On the other side of the world, France and then the United States
were fighting a war of attrition in Indochina. The French wanted to
restore their pre-war colonial rule. The U.S. was persuaded by George
Kennan and John Foster Dulles to adopt a policy of containment to rein
in international communism. The locals wanted self-determination and
were willing to take help from any quarter, as they had done during the
Second World War. Step by reluctant step, the U.S. entered the Vietnam
quagmire, unsupported, for once, by the U.K. Like Afghanistan today, it
was a conflict fought against a guerrilla army, one in which the
occupation of minds counted for more than the control of territory. It
saw the emergence of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones (based on
British experience in Malaya); civic action teams; recruitment of
aboriginal tribes; and a steady buildup of Special Forces such as the
Mobile Guerrilla Force and including, from 1962, the creation of Navy
SEALs (described by their Vietcong adversary as “devils with green
faces”) on the orders of President Kennedy. The same themes resonated in
Afghanistan, but as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out:
“Apart from Special Forces and a few dissident colonels there has been
no strong, deeply rooted constituency inside the Pentagon or elsewhere
for institutionalizing the capabilities necessary to wage asymmetric or
irregular conflict.”14 By 1970, as U.S. planes began bombing the Ho Chi
Minh trail and American combat troops invaded Cambodia, the British SAS
focused on another Communist threat: the potential loss of Oman, gateway
to the Gulf, as a result of the despotic, medieval regime of the Ruler,
Sheik bin Taimur, a British client. A coup d’etat was engineered by SIS
in which the Ruler was replaced by his son, Qaboos, then under house
arrest. The first problem was to open a line of contact with Britain’s
chosen Ruler-in-waiting, Qaboos. His father grudgingly allowed him to
receive cassette tapes of music. Qaboos, as a result of his service with
the British army in Germany, liked Scottish marches, with bagpipe
accompaniment. The tapes, purchased at Harrods store in London, were
doctored so as to interrupt the music and relay voice messages from a
friend who had shared his room at Sandhurst military college.
After a brief exchange of fire during which Bin Taimur shot himself
through the foot, the deposed leader was spirited away by the Royal Air
Force to live out his final years in London. The SAS then moved
stealthily into Oman with a strategy that placed as much emphasis on
winning hearts and minds as war-fighting. It included the extraordinary
gamble of persuading the untamed hill tribes of Dhofar to change sides
by arming them with the latest British rifles, and paying them. A
similar strategy saved Western policy in Iraq in 2006 with the
difference that in Oman, SAS officers and sergeants worked in isolation
with these “turned” enemy, at great personal risk. The Oman Cocktail—a
blend of bribes, development, and firepower—became a signature tactic of
the SAS, out of sight of the British public in a six-year war without
limits that ended in 1976. This SAS victory had momentous implications.
It ensured Allied control of the gateway to the Hormuz Strait, the Gulf,
and its oilfields for decades.
The SAS phenomenon spread to postwar U.S. Special Forces thanks to
Charlie Beckwith, a young American officer attached to 22 SAS from 1961
to 1963, during which time he took part in jungle operations in Malaya.
The informal structure and idiosyncratic discipline of the SAS that paid
little heed to rank, only quality, puzzled and fascinated him. He wrote
later: “I couldn’t make heads or tails of this situation. The officers
were so professional, so well read, so articulate, so experienced. Why
were they serving within this organization of non-regimental and
apparently poorly disciplined troops? The troops resembled no military
organization I had ever known…. Everything I’d been taught about
soldiering, been trained to believe, was turned upside down.”
In 1977, having survived an apparently fatal gunshot wound in the
abdomen in Vietnam, “Chargin’ Charlie” set up an elite Special Forces
known as Delta, carefully modeled on the SAS. Its first major test,
Operation Eagle Claw—an attempt to rescue U.S. diplomat-hostages in Iran
in 1980—was a fiasco caused by poor air support and a top-heavy command
structure. Beckwith’s ironic verdict, in a message to his British
buddies, was: “You can’t make chicken chowmein out of chickenshit.”
Delta survived that disaster to become the cutting edge of U.S.
unconventional warfare in Iraq from 2003 and Afghanistan after campaigns
in Mogadishu, 1993, Central and South America. When the going got tough
in Congress, ingenious spirits in Washington such as Marine Colonel
Oliver North recruited plausibly deniable ex-SAS British mercenaries and
others to operate in Nicaragua. They included Major David Walker,
formerly of the SAS and later head of the enigmatic private military
company KMS.
The creation of Delta Force was followed in 1979 during the Iran
crisis by the Foreign Operating Group (later redesignated the
Intelligence Support Activity, aka “The Activity”). In 1981 the ISA ran
signals intelligence that led to the rescue of U.S. General James Lee
Dozier, a prisoner of Italian Red Brigade terrorists for forty-two days,
as well as the 1984 attempted liberation of Bill Buckley, the CIA
station chief held captive, then murdered, in Beirut; and operations in
Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Like Britain’s
Special Reconnaissance Regiment, a unit with roots in the Irish
conflict, the ISA also acts as the eyes and ears of an SF strike force
such as Delta.
By the time the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989, Special Forces had
emerged as the means to resolve political conflict without the penalties
that would accompany the use of conventional armies. It was even, as M.
R. D. Foot argued, a political safety-valve, a useful alternative to
the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war. This history examines
the validity of that novel proposition, and much else, including the
extent to which the SF phenomenon licenses its operators, notably
deniable warriors in the private sector, to enter a legal gray area
where others dare not go, boldly or otherwise. In practice it uniquely
inhabits an ambiguous zone between the politically acceptable and the
officially deniable. Success comes at a cost, usually in civil
liberties. Population control methods employed in the conflicts of
Malaya, Vietnam, Kenya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and internment without
trial in Northern Ireland were all case studies in misapplied social
engineering.
But in an age of asymmetric warfare, the techniques developed by
Special Forces represent the future. The economic crash of 2008 forced
the Obama regime to take a long, hard look at the Pentagon’s spending.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, espoused instead Professor
Joseph Nye’s concept of “smart power,” acknowledging that “most of the
conflicts we are facing and will face rarely have a military solution.”
It was probably no coincidence that in the final months of the Bush
presidency, after prolonged campaigns that ended in stalemate, at best, a
blueprint for a new military strategy emerged from the Pentagon. Dated
September 2008, the 280-page document is Field Manual 3-05.130, entitled
Army Special Operations Forces—Unconventional Warfare. It defines the
Bush administration’s foreign policy aims as “furthering capitalism to
foster economic growth…and promote the sale and mobility of U.S.
products to international consumers” accompanied by such strategic tools
as “global freedom of action” and “full spectrum dominance.”
To create a new world order, after the American model, the authors
concede, will be the work of generations. While orthodox military
dominance, worldwide, is a given, the main thrust of policy is the use
of Unconventional Warfare, “working by, with or through irregular
surrogates in a clandestine and/or covert manner against opposing
actors.” It is also “a fundamentally indirect application of power that
leverages human groups to act in concert with U.S. national objectives.”
That means training and supporting surrogates in “the full range of
human motivation beyond narrowly defined actual or threatened physical
coercion.”
It is, essentially, war on the mind, manipulating public opinion.
“The objective of Unconventional Warfare (UW) is always inherently
political…. Some of the best weapons do not shoot.”
Furthermore, “A
fundamental military objective in Unconventional Warfare (UW) is the
deliberate involvement and leveraging of civilian interference in the
unconventional warfare operational area…. Actors engaged in supporting
elements in the Unconventional Warfare Operational Area may rely on
criminal activities, such as smuggling, narcotics or human trafficking….
The methods and networks of real or perceived criminal entities can be
useful as supporting elements of a U.S.-sponsored UW effort.”
The foot soldiers in the new model army of irregulars will be
“unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These
forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary
forces, contractors, individuals, businesses…black marketers and other
social or political ‘undesirables’.” The new doctrine also proposes a
license to kill opponents pre-emptively, “against non-state actors
operating within or behind the laws of nonbelligerent states with which
the United States is not at war…or within a hostile state that harbors,
either wittingly or unwittingly, these nonstate actors within its
borders.”
There is more of the same. The new doctrine also synthesizes the
darker history of Special Forces: the ruthless use of surrogates
including civilians, involvement in the international drug trade,
compulsory relocation of civilian populations, the redirection of aid
programs for political purposes, and the subversion of unfriendly
governments lubricated by the dollar (as in Iran in 1951). It is a
pragmatic handbook for illegal military activity to “ignite a new era of
global economic growth through free markets and free trade.” Its
attraction to increasingly hard-up military planners facing an
open-ended Global War On Terror, could be irresistible unless the Obama
administration puts its foot on the ethical brake. Whatever the outcome,
we cannot understand the complexities of modern, asymmetric warfare
without an awareness of the sophisticated, multi-layered organism that
we loosely describe as “Special Forces.”
What began as Irish and American resistance to British rule, mutating
into organized guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and propaganda-by-deed
along the way, has now become a military discipline in its own right. It
does not discard the old skills such as, for example, the British
commando raid on the Bruneval radar station in 1942 to snatch enemy
secrets. But it has matured into a matrix of intelligenceled military
and non-military techniques requiring skills beyond the reach of the
most talented conventional soldier including public relations, deception
operations, undetectable burglary, and esoteric foreign
languages—alongside, of course, high-altitude freefall parachuting,
scuba diving, and a voluminous knowledge of exotic weapons. There is
much more. SF medical specialists learn field surgery by practicing on
anaesthetized, live animals freshly wounded by gunshot to ensure
realistic blood pressure levels as the medics try to revive them.
The SF military agenda is now expected to include unconventional
military operations as part of a conventional campaign (see Britain’s
amphibious South Atlantic War, 1982); counterinsurgency (Iraq,
Afghanistan); combat rescue (Entebbe 1976); peacekeeping including
weapons verification (Balkans); snatch operations to arrest wanted war
criminals; rescuing allied pilots from enemy territory; and surrogate
warfare using deniable paramilitaries. As an IRA joke about the SAS ran:
“An SAS man is one who can speak half a dozen different languages while
disguised as a bottle of Guinness.”
Yet during the decades since 1945, Special Forces have won acceptance
among governments at the pace of a funeral march and are sometimes—as
in Yemen in the sixties—dependent on private funding. Official caution
is understandable. Elements of the British Army in Northern Ireland
during the Troubles, operating as armed men in civilian clothes, came
chillingly close to resembling the death squads of South America. If
democratic governments have a nightmare about their armed forces, it is
that some adventurous spirits will act as a law unto themselves.
As we have seen, the SAS was officially reinvented with the
inauguration of a reserve unit, 21 SAS (the Artists’ Rifles) in 1947 and
its merger with an ad hoc formation, the Malayan Scouts (SAS) in 1951.
With the end of the Malayan Emergency, two of the regiment’s four
squadrons were axed. They were restored in the 1960s, following the
regiment’s successful cross-border secret war in Indonesia. Yet it was
not until the regiment’s unique skills were demonstrated during the
Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980—when what started as a terrorist
“spectacular” became a British government “spectacular”—that it was
accepted as a national institution. What little was published about the
SAS until then, in postwar years, was almost universally hostile, the
work of left-wing journalists.
American Special Forces, in spite of their many successes in
defending a political lost cause in Vietnam, were also slow to win
permanent status in America’s order of battle. This time the leading
opponents of Special Forces were the military top brass. “These [Special
Forces] units,” writes Colonel John T. Carney, one of their pioneers,
“had been virtual pariahs within their own armed services…in the late
1970s” after Vietnam. “In the aftermath of post-Vietnam down-sizing,
funding for special operations forces had been cut by 95 per cent.
Reaching a low point in 1975, special operations forces constituted only
one-tenth of one per cent of the entire defense budget.”16 No official
U.S. document even dared mention Special Operations Forces as such until
1981, when a Defense Guidance from the Pentagon directed all the armed
services to develop an SOF capability.
Five years later, Senators Sam Nunn and William S. Cohen persuaded
Congress to legislate for an independent U.S. Special Operations
Command, to ensure that never again would “ad hoc rescue forces have to
be cobbled together to meet the kind of time-urgent crisis that the Son
Tay and Iranian rescue missions represented.” Another year passed before
Special Operations Command could begin work as the lead agency against
terrorism, just in time for Afghanistan, America’s first major Special
Forces conflict since Vietnam. SF soldiers do not give up easily. As
Colonel Bill Cowan USMC, one of the pioneers of the reborn Special
Forces, told the author: “Following my retirement I went to serve as an
aide on Capitol Hill. I got the last laugh with the bureaucracy. I was
one of five key staffers who wrote the legislation which created the
Special Operations Command in Tampa. The Pentagon and the White House
fought the legislation tenaciously. But they lost and the command was
formed, leading to Spec Ops being at the forefront as they are today.”
The story of the CIA’s paramilitary Special Operations Group followed
a similar pattern. Following many misadventures involving coups and
assassinations in the 1980s, the Agency retreated to intelligence
analysis allied to satellite surveillance. The SOG “knuckle-draggers”
were moribund. George Tenet, CIA Director, started the SOG renaissance
in 1998. The process accelerated rapidly after 9/11. The budget grew by
millions of dollars, equipment including jet aircraft, cargo planes
reminiscent of Air America and Vietnam, speedboats, and Predator drones
armed with Hellfire missiles.
Their remit, handed down by President George W. Bush, was to use “all
necessary means” to track down and kill Osama bin Laden and his
cohorts. Not everyone—notably Defense Secretary Rumsfeld—was happy about
the duplication of effort that SOG—though tiny compared with
SOCOM—represented. In 2005 he unveiled yet another weapon to be added to
SOCOM’s armory.
The Marines had landed, in the form of 2,500
Leathernecks and sailors, to form an entity known as MarSOC (U.S. Marine
Corps Forces Special Operations Command). The Corps was not happy, for
it creamed off some of its best reconnaissance talent. It was also to
lead to one of the most disputed firefights of the Afghanistan campaign,
and an equally controversial court of inquiry that exonerated two
officers.
The CIA, meanwhile, continued to recruit experienced Special Forces
officers, training some of them for a year in spycraft, before sending
them back to the Agency’s preferred form of low-profile warfare, working
through proxies. For a time after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a
symbiosis of CIA and SOCOM functioned well enough. But the two have
continued to work in parallel, rather than together, with mixed results.
Should President Barack Obama conclude some time in the future that
U.S. strategy requires a change of emphasis, away from hearts-and-minds
toward Howard Hart’s nostrum (“Cut a deal with the Taliban”) and Senator
Biden’s wish to concentrate America’s fire on al Qaeda, it suggests a
bigger role for the CIA’s Special Operations Group. The McChrystal
formula, publicly endorsed by the president at West Point on 2 December
2009 to safeguard civilians in the most populous areas of Afghanistan
(and, by extension, Pakistan), will be a task that emphasizes the role
of SOCOM, as well as the poor bloody infantry.
But we should note that Obama, a cautious cat, hedged his bets. He
said: “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished
quickly and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan…. Unlike the
great power conflicts and clear lines of division that defined the 20th
century, our effort will involve disorderly regions and diffuse
enemies. So as a result…we will have to be nimble and precise in our use
of military power. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a
foothold—whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere—they must be
confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.” Note the
language. For “nimble and precise,” read “Special Operations Forces.” At
the military level, the symbiosis of CIA paramilitary and intelligence
combined with Special Operations Forces was the future war-fighting
model beyond the time-limited commitment to Karzai’s Afghanistan.
