The fight was that the Army wants them as "temps." Makes a big difference long term.
While the Army Rotates, SOCOM Rolls
By Ed Offley
SFTT
Forget the stunning reversal of DoD resistance to enlarging the overstretched U.S. Army that came from Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker in a congressional appearance yesterday.
The real news in the war against terrorism comes from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, where the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has been given the green light for organizing and mounting its own counter-terrorism operations around the world, and received a major increase in manpower and budget to make that happen.
With news reports that the Pentagon plans a major “spring offensive” to root out al Qaeda and Taliban cells in Afghanistan – possibly including incursions into the Pakistani frontier area where bin Laden is believed to be hiding – a quiet announcement that SOCOM has finished setting up an operational headquarters is no small development.
No one – including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, at long last – disagrees that the operational requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan have seriously strained the conventional military units servign there. After months of “We don’t need it” rhetoric, Rumsfeld recently invoked post-9/11 emergency powers to authorize the Army to increase its personnel end-strength by 30,000 troops above the congressional limit of 482,000.
That 6-percent hike, Schoomaker said, will be needed for an estimated four years as the Army retools its 10 divisions by expanding from 3 to 5 combat brigades in each unit. Both Rumsfeld and Schoomaker believe that the increase does not have to be permanent, although they would reconsider if the overall situation remains dire, The Washington Post reported on Jan. 29.
The external force driving the Army-expansion debate appears to be how successfully the U.S. military carries out its stabilization operations in Iraq, and for how long the force will be needed there. The Army has already begun a massive troop rotation plan that will move around 250,000 soldiers in or out of Iraq and Afghanistan – involving 8 of the service’s 10 active-duty divisions – that will go on for months.
Schoomaker also revealed he has ordered planning to begin for subsequent troop rotations in 2005 and 2006, a sign that there is no immediate scenario for pulling our forces out of the two combat zones.
The changes at SOCOM and its component Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine units portend not more of the same, but a significantly expanded capability to take the fight to the terrorists’ havens. In a lengthy National Defense interview just published, Army Gen. Bryan D. Brown, commander of SOCOM, said his command has finished reorganizing its headquarters and has added a new “war-fighting hub” that provides “an in-place capability for seamless planning and execution of operations that span the spectrum of conflict.”
Prior to 9/11, SOCOM was a “providing” command that would supervise the training of SOF units before they were transferred to one of the regional unified command headquarters for operational control. Now, SOCOM has become a warfighting command on its own with the legal authority to carry out counter-terror operations directly.
In addition, Brown told the publication, SOCOM in the current fiscal year has been authorized to add 5,100 troops to its 47,000-man roster – a 10.8 percent increase. His command’s budget likewise has been hiked to $4.6 billion this year, a 35-percent jump.
Brown recently testified before Congress that the additional manpower would include two Navy SEAL teams, an aviation battalion, a psychological operations company, a civil affairs company and a reserve civil affairs battalion. However, the development of these extra units will depend on how fast new SOF personnel reach a point of training and readiness to be effective, which Brown said takes a minimum of three years.
“SOF cannot be mass-produced,” Brown cautioned National Defense. “The service members who volunteered for SOF in September 2001 and successfully completed the arduous selection and training regimen are just now entering the deployable force.”
One element of the SOCOM reorganization appears to stem from a “lesson learned” from “Operation Anaconda” and other maneuvers in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders have managed to slip through military dragnets.
Describing a broad array of high-tech computer networks and global communications on hand, Brown stressed that the overall goal is “time-sensitive” planning process involving the capability to amass, coordinate and distribute vital intelligence from headquarters to field units as rapidly as possible.
At his swearing as SOCOM chief last September, Brown heard these words of praise for his troops from Rumsfeld:
“You hunted Scuds, pinpointed high-value targets, secured oil fields, established landing strips in the desert ... When we were unable to get our forces into Iraq from the north, special operations forces mobilized the Kurdish Peshmerga ... and helped unravel the northern front with amazing speed.”
It was a SOCOM unit, Task Force 121, that captured Saddam Hussein three months later. And it will primarily be from the 47,000-man ranks of SOCOM that the United States will launch the reported “spring offensive” against Al Qaeda along the Afghani-Pakistani frontier this spring.
The conventional Army may be rotating, but SOCOM is on a roll.
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