By Ronald Baygents, KUNA,
Tampa, Florida : They are the stuff of action movies, but more important, real life. There are some 8,000 U.S. Special Forces operating in the Middle East, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan — and mostly behind the scenes.
The U.S. Congress in 1986 established by law the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the wake of the failed 1980 mission to rescue U.S. hostages who had been held near Tehran for months after a takeover of the U.S. Embassy there by Iranians under the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. That mission, known as Operation Eagle Claw, ended with eight U.S. airmen and eight military aircraft lost at a desert staging area.
During a media tour of SOCOM held last week in Tampa and at nearby MacDill Air Force Base during International Special Operations Forces Week, U.S. and mostly foreign press members were granted interviews with top U.S. and allied officers involved in Special Operations.
SOCOM is a unique organization with a unified combatant command, noted Colonel Hans Bush, a Green Beret who works in SOCOM public affairs.
Special Operations forces are employed globally through synchronized, coordinated missions that are underpinned by a number of essential “truths,” said Bush — that humans are more important than hardware; that quality is better than quantity; and that special forces cannot be created after emergencies occur, but must always be ready and in place.
Special forces equipment is usually modified with more high-tech components than regular military equipment, and SOCOM has more senior civilians in more places than is typical of other U.S. Defense Department organizations, Bush noted.
SOCOM operates under a simpler, more direct hierarchy to make it easier to move quickly.
Core tasks of SOCOM include unconventional warfare, such as was utilized in the early phases of the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 war in Iraq; foreign internal defense; special reconnaissance; direct action, such as destroying certain facilities or capturing high-value targets; counter-terrorism, which is a much broader area of SOCOM responsibility since the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001; civil affairs operations; psychological operations, which are often aimed at the “second audience” in a conflict area and may include distribution of handbills; counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and synchronized efforts in the global war on terror.
More than half of U.S. Special Operations Forces are in the U.S. Army, primarily based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Army Rangers are perhaps the best known of these.
The remaining Special Ops forces are in the Navy (such as Navy Seals), Air Force, Marines and Joint Special Operations Command. A Joint Special Operations University has been established with an emphasis on interagency training, including with the U.S. State Department, Bush noted.
U.S. Special Ops forces are typically deployed in about 70 countries or territories on any given day, Bush said.
Although Special Ops forces comprise only 2 percent of the total Pentagon budget, each service provides the Special Ops forces with their equipment.
The command has an annual budget of more than 7 billion dollars and nearly 50,000 military and civilian personnel.
The original Special Ops forces broke off from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the late 1940s, but the forces still work closely with the CIA today, Bush said, as well as with other U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Customs.
During a media roundtable with a nine-member panel of international SOCOM leaders, Special Operations commander Admiral Eric Olson of the Navy Seals said Special Ops forces “represent a culture of international cooperation” that can meet in non-military environments to conduct special operations, joint operations or bilateral or multi-lateral operations.
The priorities of the forces are “greatly determined by input from the geographic commanders,” Olson said.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the military command overseeing U.
S. Special Ops had moved away from a contentious plan that gave it broad control over anti-terrorism operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots.
The expanded authority for U.S. Special Operations Command was pushed through by former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before he resigned in late 2006.
The shift caused friction among leaders at other war-fighting organizations who saw it as an intrusion into their geographic domains.
Olson, who has been Special Ops commander since last July, has steered clear of micro-managing specific missions against al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
His primary focus is to ensure these plans are fused into a broader strategy for defeating extremist ideologies, reflecting his view that the troops closest to the action know best how to handle it.
Asked by KUNA if high-level diplomacy would be important to the missions of the Special Ops forces after a new U.S. president takes office in eight months, Olson said high-level diplomacy was best left to the State Department.
However, he told KUNA, his command is in the business of training “warrior-diplomats” who go places no one else goes.
It is “every-day, every-place diplomacy” that separates Special Ops forces from some of the other U.S. military forces dispatched around the globe, he told KUNA.