One Hundred Victories (42 page)

The sixty-seven-year-old general was ready to pass the torch, after forty-five years of military service and two very narrowly survived attempts on his life—one of them outside his office door on the third floor of the ministry. Unlike Afghanistan’s nouveau riche, he noted, he had no passport, so he would not be hightailing it to Dubai or America. His son Zia, a tall and thoughtful young man, was about to depart for school at Fort Benning, just after his first child, a daughter, was born. He had been his father’s aide-de-camp for the past three years and had absorbed every chapter of the saga. He was ready, he said, to carry on in his father’s stead.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

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THE FUTURE OF SPECIAL
OPERATIONS AND
AMERICAN WARFARE

Special operations forces have played an increasingly prominent role over the past decade in many ways, and that trend is likely to continue in the future for two basic reasons: technology and political preference. A highly skilled, small military force is more cost effective than a large one and less likely to cause attendant political and diplomatic complications—
if it is used with care and sophistication. Part of that caveat points to the need for special operations forces to mature, to view themselves differently, to be—and to be seen as—a more integral part of the nation’s arsenal, rather than a secret tactical tool that is brought out on occasion and then again tucked away. Their future evolution will be multifaceted, but some signs of the changes are in evidence.

Beginning in 2010, special operations forces started making an important pivot away from the heavy immersion in combat that had subsumed them for the decade following 9/11. This was true of all operators, not just those sent to the villages of Afghanistan. They were all forced to retreat from the unilateral application of their skills, to learn how to function alongside partners from a very different culture, and to cope with the myriad restrictions and tensions besetting the United States’ troubled relationship with Afghanistan.

In some respects, this change mirrored what special operations forces were already doing elsewhere. In between tours to Afghanistan, they came and went to Libya, the Levant, the Horn and the Sahel of Africa, Colombia, Southeast Asia, Korea—in all, seventy-five countries over the course of a year. Some were special mission units sent to hunt the increasingly dispersed Al Qaeda affiliates, but most often they consisted of small teams of SEALs, special forces, or civil affairs or military information soldiers who were sent to work with another country’s forces. In some cases, individual special operations officers were assigned to long tours in US embassies in Lebanon, Yemen, Turkey, and Mexico. This diverse range of small-footprint deployments would probably be the shape of the future, barring an unexpected crisis that would drag a very reluctant America into another all-out war. Even large-scale operations might resemble Libya and Somalia more than Afghanistan or Iraq, with a minority US contribution to a multinational endeavor—a formula that was also contemplated in Mali.

What was profoundly different about the latter years in Afghanistan was that special operators were tasked to engage deeply with civilian populations in remote areas and then to lead those willing to bear arms. They were forced to learn new skills and to stretch themselves in entirely new ways. Prominent among these skills was the art of sitting with elders to figure out the complicated web of rivalries and alliances that were at work in individual villages, and listening carefully to find out how the people of these villages could be motivated to come together for a common purpose. This assignment made the use of firepower the last resort—though the operators kept their spears sharp and by their side—because their partners would only learn to trust themselves if they took the lead. The center of gravity shifted decisively to this task of empowering partners and becoming teachers. Deploying in small teams in remote locations also instilled in the operators a new confidence that they could survive in hostile or guerrilla-controlled territory, lonely and sometimes very lethal environments. They learned to trust not only their technology and firepower, but the bravery of the likes of Abdullah Hakim, a bereaved father willing to risk it all.

How might this experience be relevant to the future? Though special ops are not likely to be deployed anytime soon at the scale of their footprint in Afghanistan—13,700 troops, with 17,000 support personnel, including 9,000 for aviation alone—the skills are fungible on any scale and in many places. The tactical teams, led by men such as Dan, Hutch, Matt, Marshall, and Brad, proved to be extremely adept at the skills of bonding, understanding, and maneuvering. They recaptured skills used by old-timers in Vietnam and learned how to become chess players in a complex culture. They exercised initiative in unusual ways every day, far from any superior officer. Contrary to those who thought special operators had irrevocably lost their way, the evidence suggests that the raw talent and instinctive ability to conduct political-military warfare are not in short supply.

What is needed is for their commanders—and US policymakers—to set the future course and mold the force. It is up to them to ensure that raids are not synonymous with special operations. As all special operators know, raids are the most conventional aspect of the toolkit, and should not become the tail that wags the dog. The same applies to drone warfare, which is merely a tactic. The challenge, then, is for these senior leaders to absorb and apply the experience of these last years to get the future direction right. The following observations may help in setting the azimuth.

Too little time is spent on learning, and applying what is learned, with correspondingly slow progress up the learning curve. As many of those interviewed for this book acknowledged in hindsight, many years were lost in Afghanistan through the failure to apply what operators already had learned elsewhere.

The unilateralism too often seen violated another cardinal rule that special operators should have long since internalized: it is not their country. Recognition of sovereignty entails appropriate rules of engagement and a basic sense of humility. Many US officials bore responsibility for the acts and omissions that created an increasingly fractious relationship between the US and Afghan governments at the national level, and it is worth noting that interactions at the district and village levels were generally far less tendentious.

Special operations forces and conventional forces now get along much better than they did before 9/11, but frictions persist, and these frictions should not be dismissed as situation- or personality-dependent. In particular, command relationships are still problematic despite efforts to develop collaborative networks and “mutually supporting” arrangements. The military is fundamentally a hierarchical organization, and as such the single most important question will inevitably be, “Who’s in charge?” Unity of command is also recognized as the best guarantee of coordination and synergy. Therefore, when overall command is exercised by a conventional forces officer, that officer must understand special operations and must not display prejudice or parochialism. Conventional forces may not be commanding large battles in the near future, but the US military’s activities, of whatever type, will be conducted through geographic combatant commands that are largely led and staffed by conventional forces, and therefore the imperative for greater understanding and interoperability will not disappear.

One of the most important innovations in SOF-conventional operations in Afghanistan was the attachment of fifty-four conventional infantry squads to sixty-two special operations teams who were conducting village stability operations and raising local defenders. Without such collaboration, the special ops initiative could not have been conducted on such a wide scale or in as many highly contested and remote areas. This is a highly fungible experiment, since there is a great demand for advisory support around the world, and only a limited number of special operators. The conventional unit’s performance was not uniformly good, however, and must be improved. Personnel must be carefully selected and trained, and those chosen will perform best if they have habitual—even career-long—relationships with the regions in which they are stationed and with the operators with whom they work.

A deeper issue that surfaced in Afghanistan was a lack of appreciation for what political-military warfare is and how it should be prosecuted. One special operations officer confided his dismay at seeing a terrain model in a senior general’s office in Afghanistan that was festooned with labels such as “block,” “attrit,” and “isolate”—a pretty clear indication that the general viewed the contest as a fight over physical terrain that could be addressed with a conventional scheme of maneuver. Special operators, for their part, were plagued by contradictory and shifting assessments of what people and places mattered most in their human-centric campaign, and the parlance of “jet streams” and “ratlines” indicated an ongoing focus on chasing the enemy.

Continuity of planning and execution nonetheless improved dramatically. After years of seesawing back and forth, successive special ops commanders embraced the same game plan and rulebook for Afghan Local Police and Village Stability Operations. These leaders learned from their ad hockery of the early years in Afghanistan and stopped using indigenous forces as blunt offensive weapons, militias by any other name. They codified the best practices and ensured that successive rotations of ground-level teams understood and applied them. There was some variation and some churn—and a heightened risk of failure as the endgame decisions in Washington accelerated the calendar. But the essential vision of a ground-up, elder-validated defense force providing security in major belts of the rural insurgent zone was embraced, implemented, and expanded by special operations commanders and their staffs.

Unity of command within special operations forces’ competing tribes remains a work in progress. Internally, special operations forces face a choice between learning to operate together, to combine their various competencies in new and creative ways, or retreating to their separate stovepipes. The latter mode is wasteful and counterproductive. The internal tensions are sharp indeed, but the experience of the past decade has given a new generation of generals and admirals the ability to see the promise and benefit of creating a fully unified special operations community. It may become a community less dominated by a strict “tier” or caste system, where more officers or operators attain a wider range of qualifications than in the past. These new commanders not only need to be leaders of the entire community, but also to deliberately and systematically raise the bar on preparing for and exercising leadership.

To improve civil-military relations, these new leaders should strive to ensure that policymakers understand the ways in which their forces may be used, because most policymakers lack sufficient knowledge of what they can and cannot do. The latter—
not
doing something—is possibly the most important, and most difficult, type of counsel to offer, since by nature this breed wants to wade into the troublesome spots and try to make a difference. But it would be extremely dangerous if the newfound visibility of special ops caused them to be mistaken for a panacea. Application of special operations forces is one option between doing nothing and engaging in a major military operation. Policymakers will always be forced to weigh whether US interests or a larger moral imperative dictates sending troops into hostile zones.

Special operations forces will gain credibility if they develop criteria that help policymakers evaluate and weigh options for their use. There is nothing easy or guaranteed about building viable, legitimate security forces to support governments in places such as Yemen, Somalia, or the Maghreb, or, in some cases—where the harm of backing an illegitimate government may argue for a stopgap—backing tribes who have greater standing than the government among their own people. The option of conducting unconventional warfare, one of the special operators’ core missions, to throw off despots in places such as Taliban Afghanistan will always be controversial, whether conducted covertly or not. In the end, civilians will make judgment calls that cannot be reduced to a science, but an effort to define the elements required for degrees of success would be useful.

Security force assistance is a fundamental tool of national security and foreign policy, but neither the US military nor policymakers prioritize it. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from Afghanistan is that the United States did not place enough importance on getting Afghan security forces ready to shoulder the responsibility of defending their land against internal and external enemies. The US military remains an institution that is geared toward major combat operations and that prepares and rewards combat leaders. To rectify this imbalance, special operations forces should systematically embrace and integrate their role in this vital mission of security force assistance.