduct some type of JSOC investigation beginning in 2008—with results no one will discuss.
Barack Obama was a complete unknown—a Democrat with no military experience and little understanding of its dynamics. A wave of JSOC operators quietly retired as President George Bush’s second term drew to a close. Some migrated to become contractors or to the CIA or lower-profile military units.
Admiral William McRaven assumed command of JSOC on June 13, 2008. The problem with being a secret organization is that when a harsh light is cast on questionable activities—even activities performed with patriotic intent or, at least, performed when no better options seemed available at the time—there’s no opportunity for a rebuttal. “We are in a difficult position, in that there’s not much we can do to make the case for ourselves,” McRaven said in 2010. “There are some things we can try and do to respond to things like Seymour Hersh articles,” referring to the journalist’s allegations that JSOC fostered a culture that resulted in torture and later served as Dick Cheney’s personal assassination force, “but we are constrained.”
For all of McChrystal’s advances and achievements, McRaven still inherited a work in progress. Even with all of the attention paid to ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) assets, JSOC had only thirty-three planes to its name, and its drones were making only five orbits per day over Iraq. Fusion cells that worked well in some areas didn’t necessarily work in others. With a new U.S. president, the rules of engagement in Iraq were about to change, and attention would soon shift back to Afghanistan and more decisively toward Africa. The spigots were still open, but JSOC’s bureaucracy was growing overburdened.
One of the earliest problems McRaven had to deal with was the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), signed with Iraq and which forbade the United States from conducting most counterterrorism raids without warrants. Warrants? JSOC doesn’t do warrants—that’s a law enforcement thing. Many in the Command wanted to ignore the SOFA entirely. McRaven, however, insisted that his team figure out a way to fulfill the agreement. To do this, he directed JSOC funds to build mini-courthouses, first in Baghdad and then elsewhere in the country. JSOC flew in JAG (Judge Advocate General) officers from the United States, and McRaven personally briefed the Iraqi leadership, describing the constraints under which JSOC often operated. He asked for their help.
As a result, Iraqi judges were empowered by the U.S. military and began issuing warrants based on the testimony of JSOC intelligence analysts, SEALs, or Delta guys themselves. McRaven at first faced internal resistance for bringing in the Iraqis—JSOC was supposed to be a secret organization. Yet as operators saw how well the courthouse system worked, they soon dropped their objections and quickly adapted.
Likewise, they adapted to McRaven’s establishment of an Afghan partner unit within JSOC. It consisted mostly of civilians, many without a shred of military experience, and began to accompany JSOC units on raids. This was a particularly important outreach following a JSOC disaster in April 2010, when a Ranger unit killed five Afghan civilians in Khataba, the result of a bad tip from an unreliable source. McRaven took the extraordinary step of personally apologizing to the family and admitting that the men under his command had made a “terrible terrible mistake.” As reported, McRaven, near tears, told an elder, “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas, away from my family. But I have children as well. And my heart grieves for you.” McRaven figured that the Afghan partner units could prevent these kinds of mistakes—the kind that made the job harder for every soldier, conventional or special operations, who was fighting in Afghanistan. McRaven further reached out to conventional units, asking commanders how his units could better assist their missions.
As of yet, JSOC does not seem to have found the kind of successes in Afghanistan that it did in Iraq. The enemy is different, more embedded in the population. The geography makes intelligence gathering more difficult. And the strategy from the White House is different. Yet as a force multiplier and as a hub of best practices, the Command may have prevented a decisively unwinnable situation from descending into disaster.
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In the early morning of April 12, 2009, Somali pirates held an American merchant marine captain captive, and President Obama had his first encounter with his secret army. On the other end of the telephone was McRaven, who, in turn, had a deputy directly plugged in to a DEVGRU platoon positioned on the deck of the USS Bainbridge off the coast of Somalia. Four Red Squadron SEALs had sighted three of the pirates with their long-barreled M-110 rifles. Obama and McRaven agreed on the rules of engagement. If the pirates seemed to endanger the life of the captain, the SEALs could shoot.
A few hours after the call, the SEAL snipers squeezed their triggers, and the hostage situation was over. Obama was not required to make that particular call to McRaven. A secure teletype sent through the Defense Message Service had already given the element commander authority to use force if necessary. In fact, those present could recall only two other times in recent memory when a president directly discussed firing options with a commander. But Obama was curious about the authority associated with the presidency. The military was curious, too. Did Obama have the mettle?
It would seem he did. The new commander in chief, a young one-term senator who did not strike voters as the type who was predisposed to authorizing force, had endorsed a decisive application of lethal action. From this kill, a relationship flourished. Months later, the White House authorized a large expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries, rewriting, in effect, the Al Qaeda Network Exord. Obama’s national security adviser, retired marine general James Jones, and his chief lieutenant for Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Douglas Lute, were well aware of JSOC’s capabilities. Obama gave JSOC unprecedented authority to track and kill terrorists. In turn, JSOC would keep al-Qaeda from regrowing the networks and the branches needed to mount large-scale attacks against the United States. That was the implicit understanding Obama and the National Security Council had reached with McRaven. Keep us safe, and you can do what you need to do.
Notes
1. Author’s interview with Michael Leiter.
Chapter 7
When You See the Word National, You Know It Is Important
The Command has no published organizational chart—at least, not one that we’ve seen. So here’s a good guess at what it might look like. Like any other military unit, it is divided into staffs. Because it is “joint,” staff designations have a “J” prefix. J-1 is the manpower branch, which recruits, hires, and trains the next generation of JSOC warriors and analysts; J-2 is responsible for intelligence and information operations; J-3 is operations, the central hub of activity; J-4 is logistics and transportation; J-5 is strategic plans and policy; J-6 handles signals and communication; J-7 is JSOC’s training and exercise directorate; J-8 deals with acquisitions and budgeting. The Office of the Commander is a three-star general billet based at Pope Army Airfield, adjacent to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, an army Ranger, is the current commander of JSOC. Beneath him are two assistant commanding generals (ACGs) and two deputy commanding generals (DCGs). The ACGs are responsible for operations and intelligence; the DCGs are dual-hatted as commanders of the numbered Joint Task Forces that operate around the world. The Defense Cover Program protects the identities of the DCGs and the ACGs, although we found open-source references to three of the four. (One is Brigadier General Marshall Webb, whose impassive face was made famous by Pete Souza’s photograph of the White House Situation Room during Neptune’s Spear.) One ACG provides line command to JSOC’s three operating divisions, each of which is managed by a civilian director. One division includes the National Missions Force, a title that was suggested by a Pentagon consultant to give people an unclassified way to refer to the elite special missions units not assigned to geographic areas of operations. (If there is an echo of the fictional Impossible Missions Force, it’s not quite accidental.)
Another division is responsible for Force Mobility—how JSOC moves its personnel from A to B. The third operational division tends to the logistics and the back end of the Command’s combatant-command deployments.
The Tier One forces, as previously noted, consist of the Combat Applications Group (CAG), more widely known as the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), or SEAL Team Six.
Each special missions unit (SMU) has a commander and a deputy commander; two captains for the SEALs and two colonels for Delta. There are now four operational CAG squadrons (A, B, C, and D), four operational DEVGRU squadrons (Blue, Red, Gold, and Silver), and one training squadron per SMU. The squadrons break down into troops and detachments. Each is supported internally by explosive ordnance disposal specialists, intelligence analysts, communications and logistics noncommissioned officers, and other personnel who are not considered to be “operators” (or, more specifically, graduates of the Operators Training Course—what popular culture would consider the “shooters”) but are vital to the mission. There is an unacknowledged CAG squadron and a secret DEVGRU squadron (known as DEVGRU Black), each of which performs exceptionally sensitive reconnaissance missions, such as cross-border, high-value target hunts in Pakistan. These units are smaller than the other squadrons. As of 2011, JSOC has about 4,000 personnel; we don’t know for sure, but we think that about 300 are members of DEVGRU and 450 are Delta operators. The average operator has more than seven years’ worth of experience in his unit, a number diminishing as elite soldiers on near-constant deployments retire in greater numbers.
The 75th Ranger Regiment, headquartered at Ft. Benning, Georgia, belongs to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command but details infantrymen to JSOC on a regular basis. (Both General Votel and General Stanley McChrystal commanded the 75th at some point in their respective careers.) The same goes for the Nightstalkers of 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), or SOAR, based out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. For discrete missions, the U.S. Air Force 427th Special Operations Squadron provides Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) assets, as well as nontraditional aircraft. For JSOC, a nontraditional aircraft would be a passenger jet, which, to civilians, is quite traditional. Although it officially belongs to the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command, the 427th also operates special worldwide crisis response aircraft for the State Department and the CIA.
Other SMUs reporting to the ACG for operations include:
The Joint Communications Unit, a worldwide, all-weather, transportable communications brigade supporting JSOC operations globally. It often incorporates elements of the Air Force 25th Intelligence Squadron, which conducts offensive cyber attacks and exploitation. The 25th is divided into five squadrons, one of which is stationed in Afghanistan and another in Iraq.
The 24th Special Tactics Squadron of the U.S. Air Force is a Tier Two SMU. Based at Pope, it provides combat air controllers (essentially, air traffic controllers with commando training) and pararescue airmen (for quick reaction rescue missions) for CAG and DEVGRU operations.
The Aviation Tactics and Evaluation Group (AVTEG) consists of three battalions that supply all types of aircraft and highly trained pilots for sensitive JSOC missions. Along with SOAR, it moves JSOC forces around the world. AVTEG is a clandestine air force of sorts within JSOC, and its pilots and analysts determine what JSOC and its units might need and, from a strategic level, figure out how to get it to them. (AVTEG pilots tested the stealth helicopters later used in the bin Laden raid, for example.) AVTEG, as well as SOAR, also flies highly sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft.
The Technical Applications Program Office (TAPO), based in Ft. Eustis, Virginia, incorporates the modern-day equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) SEASPRAY unit, which helped the agency obtain, exploit, and spoof foreign aircraft and technology. TAPO itself is unclassified, but most of its work is budgeted in secret. (In military J-8 speak, TAPO has “streamlined acquisition procedures to rapidly procure and integrate non-developmental item equipment and systems for Army Special Operations Aviation.”) Quite often, its platforms work so well that they become standardized for entire branches of the military.1 TAPO is one of several program offices that primarily support JSOC operations. Another is the Ground Applications Program Office, based out of Ft. Belvoir, which manages the most sensitive acquisition and development projects in the Command. (There is a subordinate contracting office to each—the Ground Applications Contracting Office for the Ground Applications Program Office, and Technical Applications Contracting Office for TAPO.) They report directly to the Office of the Commander and support the technology that JSOC uses in the field, which includes aviation platforms such as “Liberty Blue,” an advanced signals collection package bolted onto jet aircraft; “Chainshot,” a specialized navy EP-3 Orion intelligence, surveillance, and collection plane; the Command’s numerous tracking, tagging, and location programs; and other projects that would fill a library of Tom Clancy novels.
GAPO supports both fixed and temporary JSOC bases around the world. (One is located in a major European airport.) JSOC’s office of congressional affairs also reports directly to the Office of the Commander. Recruitment is handled by the SMUs themselves, as well as by an administrative directorate reporting directly to the assistant commanding general for operations.
Another flying unit at Pope, the 66th Air Operations Squadron, provides cargo and transport planes, such as C-130s for JSOC operations. An air force memorandum from 2000 suggests that AVTEG and the 66th are uniquely permitted to conduct bare base ops and training with forward air refueling, eschewing much of the normal bureaucratic process before doing so. Although much has changed in the decade since, it certainly suggests a legacy of secret operations.2 (Otherwise reasonable military regulations are often an obstacle to JSOC’s unique mission. As a job posting for AVTEG’s top intelligence coordinator states: “Guidelines such as Executive Orders and DOD, DIA, DCI, USSOCOM, and military service directives exist, but judgment and i
ngenuity in interpreting the intent of these guides is required. Incumbent must be fully knowledgeable of highly specialized SOF doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. May be required to make major or novel adaptations to existing guides in order to accomplish the organizational mission.”)
The deputy commanding general for the Intelligence and Operational Security Directorate (ISOD) oversees JSOC’s expanding intelligence empire. In late 2008, Admiral William McRaven stood up the JSOC Intelligence Brigade, a six-hundred-person intelligence analysis detachment that serves the entire command. It analyzes all source intelligence from satellites, drones, CIA cables, State Department cables, the National Security Agency, and foreign intelligence services and produces analytical products to support JSOC commanders and field soldiers. It has divisions for interrogations, planning, and intelligence support.
There is a separate information operations division within the IOSD, that plans and executes JSOC’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO, formerly known as psychological operations, or PSYOP). The same office includes a liaison element with the Defense Program Activity Office, which conducts offensive information operations campaigns against terrorists and other sensitive targets. There are five fixed global JSOC command posts—now called Joint Reconnaissance Task Forces—that perform command and control functions for ongoing operations. And then there is the classified Joint Interagency Task Force–National Capital Region, which fuses and disseminates intelligence relating to the external evolution of terrorist networks.