In 120 countries across the
globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war
of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings,
capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint
operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous
partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans, notes Nick Turse.
|
Middle East Online
|
Somewhere on this
planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70
times and you’re done... for the day. Without the knowledge of the
American public, a secret force within the US military is undertaking
operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon
power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been
revealed, until now.
After a US Navy SEAL put a bullet
in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most
secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its
mission in the public spotlight. It was atypical. While it’s well known
that US Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of
Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units
operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full
extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.
Last
year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that
US Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60
at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, US Special
Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will
likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than
Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence -- in about
60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged
-- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power
elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.
The Rise of the Military’s Secret Military
Born
of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which
eight US service members died, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was
established in 1987. Having spent the post-Vietnam years distrusted and
starved for money by the regular military, special operations forces
suddenly had a single home, a stable budget, and a four-star commander
as their advocate. Since then, SOCOM has grown into a combined force of
startling proportions. Made up of units from all the service branches,
including the Army’s “Green Berets” and Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force
Air Commandos, and Marine Corps Special Operations teams, in addition to
specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel,
para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special
operations weathermen, SOCOM carries out the United States’ most
specialized and secret missions. These include assassinations,
counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence
analysis, foreign troop training, and weapons of mass destruction
counter-proliferation operations.
One of its key
components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a
clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing
suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his
authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American
citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign
that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general
and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost
industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."
This
assassination program has been carried out by commando units like the
Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force as well as via drone strikes as
part of covert wars in which the CIA is also involved in countries like
Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen. In addition, the command operates a
network of secret prisons, perhaps as many as 20 black sites in
Afghanistan alone, used for interrogating high-value targets.
Growth Industry
From
a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command
personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career
members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties,
but periodically cycle through the command. Growth has been exponential
since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM’s baseline budget almost tripled
from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion. If you add in funding for the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8
billion in these years. Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel
deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold. Further increases, and
expanded operations, are on the horizon.
Lieutenant
General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces
Special Operations Command -- the last of the service branches to be
incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 -- indicated, for instance, that he
foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600. “I see them as a force
someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we
have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000,” he said at a June
breakfast with defense reporters in Washington. Long-term plans already
call for the force to increase by 1,000.
During his
recent Senate confirmation hearings, Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven,
the incoming SOCOM chief and outgoing head of JSOC (which he commanded
during the bin Laden raid) endorsed a steady manpower growth rate of 3%
to 5% a year, while also making a pitch for even more resources,
including additional drones and the construction of new special
operations facilities.
A former SEAL who still
sometimes accompanies troops into the field, McRaven expressed a belief
that, as conventional forces are drawn down in Afghanistan, special ops
troops will take on an ever greater role. Iraq, he added, would benefit
if elite U.S forces continued to conduct missions there past the
December 2011 deadline for a total American troop withdrawal. He also
assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that “as a former JSOC
commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at
Somalia.”
During a speech at the National Defense
Industrial Association's annual Special Operations and Low-intensity
Conflict Symposium earlier this year, Navy Admiral Eric Olson, the
outgoing chief of Special Operations Command, pointed to a composite
satellite image of the world at night. Before September 11, 2001, the
lit portions of the planet -- mostly the industrialized nations of the
global north -- were considered the key areas. "But the world changed
over the last decade," he said. "Our strategic focus has shifted largely
to the south... certainly within the special operations community, as
we deal with the emerging threats from the places where the lights
aren't."
To that end, Olson launched "Project
Lawrence," an effort to increase cultural proficiencies -- like advanced
language training and better knowledge of local history and customs --
for overseas operations. The program is, of course, named after the
British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of
Arabia"), who teamed up with Arab fighters to wage a guerrilla war in
the Middle East during World War I. Mentioning Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Mali, and Indonesia, Olson added that SOCOM now needed "Lawrences of
Wherever."
While Olson made reference to only 51
countries of top concern to SOCOM, Col. Nye told me that on any given
day, Special Operations forces are deployed in approximately 70 nations
around the world. All of them, he hastened to add, at the request of the
host government. According to testimony by Olson before the House Armed
Services Committee earlier this year, approximately 85% of special
operations troops deployed overseas are in 20 countries in the CENTCOM
area of operations in the Greater Middle East: Afghanistan, Bahrain,
Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon,
Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. The others are scattered
across the globe from South America to Southeast Asia, some in small
numbers, others as larger contingents.
Special
Operations Command won’t disclose exactly which countries its forces
operate in. “We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not
advantageous for us to list where we’re at,” says Nye. “Not all host
nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have -- it may be
internal, it may be regional.”
But it’s no secret (or
at least a poorly kept one) that so-called black special operations
troops, like the SEALs and Delta Force, are conducting kill/capture
missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, while “white” forces
like the Green Berets and Rangers are training indigenous partners as
part of a worldwide secret war against al-Qaeda and other militant
groups. In the Philippines, for instance, the US spends $50 million a
year on a 600-person contingent of Army Special Operations forces, Navy
Seals, Air Force special operators, and others that carries out
counterterrorist operations with Filipino allies against insurgent
groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf.
Last year,
as an analysis of SOCOM documents, open-source Pentagon information,
and a database of Special Operations missions compiled by investigative
journalist Tara McKelvey (for the Medill School of Journalism’s National
Security Journalism Initiative) reveals, America’s most elite troops
carried out joint-training exercises in Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria,
Burkina Faso, Germany, Indonesia, Mali, Norway, Panama, and Poland. So
far in 2011, similar training missions have been conducted in the
Dominican Republic, Jordan, Romania, Senegal, South Korea, and Thailand,
among other nations. In reality, Nye told me, training actually went on
in almost every nation where Special Operations forces are deployed.
“Of the 120 countries we visit by the end of the year, I would say the
vast majority are training exercises in one fashion or another. They
would be classified as training exercises.”
The Pentagon’s Power Elite
Once
the neglected stepchildren of the military establishment, Special
Operations forces have been growing exponentially not just in size and
budget, but also in power and influence. Since 2002, SOCOM has been
authorized to create its own Joint Task Forces -- like Joint Special
Operations Task Force-Philippines -- a prerogative normally limited to
larger combatant commands like CENTCOM. This year, without much fanfare,
SOCOM also established its own Joint Acquisition Task Force, a cadre of
equipment designers and acquisition specialists.
With
control over budgeting, training, and equipping its force, powers
usually reserved for departments (like the Department of the Army or the
Department of the Navy), dedicated dollars in every Defense Department
budget, and influential advocates in Congress, SOCOM is by now an
exceptionally powerful player at the Pentagon. With real clout, it can
win bureaucratic battles, purchase cutting-edge technology, and pursue
fringe research like electronically beaming messages into people’s heads
or developing stealth-like cloaking technologies for ground troops.
Since 2001, SOCOM’s prime contracts awarded to small businesses -- those
that generally produce specialty equipment and weapons -- have jumped
six-fold.
Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in
Florida, but operating out of theater commands spread out around the
globe, including Hawaii, Germany, and South Korea, and active in the
majority of countries on the planet, Special Operations Command is now a
force unto itself. As outgoing SOCOM chief Olson put it earlier this
year, SOCOM “is a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground,
air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and
responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military
Services, and Defense Agencies.”
Tasked to coordinate
all Pentagon planning against global terrorism networks and, as a
result, closely connected to other government agencies, foreign
militaries, and intelligence services, and armed with a vast inventory
of stealthy helicopters, manned fixed-wing aircraft, heavily-armed
drones, high-tech guns-a-go-go speedboats, specialized Humvees and Mine
Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, as well as other
state-of-the-art gear (with more on the way), SOCOM represents something
new in the military. Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers
Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army,"
today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive’s private
assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon
power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic
power and global reach.
In 120 countries across the
globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war
of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings,
capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint
operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous
partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once
“special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are
special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
That
aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which
helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while
many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows.
Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral
Olson: “I am convinced that the forces… are the most culturally attuned
partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile,
innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers,
problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer.”
Recently
at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum, Olson offered up similarly
gilded comments and some misleading information, too, claiming that US
Special Operations forces were operating in just 65 countries and
engaged in combat in only two of them. When asked about drone strikes in
Pakistan, he reportedly replied, “Are you talking about unattributed
explosions?”
What he did let slip, however, was
telling. He noted, for instance, that black operations like the bin
Laden mission, with commandos conducting heliborne night raids, were now
exceptionally common. A dozen or so are conducted every night, he said.
Perhaps most illuminating, however, was an offhand remark about the
size of SOCOM. Right now, he emphasized, US Special Operations forces
were approximately as large as Canada’s entire active duty military. In
fact, the force is larger than the active duty militaries of many of the
nations where America’s elite troops now operate each year, and it’s
only set to grow larger.
Americans have yet to grapple
with what it means to have a “special” force this large, this active,
and this secret -- and they are unlikely to begin to do so until more
information is available. It just won’t be coming from Olson or his
troops. “Our access [to foreign countries] depends on our ability to not
talk about it,” he said in response to questions about SOCOM’s secrecy.
When missions are subject to scrutiny like the bin Laden raid, he said,
the elite troops object. The military’s secret military, said Olson,
wants "to get back into the shadows and do what they came in to do.”
By Middle-east online
|
