The tip of the spear
Linda Robinson, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, has an interesting report in the Oct. 18 issue of U.S. News regarding the Pentagon's moves to expand the role of special operations forces in the war on terrorism. The initiative comes at a time when various members of Congress, as well as newly-sworn-in CIA Director Porter Goss, are calling for a concomittant expansion of CIA special operations capabilities. Aside from the obvious Washington turf war, there is a real debate going on about the relative efficacy of each type of special ops, and which type can get the job done better.
New rules. Despite all his efforts, however, Brown and SOCOM have been ensnared in a grinding Pentagon turf war. Several of the powerful four-star officers who lead the Pentagon's five geographic commands have raised questions about SOCOM's new global mandate. The State Department and the CIA have also raised objections, officials say. Thomas O'Connell, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict--and a former comrade in arms of Brown--argues that the U.S. decision-making system must adapt to cope with a wholly new kind of enemy. "We are operating under rules written in the cold war," O'Connell says. "The rules need to be changed because the game has changed."
But refining the new rules is proving to be no easy matter. SOCOM's special operators are multifaceted warriors, trained to apply a mix of discrete force, intelligence, and nonlethal measures. They have performed superbly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have largely operated at the behest of conventional commanders in both places. In countries where the United States is not at war, SOCOM forces have operated under the watchful eyes of ambassadors and CIA station chiefs.
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By law, the Pentagon's regional combatant commanders answer directly to the president through the secretary of defense. These commanders can argue (and several have, loudly) that giving SOCOM a lead role in the war on terrorism would interrupt the chain of command. An amendment to the same law that outlines that chain of command, however, says that the president may order SOCOM to execute certain missions directly. In fact, this has occurred on a number of occasions in which the president has authorized SOCOM's Joint Special Operations Command to deploy classified "special mission units" to hunt down targets like Osama bin Laden and Somalia's Mohammed Farah Aidid.
U.S. News has learned that Rumsfeld is set to sign a memorandum that will spell out SOCOM's purview and specify how it will coordinate with the regional commanders. The language of the memo would be incorporated into the commands' official orders, a document known as the Unified Command Plan. A Pentagon official explains how the new system might work: Soldiers from the Pentagon's Central Command might capture a terrorist in Afghanistan that triggers a manhunt in Yemen or Somalia; Brown's SOCOM commandos would lead the manhunt. Seeking to allay regional commanders' concerns, a senior Pentagon official emphasizes that they will be kept informed of any SOCOM missions occurring in their areas of responsibility.
Interesting stuff... And given the nature of clandestine special operations, it's unlikely we're reading the full story here. A great deal of attention has been paid to reforming America's intelligence community and making its various intelligence and law enforcement agencies work together. But much less attention has gone to the question of how to make America's special operators more capable of exploiting that intelligence. The Pentagon, as one might expect, has its opinion on the matter. Before that opinion gets carved into stone, I hope some folks on the National Security Council and/or White House staff get a crack at this problem. It's much bigger than simply adding force structure to special operations, as Sen. Kerry says he wants to do. The real issue is how you use these capabilities, and match the right unit at the right place with the right intel to get the job done. That will require more force structure, because there are a lot of "right places" right now. But it will also require some smart decisionmaking from the White House and Pentagon E-Ring, not to mention the command cells at CENTCOM and SOCOM.
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