Author Archives: Tara McKelvey

By TARA McKELVEY
Carnegie Fellow

A senior-level officer stood next to a desk at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida and twirled a black, KA-BAR knife in his right hand. “The tip of the spear,” said the officer, a former Army Ranger,  “it kind of signifies Special Operations.”  Those special operators — “the rock stars of the military,” as the officer described them — are fighting on the front line against terrorists. On any given day, he explained during a briefing, these men and women are conducting operations in 72 countries around the world.

U.S. Special Operations has been an integral part of the military for decades, and its role became particularly important after the terrorist attacks of 2001. Funding for Special Operations increased dramatically after 9/11, and its range of duties also expanded. The most important area for U.S. Special Operations now is Afghanistan, which is known in the military as a Special Ops War. “Afghanistan has always been an intelligence-driven war,” said  James Gordon Meek, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Daily News who has covered counterterrorism and U.S. Special Operations for more than a decade. “The fighting has been done primarily by Special Ops.”

A database of Special Operations that was created for this project includes accounts of about 350 operations — half of them unfolding in Afghanistan. The database is not a scientific study, but nevertheless it shows the breadth of the missions and demonstrates that these operations have become an integral part of the military undertaking in Afghanistan.

With the dramatic growth in Special Operations and its increasingly visible role in Afghanistan, the media coverage of this aspect of the military has never been more important; journalists play a role both in recognizing the valuable work that is being done by special operators in Afghanistan and in other countries around the world and also in exposing misdeeds committed by the special operators and holding them accountable for their actions.

At the same time, many journalists are daunted by the subject; indeed, the world of Special Operations may seem as exotic as a foreign country and remains a subject that is closed off to much public discussion. The goal of this project is to shed light on the work of Special Operations, as well as its culture, history, and background, and in this way to show journalists how they can approach the subject and make it accessible to a wider audience.

Journalists may view U.S. Special Operations as impenetrable, and in turn special operators tend to see journalists as people encroaching on their territory. The relationship between the military and the media is fraught with tension and misunderstandings.  The one between journalists and special operators is even more difficult, especially since special operators are trained to carry out missions in a quiet, and often secretive, way.

The senior-level officer who worked at the Special Operations Command headquarters agreed to meet with me, but later asked me not to quote him by name. His reserve was typical of those in the field.  During the interview, I referred to an internal investigation that was being conducted by U.S. Special Operations and made a light-hearted comment. He shot me an angry look.

“I was joking,” I said.

“You’re joking around, and you have a notebook and a pen in your hand, and you’re writing everything down,” he said.

“But you have a knife,” I said, glancing at the blade that was lying on his desk.

“What you have is more dangerous,” he said.

The officer was not being terribly serious, but nevertheless the exchange reflected a suspicion on both sides and showed that journalists and special operators often see each other in an exaggerated manner or even as caricatures. The other side is armed and dangerous, at least in a metaphorical sense, and overcoming these psychological and cultural barriers is a challenge. Yet for journalists the importance of overcoming these barriers and covering U.S. Special Operations has only increased over time.

By TARA McKELVEY
Carnegie Fellow

The special operators who travel the world are among the most elite, and well-trained, forces in the military, and their education begins in classrooms here in the United States at facilities such as the Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C.  At the Schoolhouse, as the Kennedy Special Warfare Center is known, and at other military facilities across the country, special operators learn about doctrine, policy, and practical aspects of their work.

And whether they are studying to be Green Berets at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center, or Air Force Combat Divers at the Combat Divers School in Panama City, Florida, or Navy SEALs at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in Coronado, California, they are subjected to some of the most rigorous tests in the military in order to build their physical, mental, and psychological stamina that will prepare them for their missions abroad. And regardless of which branch of the military these special operators come from, they all learn how to act as independently, and with as little gear, as possible while they are deployed to trouble spots around the world.

Sharpest Knives in the Drawer

It was cool and damp on an August afternoon in a forest near Norman, North Carolina, where several dozen soldiers are participating in a Special Warfare Center training program known as Robin Sage, which is a 19-day counterinsurgency exercise that is conducted several times a year. Flies buzzed in the still air, and a clearing in the forest smelled like Sani-Wipes, rain and pine. One of the instructors, a burly Army officer in desert boots, showed a visitor a tripwire that was tied to two trees and acted as an early-warning system in case someone entered the area without permission. Several yards away, an AK-47 was lying on the ground.

The Army officers at the Center are steeped in military doctrine and are specially trained for this kind of work. The officer in desert boots has helped conduct counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, for example, and he has read classics by Mao Zedong, the father of the Chinese revolution, and French counterinsurgency expert David Galula. (“He has his obvious flaws,” says the officer, in an understated manner, “advocating torture and stuff.”) The officer maintains that the most important lessons taught during the Robin Sage training exercise come not from texts, but from the men who have learned how to survive in the wilds of the Afghan mountains. “You got all the technology in the world, and it still comes down to the basics,” he says.

Graduates of the program excel at counterinsurgency, which is a slow and difficult undertaking based on creating alliances with local police and military and protecting civilians from harm. A core part of the counterinsurgency work is building bridges, schools, and roads and otherwise making local communities stronger so they can resist the pull of the insurgency. These are the kinds of activities that Kennedy Special Warfare Center graduates will undertake once they are deployed to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army special operators often travel in small groups of 12 and spend weeks at a time in some of the most treacherous parts of the world. “We’re like the Swiss Army knife of the army,” says another instructor in the Robin Sage program who asked not to be identified. “We’re compact and lightweight. We’re not low-impact; we’re high-impact. You’re talking about 12 guys that can shape a nation.”

Since 2000, the Kennedy Warfare School has increased the number of training programs from four to eight classes a year. On any given day, says Major David Butler, a public affairs officer at the Center, they are teaching about 2,200 special operations soldiers in their facilities in North Carolina. The demand for their work is high, and they have consequently stepped up their efforts in training and added instructors, and yet they are still falling short of their staffing goals. The problem, as officers and soldiers explain, is that the training of special operators is lengthy and expensive. “Special Operations soldiers cannot be mass produced,” as the authors of a military document, a September 2010 Fact Sheet issued by the Center, explained. As a result, says one of the instructors, “We are struggling to fill those slots.”

Choirboys Not Allowed

The training of special operators is time-consuming – and ruthless. Anyone who is in the Army, whether a decorated officer or a cook in a DFAC (as a military Dining Facility is known), can announce that they want to join one of the elite, special operator units such as the Green Berets. One of the appealing things about Special Operations, say former members of the unit, is that the groups are highly competitive and prestigious within the military, and yet everyone has a chance, even those with a dodgy past, to become part of the team.

“They’re not looking for a choirboy. They don’t want your first mistake to be in a foreign country,” says an ex-Delta troop commander. “Let’s say you had a DUI. That’s not necessarily a disqualifier. They want you to have faced adversity and that you shouldered it and put it behind you. Just because you had trouble in the past doesn’t mean you’re not going to get a fair shake.”

Aspiring special operators in the Army enter into a month-long tryout in which  physical and psychological fitness is tested. The unit leaders are expansive in their definition of who can try out to be a special operator, but only the best among them will be chosen to enter into the training program. Several hundred people will audition for the Green Berets during one of their tryout periods, explains a former army officer who is familiar with the process, but only about one percent of these individuals will make it through the screening process.

Once they have made it through the screening, they embark on a training program. The length and type of training varies according to the branch of the military and the area of specialization. People who want to become part of Air Force Special Operations, for example, learn how to carry 100-pound backpacks while wearing body armor  for several days in the mountains.

Meanwhile, those who want to become Navy Seals go through a program that is known, officially, as “Hell Week.” Participants train continually for 5 1/2 days, with only four hours of sleep. “Hell Week proves to those who make it that the human body can do 10 times the amount of work the average man thinks possible,” according to a Navy Seals fact sheet. “During Hell Week, you will learn the value of cool headedness, perseverance, and above all, TEAMWORK.”

Special operators learn teamwork – but they are expected to function in an insular environment. Rather than working within the hierarchical structure of the military, special operators operate miles from ground commanders and make decisions on their own. “They’re inserted into hostile environments without all the resources that a regular soldier has,” explains Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who has written about U.S. efforts to fight Al Qaeda. “So that is part of their training.”

Special operators develop a grounding in counterinsurgency doctrine while they are studying at the Special Warfare Center and at other facilities in the United States, and they condition themselves to reach peak physical strength. When they arrive in a country in the midst of a crisis, they are prepared to evaluate the situation — often with little or no support from back home. Under these circumstances, the special operators are forced to grapple with some of the toughest decisions. As Georgetown University’s Bruce Hoffman explains, “It’s kind of the search for the truth, in essence.”

By TARA McKELVEY
Carnegie Fellow

SWAT VALLEY, PAKISTAN — The U.S. Army officer was standing in a field surrounded by the Hindu Kush mountains as Pakistani refugees lifted sacks of potatoes from a Chinook helicopter on a brisk October afternoon. He was leading a group of soldiers on a humanitarian mission to help people who had been trapped in flood-ravaged villages, and I asked him if this was the first time he had been in Pakistan.

We stood together on the grassy tarmac, listening to the whir of the nearby helicopters, and he looked thoughtful. He nodded his head, but he said the word “No” — emphatically. After a moment, I got it: He had been to Pakistan, and he was teasing me with his yes / no response to my question.

He came to Islamabad for the first time in December 2001, he told me, during a period of time when the United States was invading Afghanistan. The officer and about 1,100 other U.S. troops were stationed in Pakistan during the early phase of the Afghan war, according to Gen. Tommy Franks in his book American Soldier, and many of the soldiers were part of U.S. Special Operations who crossed over the border into Afghanistan and fought in battles. After the initial phase of the war, a small group of special operators stayed in Pakistan and began training local forces to fight against the Pakistani Taliban and other militants in this country.

The Army officer was joking with his “yes / no” answer about whether or not he had been to Pakistan, but it captures the contradictory message that the U.S. government sends out about U.S. Special Operations. In the case of special operations, however, it is not a joke. The lives of U.S. and Pakistani soldiers and officers are at stake, as well as questions of national sovereignty and U.S. counter-terrorism policy, and all of these issues are being played out on Pakistani soil.

Government officials, military experts and others have weighed in on the value, and the cost, of U.S. Special Operations over the years. Here are some of their comments.

Who Are Special Operators?

“The best force against a shadowy terrorist enemy is a group of men and women called ‘the silent professionals.’ Special operators understand the fight and know they are engaged in ‘prolonged, messy engagements where tactical success does not necessarily yield strategic success; where cultural knowledge and language skills often mean a great deal more than raw fire power; where victory ultimately is not measured by how well we do the job but how well we can train and empower other nations to defend themselves.”

— Defense Secretary Robert Gates. (U.S. Department of Defense’s American Forces Information Service, May 22, 2008.)

“In some places, we [U.S. Special Operations] are quite obvious in our presence. In some places, in deference to host-country sensitivities, we are lower in profile. In every place, Special Operations forces activities are coordinated with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational control of the four-star regional commander.”

— U.S. Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, head of Special Operations Command. (“U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally” by Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, The Washington Post, June 4, 2010.)

“We go into these far-off places, we chase the enemy down, we bring the stability, [and] we bring peace and central government control so that that valley no longer becomes a safe haven for the enemy.”

— Col. Walter Herd, former U.S. chief of Special Forces in Afghanistan. (“Hunt for bin Laden could end in a day or decades” by Matthew Pennington, The Associated Press, June 24, 2004.)

By TARA McKELVEY
Carnegie Fellow

Special Operations Command was founded on disaster. The Iran hostage rescue operation of April 1980 — when three of the eight helicopters that were supposed to be used for the mission had mechanical problems, and eight U.S. servicemen died — was a turning point for the United States, and for the U.S. military, too. Americans were humiliated by the spectacle of fifty-three people being held captive in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and military officers struggled to find a way to ensure that the branches of the military worked together more effectively in order to prevent a similar situation from unfolding in the future.

“Once upon a time all the special operators were trained and kept separate in different branches of the military, and this mission showed the importance of unity,” a senior-level officer at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida told me, describing the hostage crisis as a galvanizing force that led to creation of U.S. Special Operations. “Congress decided, ‘We can’t let this happen again.’”

The story of the hostage crisis received intense scrutiny. Indeed, one of the most popular news programs in the nation, Nightline, was established during the hostage crisis as journalist Ted Koppel tracked the number of days that the Americans were held at the Embassy. Since that time, journalists and Special Forces have worked in tandem, and have also been at odds, as Americans have faced their most trying times.

Some time after the failed attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, a review panel, headed up by Admiral James L. Holloway, was created by Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to find a better way for the military to respond to crises. The work of the Special Forces had been deteriorating for decades, particularly since the Vietnam war when its funding was cut dramatically. The members of the Holloway panel made a series of recommendations that were designed to make U.S. Special Forces more nimble and effective and to ensure that they would be able to successfully resolve crises like the one in Iran and supported the creation of an umbrella unit that would oversee this part of the military. President Ronald Reagan signed off on the establishment of U.S. Special Operations on April 13, 1987.

“That was the genesis of it,” explained Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, a former Pentagon’s senior military intelligence official who served under President George W. Bush.

Since then, Special Operations has expanded its mandate from rescuing hostages to fighting drug traffickers and terrorists, jumping into countries that ranged from Grenada to Somalia and building up a fleet of covert planes and helicopters, as well as engaging in psychological operations and Civil Affairs, which trains soldiers and officers to work with local people in a host of countries and assist in fighting against insurgencies. The men and women who work in Civil Affairs have also worked extensively to provide humanitarian aid to people in Haiti after the island was hit by natural disasters, and they helped restore public transportation, electrical grids, and other parts of the infrastructure in Bosnia and assisted in the creation of a national government. In Kosovo, soldiers in the Civil Affairs division set up a radio station in Pristina and helped ensure that people had access to running water, according to the “United States Special Operations Command History” (USSOCOM History and Research Office, 2008). (Embedded above, right).

In recent years, members of the Psychological Operations unit created websites to fight against the propaganda circulated by terrorist groups in Iraq. They have also funded American-style magazines in Latin America and provided $1.5 million for the creation of a Mali documentary about “tolerant tenets of Islam.”

Since 2001, one of the elite units, Joint Special Operations Command (JSCOC – it is pronounced “j-sock”), has focused on a global campaign of hunting down and killing the leaders of Al Qaeda and other violent groups, and today the pursuit for terrorists is the main focus of the unit. Joint Special Operations Command encompasses several branches of the military, including the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and its umbrella organization in the military is the United States Special Operations Command, located in Tampa, Fla., with the strike forces stationed at Fort Bragg.

While Special Operations encompasses a variety of missions and tasks, ranging from the establishment of radio stations and websites to restoring electrical grids to the building of roads and schools in war-torn countries, the division of Special Operations that has accrued the most funding, equipment, and personnel has been the side that focuses on “direct action,” or the pursuit of terrorists. Direct Action is often referred to as “kinetics,” which are “basically very offensive things like raids, door kicking,” Michael P. Noonan, the managing director of the Program on National Security at Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based research organization. “Non-kinetic is working by, with and through local population, or counterinsurgency work.”

Some military analysts believe that the emphasis on the offensive side of Special Operations is short-sighted. “That’s the Hollywood part. The most exciting part,” John Nagl, president of a Washington-based, nonpartisan organization, the Center for a New American Strategy, told me, describing the dangerous Special Operations missions that are undertaken to capture and kill terrorists. “But in some ways it’s the least important part.” He argues that the significant work for special operators and soldiers lies in helping people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries to rebuild civil society and other institutions and in this way establish a more lasting peace.

Journalists have traditionally been drawn to the more glamorous, and dangerous, aspects of U.S. Special Operations and focused their coverage on the capture and killing of terrorists and on efforts to rescue Americans, dating back to the Iranian hostage crisis. Covering prosaic aspects of Special Operations, such as their efforts at promoting civil society in countries overseas, may seem less appealing, and yet provides many important stories about the U.S. military and its role in the world.