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Commandos mobilize for unconventional war
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, WASHINGTON -- For all the emphasis that Pentagon planners have put on Special Operations forces in a war against the network of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government, at the moment relatively few of these secretive soldiers are within striking distance of the heart of Afghanistan, officials at the Pentagon say. As the military's mobilization accelerated last week, a Defense Department official said that only a few dozen members of the military's Special Operations forces had deployed into the region so far. Short of an intelligence coup disclosing bin Laden's location, that is scarcely enough to scour the caves and canyons of the country looking for bin Laden and his captains. But an additional 500 or so members of Special Operations units will be laced among the 23,000 U.S. troops now landing in Egypt for a monthlong military exercise, "Bright Star," that begins this week, Defense Department officials say. One Pentagon official said these troops could easily swing over toward Afghanistan. And other Special Operations forces will most likely deploy with many units bound for the region. With so few of them there so far, the initial mission of these fighters has focused on the more conventional of their many specialized roles. These include scouting targets and standing by to illuminate them with laser beams that precisely guide missiles and bombs to the most important ones. Recalling the Persian Gulf War of a decade ago, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, said last week that the "most effective means for finding Scud missiles, Iraqi Scud missiles, was putting very brave special forces people on the ground in western Iraq." But he conceded that their daring sometimes went to waste. "When they got there and they found targets, we didn't have the kind of integration with our air capability to make that bravery effective," Wolfowitz said. Special Operations forces are also the most likely soldiers to carry out another strategy that Pentagon officials have spoken of: assisting resistance forces of the Northern Alliance in their campaign against the Taliban's military. Indeed, in the Special Forces doctrine this kind of operation goes by the name "unconventional warfare," exactly the term that top Bush administration officials have used again and again to describe their plans. The hope has been both to dislodge the Taliban regime and to flush out al-Qaida, the terrorist network. And counterterrorism generally is another of the particular missions of Special Operations units. Wayne Downing, a retired four-star Army general who headed the U.S. Special Operations Command, has joined the National Security Council as the president's new director for counterterrorism. U.S. commandos are capable of much more than hiding for days on end and working in the dark of night to locate targets, or propping up indigenous rebels to do the fighting. These forces receive the most intense training in the military, and some of its most sophisticated radios and weapons, so they can wipe out targets on their own. Special forces wage their corner of the war with intense and concentrated violence that can be important tactically to the broader mission, and disruptive psychologically to an enemy, according to current and past members of these units. In the words of one former Special Operations officer, "They fight fast and they fight furious, and then they get out." They can be secretly inserted into enemy territory in pitch darkness by Pave Low and Pave Hawk helicopters that skirt the terrain. For heavier loads and longer distances, there is the Combat Talon, a modified cargo plane that needs only 750 feet of rudimentary runway to land. So secret are the Special Operations forces' missions that their movements into and around the region are blacked out of slide presentations about the war effort shown to some of the most senior military leaders at the Pentagon. Their importance to that effort, though, is no secret. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has made it clear that in this campaign, "a lot of it will be Special Operations." Some Special Operations missions are too secret ever to be disclosed, even when they succeed. But Hollywood notwithstanding, the majority of them have nothing to do with high-altitude parachute drops followed by 5-mile swims against the tide followed by kicking in doors followed by long knives in the night. As the Air Force readies high-altitude food drops over Afghanistan, an operation aimed at filling the stomachs as well as winning the hearts of the Afghan people and undermining the Taliban's legitimacy in their minds, special forces could stealthily search for, identify and help destroy Taliban antiaircraft systems, whose capabilities remain an unknown, Pentagon officials say. That mission would become even more critical if President Bush orders a sustained bombing campaign to squeeze the Taliban by attacking command posts, arms depots, airfields, training camps and storage sites for the heroin that has underwritten the Taliban, officials say. Special Operations forces do everything from coordinating refugee relief to training foreign soldiers to reconstituting a water purification system to preparing leaflets urging surrender in dialects that few U.S. soldiers have ever heard spoken. There are 40,000 members of U.S. Special Operations units, budgeted at just over $3-billion, or about 1.3 percent of all military spending, said Col. Bill Darley, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command. (Most Special Operations personnel who work in civil affairs are in Reserve units, as are many of those trained in psychological operations.) Units vary in size and specialty, from the top-secret Delta Force, which specializes in counterterrorism, to Navy SEAL teams that specialize in coastal reconnaissance, infiltration and demolition, to the larger units of Army Rangers, perhaps the best-trained infantry in the world. But spectacular failures still haunt these forces. There was the aborted hostage rescue in Iran in 1980. During the 1989 invasion of Panama, the forces had a disproportionate number of casualties when their small-unit missions rolled into large, set-piece firefights. The disastrous attempt to kidnap a Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, in 1993 ended public support for involvement there.
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