Tomgram: Nick Turse, Success, Failure, and the "Finest Warriors Who Ever
Went Into Combat"
By Nick Turse
Posted on October 25, 2015, Printed on October 25, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176060/
If journalism was once considered the first rough draft of history, now,
when it comes to American military policy at least, its often the first
rough pass at writing a script for "The Daily Show." Take, for example, a
little inside-the-paper piece that Eric Schmitt of the New York Times penned
recently with this headline: New Role for General After Failure of Syria
Rebel Plan. And heres the first paragraph:
The Army general in charge of the Pentagons failed $500 million program to
train and equip Syrian rebels is leaving his job in the next few weeks, but
is likely to be promoted and assigned a senior counterterrorism position
here, American officials said on Monday.
Yes, you read that right. Major General Michael Nagata is indeed likely to
be promoted. He remains, according to Schmitt, one of the Armys rising
stars and is in line to be awarded a third star, to lieutenant general,
and take a senior position at the National Counterterrorism Center in
Washington. Oh, and one of the reasons for his possible upcoming promotion,
other than having overseen a program to produce 15,000 American-backed
moderate Syrian rebels ready to fight the Islamic State that actually only
produced a handful of them who fought no one, is according to colleagues
his bureaucratic acumen in counterterrorism jobs at the C.I.A. and the
Pentagon.
Bureaucratic acumen! What better skill could you ask for in the new American
national security state built since 9/11 on failure? No kidding, wouldnt
you give your right arm to be in an organization that essentially called
whatever you did success and promoted you accordingly? As TomDispatchs Nick
Turse notes in his latest stunning report on Americas Special Operations
forces, the secret military within our military that has in recent years
grown to monstrous proportions has also gone from success to success;
that is, as an organization, its expansion has been dependent upon
Washingtons military failures and disasters, especially in the Greater
Middle East. One of Bob Dylans famed cryptic lyrics seems to cover the
situation with a certain precision: She knows there's no success like
failure. And that failure's no success at all. Tom
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Special Ops Successes
Americas Elite Forces Deploy to a Record-Shattering 147 Countries in 2015
By Nick Turse
Theyre some of the best soldiers in the world: highly trained, well
equipped, and experts in weapons, intelligence gathering, and battlefield
medicine. They study foreign cultures and learn local languages. Theyre
smart, skillful, wear some very iconic headgear, and their 12-member teams
are capable of conducting the full spectrum of special operations, from
building indigenous security forces to identifying and targeting threats to
U.S. national interests.
Theyre also quite successful. At least they think so.
In the last decade, Green Berets have deployed into 135 of the 195
recognized countries in the world. Successes in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Trans-Sahel Africa, the Philippines, the Andean Ridge, the Caribbean, and
Central America have resulted in an increasing demand for [Special Forces]
around the globe, reads a statement on the website of U.S. Army Special
Forces Command.
The Armys Green Berets are among the best known of Americas elite forces,
but theyre hardly alone. Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, Army
Rangers, Marine Corps Raiders, as well as civil affairs personnel,
logisticians, administrators, analysts, and planners, among others, make up
U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF). They are the men and women who carry
out Americas most difficult and secret military missions. Since 9/11, U.S.
Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has grown in every conceivable way from
funding and personnel to global reach and deployments. In 2015, according
to Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Special Operations
forces deployed to a record-shattering 147 countries -- 75% of the nations
on the planet, which represents a jump of 145% since the waning days of the
Bush administration. On any day of the year, in fact, Americas most elite
troops can be found in 70 to 90 nations.
There is, of course, a certain logic to imagining that the increasing global
sweep of these deployments is a sign of success. After all, why would you
expand your operations into ever-more nations if they werent successful?
So I decided to pursue that record of success with a few experts on the
subject.
I started by asking Sean Naylor, a man who knows Americas most elite troops
as few do and the author of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint
Special Operations Command, about the claims made by Army Special Forces
Command. He responded with a hearty laugh. Im going to give whoever
wrote that the benefit of the doubt that they were referring to successes
that Army Special Forces were at least perceived to have achieved in those
countries rather than the overall U.S. military effort, he says. As he
points out, the first post-9/11 months may represent the zenith of success
for those troops. The initial operations in the invasion of Afghanistan in
2001 -- carried out largely by U.S. Special Forces, the CIA, and the Afghan
Northern Alliance, backed by U.S. airpower -- were probably the high point
in the history of unconventional warfare by Green Berets, according to
Naylor. As for the years that followed? There were all sorts of mistakes,
one could argue, that were made after that. He is, however, quick to point
out that the vast majority of the decisions [about operations and the war,
in general] were not being made by Army Special Forces soldiers.
For Linda Robinson, author of One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the
Future of American Warfare, the high number of deployments is likely a
mistake in itself. Being in 70 countries... may not be the best use of
SOF, she told me. Robinson, a senior international policy analyst at the
Rand Corporation, advocates for a more thoughtful and focused approach to
the employment of SOF, citing enduring missions in Colombia and the
Philippines as the most successful special ops training efforts in recent
years. It might be better to say Lets not sprinkle around the SOF guys
like fairy dust. Lets instead focus on where we think we can have a
success... If you want more successes, maybe you need to start reining in
how many places youre trying to cover.
Most of the special ops deployments in those 147 countries are the type
Robinson expresses skepticism about -- short-term training missions by
white operators like Green Berets (as opposed to the black ops
man-hunting missions by the elite of the elite that captivate Hollywood and
video gamers). Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Special Operations
forces carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in
as many as 67 countries, practicing everything from combat casualty care and
marksmanship to small unit tactics and desert warfare alongside local
forces. And JCETs only scratch the surface when it comes to special ops
missions to train proxies and allies. Special Operations forces, in fact,
conduct a variety of training efforts globally.
A recent $500 million program, run by Green Berets, to train a Syrian force
of more than 15,000 over several years, for instance, crashed and burned in
a very public way, yielding just four or five fighters in the field before
being abandoned. This particular failure followed much larger, far more
expensive attempts to train the Afghan and Iraqi security forces in which
Special Operations troops played a smaller yet still critical role. The
results of these efforts recently prompted TomDispatch regular and retired
Army colonel Andrew Bacevich to write that Washington should now assume
when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign
armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
The Elite Warriors of the Warrior Elite
In addition to training, another core role of Special Operations forces is
direct action -- counterterror missions like low-profile drone
assassinations and kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-octane operators.
The exploits of the men -- and they are mostly men (and mostly Caucasian
ones at that) -- behind these operations are chronicled in Naylors epic
history of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secret
counterterrorism organization that includes the militarys most elite and
shadowy units like the Navys SEAL Team 6 and the Armys Delta Force. A
compendium of more than a decade of derring-do from Afghanistan to Iraq,
Somalia to Syria, Relentless Strike paints a portrait of a highly-trained,
well-funded, hard-charging counterterror force with global reach. Naylor
calls it the perfect hammer, but notes the obvious risk that successive
administrations would continue to view too many national security problems
as nails.
When I ask Naylor about what JSOC has ultimately achieved for the country in
the Obama years, I get the impression that he doesnt find my question
particularly easy to answer. He points to hostage rescues, like the high
profile effort to save Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama after the
cargo ship was hijacked by Somali pirates, and asserts that such missions
might inhibit others from seizing Americans. One wonders, of course, if
similar high-profile failed missions since then, including the SEAL raid
that ended in the deaths of hostages Luke Somers, an American
photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, as well as the
unsuccessful attempt to rescue the late aid worker Kayla Mueller, might then
have just the opposite effect.
Afghanistan, youve got another fairly devilish strategic problem there,
Naylor says and offers up a question of his own: You have to ask what would
have happened if al-Qaeda in Iraq had not been knocked back on its heels by
Joint Special Operations Command between 2005 and 2010? Naylor calls
attention to JSOCs special abilities to menace terror groups, keeping them
unsteady through relentless intelligence gathering, raiding, and
man-hunting. It leaves them less time to take the offensive, to plan
missions, and to plot operations against the United States and its allies,
he explains. Now that doesnt mean that the use of JSOC is a substitute
for a strategy... Its a tool in a policymakers toolkit.
Indeed. If what JSOC can do is bump off and capture individuals and
pressure such groups but not decisively roll up militant networks, despite
years of anti-terror whack-a-mole efforts, it sounds like a recipe for
spending endless lives and endless funds on endless war. It's not my place
as a reporter to opine as to whether the present situations in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Yemen were worth the cost in blood and treasure borne by U.S.
Special Operations forces, Naylor tells me in a follow-up email. Given
the effects that JSOC achieved in Iraq (Uday and Qusay Hussein killed,
Saddam Hussein captured, [al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi killed,
al-Qaeda in Iraq eviscerated), it's hard to say that JSOC did not have an
impact on that nation's recent history.
Impacts, of course, are one thing, successes another. Special Operations
Command, in fact, hedges its bets by claiming that it can only be as
successful as the global commands under which its troops operate in each
area of the world, including European Command, Pacific Command, Africa
Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Central Command or CENTCOM,
the geographic combatant command that oversees operations in the Greater
Middle East. We support the Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs) -- if
they are successful, we are successful; if they fail, we fail, says SOCOMs
website.
With this in mind, its helpful to return to Naylors question: What if
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which flowered in the years after the U.S. invasion, had
never been targeted by JSOC as part of a man-hunting operation going after
its foreign fighters, financiers, and military leaders? Given that the even
more brutal Islamic State (IS) grew out of that targeted terror group, that
IS was fueled in many ways, say experts, both by U.S. actions and inaction,
that its leaders rise was bolstered by U.S. operations, that U.S. training
helped mold another of its chiefs, and that a U.S. prison served as its
boot camp, and given that the Islamic State now holds a significant swath
of Iraq, was JSOCs campaign against its predecessor a net positive or a
negative? Were special ops efforts in Iraq (and therefore in CENTCOMs area
of operations) -- JSOCs post-9/11 showcase counterterror campaign -- a
success or a failure?
Naylor notes that JSOCs failure to completely destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq
allowed IS to grow and eventually sweep across northern Iraq in 2014,
seizing town after town from which JSOC and other U.S. forces had evicted
al-Qaeda in Iraq at great cost several years earlier. This, in turn, led
to the rushing of special ops advisers back into the country to aid the
fight against the Islamic State, as well as to that program to train
anti-Islamic State Syrian fighters that foundered and then imploded. By
this spring, JSOC operators were not only back in Iraq and also on the
ground in Syria, but they were soon conducting drone campaigns in both of
those tottering nations.
This special ops merry-go-round in Iraq is just the latest in a long series
of fiascos, large and small, to bedevil Americas elite troops. Over the
years, in that country, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, special operators
have regularly been involved in all manner of mishaps, embroiled in various
scandals, and implicated in numerous atrocities. Recently, for instance,
members of the Special Operations forces have come under scrutiny for an air
strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan that killed at
least 22 patients and staff, for an alliance with unsavory partners in the
Central African Republic, for the ineffective and abusive Afghan police they
trained and supervised, and for a shady deal to provide SEALs with
untraceable silencers that turned out to be junk, according to prosecutors.
Winners and Losers
JSOC was born of failure, a phoenix rising from the ashes of Operation Eagle
Claw, the humiliating attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S.
Embassy in Iran in 1980 that ended, instead, in the deaths of eight U.S.
personnel. Today, the elite force trades on an aura of success in the
shadows. Its missions are the stuff of modern myths.
In his advance praise for Naylors book, one cable news analyst called
JSOCs operators the finest warriors who ever went into combat. Even
accepting this -- with apologies to the Mongols, the Varangian Guard,
Persias Immortals, and the Ten Thousand of Xenophons Anabasis -- questions
remain: Have these warriors actually been successful beyond budget battles
and the box office? Is exceptional tactical prowess enough? Are battlefield
triumphs and the ability to batter terror networks through relentless
raiding the same as victory? Such questions bring to mind an exchange that
Army colonel Harry Summers, who served in Vietnam, had with a North
Vietnamese counterpart in 1975. You know, you never defeated us on the
battlefield, Summers told him. After pausing to ponder the comment,
Colonel Tu replied, That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.
So what of those Green Berets who deployed to 135 countries in the last
decade? And what of the Special Operations forces sent to 147 countries in
2015? And what about those Geographic Combatant Commanders across the globe
who have hosted all those special operators?
I put it to Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich, author of Breach of Trust: How
Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. As far back as Vietnam,
he tells me, the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with
outcomes. Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped,
or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made. Today, tallying up
the number of countries in which Special Operations forces are present
repeats this error. There is no doubt that U.S. Special Operations forces
are hard at it in lots of different places. It does not follow that they are
thereby actually accomplishing anything meaningful.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award and American Book Award winner for his book
Kill Anything That Moves, his pieces have appeared in the New York Times,
the Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. His latest book is Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Nick Turse
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176060
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Success, Failure, and the "Finest Warriors Who Ever
Went Into Combat"
By Nick Turse
Posted on October 25, 2015, Printed on October 25, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176060/
If journalism was once considered the first rough draft of history, now,
when it comes to American military policy at least, its often the first
rough pass at writing a script for "The Daily Show." Take, for example, a
little inside-the-paper piece that Eric Schmitt of the New York Times penned
recently with this headline: New Role for General After Failure of Syria
Rebel Plan. And heres the first paragraph:
The Army general in charge of the Pentagons failed $500 million program to
train and equip Syrian rebels is leaving his job in the next few weeks, but
is likely to be promoted and assigned a senior counterterrorism position
here, American officials said on Monday.
Yes, you read that right. Major General Michael Nagata is indeed likely to
be promoted. He remains, according to Schmitt, one of the Armys rising
stars and is in line to be awarded a third star, to lieutenant general,
and take a senior position at the National Counterterrorism Center in
Washington. Oh, and one of the reasons for his possible upcoming promotion,
other than having overseen a program to produce 15,000 American-backed
moderate Syrian rebels ready to fight the Islamic State that actually only
produced a handful of them who fought no one, is according to colleagues
his bureaucratic acumen in counterterrorism jobs at the C.I.A. and the
Pentagon.
Bureaucratic acumen! What better skill could you ask for in the new American
national security state built since 9/11 on failure? No kidding, wouldnt
you give your right arm to be in an organization that essentially called
whatever you did success and promoted you accordingly? As TomDispatchs Nick
Turse notes in his latest stunning report on Americas Special Operations
forces, the secret military within our military that has in recent years
grown to monstrous proportions has also gone from success to success;
that is, as an organization, its expansion has been dependent upon
Washingtons military failures and disasters, especially in the Greater
Middle East. One of Bob Dylans famed cryptic lyrics seems to cover the
situation with a certain precision: She knows there's no success like
failure. And that failure's no success at all. Tom
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Special Ops Successes
Americas Elite Forces Deploy to a Record-Shattering 147 Countries in 2015
By Nick Turse
Theyre some of the best soldiers in the world: highly trained, well
equipped, and experts in weapons, intelligence gathering, and battlefield
medicine. They study foreign cultures and learn local languages. Theyre
smart, skillful, wear some very iconic headgear, and their 12-member teams
are capable of conducting the full spectrum of special operations, from
building indigenous security forces to identifying and targeting threats to
U.S. national interests.
Theyre also quite successful. At least they think so.
In the last decade, Green Berets have deployed into 135 of the 195
recognized countries in the world. Successes in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Trans-Sahel Africa, the Philippines, the Andean Ridge, the Caribbean, and
Central America have resulted in an increasing demand for [Special Forces]
around the globe, reads a statement on the website of U.S. Army Special
Forces Command.
The Armys Green Berets are among the best known of Americas elite forces,
but theyre hardly alone. Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, Army Rangers,
Marine Corps Raiders, as well as civil affairs personnel, logisticians,
administrators, analysts, and planners, among others, make up U.S. Special
Operations forces (SOF). They are the men and women who carry out Americas
most difficult and secret military missions. Since 9/11, U.S. Special
Operations Command (SOCOM) has grown in every conceivable way from funding
and personnel to global reach and deployments. In 2015, according to Special
Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Special Operations forces
deployed to a record-shattering 147 countries -- 75% of the nations on the
planet, which represents a jump of 145% since the waning days of the Bush
administration. On any day of the year, in fact, Americas most elite troops
can be found in 70 to 90 nations.
There is, of course, a certain logic to imagining that the increasing global
sweep of these deployments is a sign of success. After all, why would you
expand your operations into ever-more nations if they werent successful? So
I decided to pursue that record of success with a few experts on the
subject.
I started by asking Sean Naylor, a man who knows Americas most elite troops
as few do and the author of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint
Special Operations Command, about the claims made by Army Special Forces
Command. He responded with a hearty laugh. Im going to give whoever wrote
that the benefit of the doubt that they were referring to successes that
Army Special Forces were at least perceived to have achieved in those
countries rather than the overall U.S. military effort, he says. As he
points out, the first post-9/11 months may represent the zenith of success
for those troops. The initial operations in the invasion of Afghanistan in
2001 -- carried out largely by U.S. Special Forces, the CIA, and the Afghan
Northern Alliance, backed by U.S. airpower -- were probably the high point
in the history of unconventional warfare by Green Berets, according to
Naylor. As for the years that followed? There were all sorts of mistakes,
one could argue, that were made after that. He is, however, quick to point
out that the vast majority of the decisions [about operations and the war,
in general] were not being made by Army Special Forces soldiers.
For Linda Robinson, author of One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the
Future of American Warfare, the high number of deployments is likely a
mistake in itself. Being in 70 countries... may not be the best use of
SOF, she told me. Robinson, a senior international policy analyst at the
Rand Corporation, advocates for a more thoughtful and focused approach to
the employment of SOF, citing enduring missions in Colombia and the
Philippines as the most successful special ops training efforts in recent
years. It might be better to say Lets not sprinkle around the SOF guys
like fairy dust. Lets instead focus on where we think we can have a
success... If you want more successes, maybe you need to start reining in
how many places youre trying to cover.
Most of the special ops deployments in those 147 countries are the type
Robinson expresses skepticism about -- short-term training missions by
white operators like Green Berets (as opposed to the black ops
man-hunting missions by the elite of the elite that captivate Hollywood and
video gamers). Between 2012 and 2014, for example, Special Operations forces
carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many
as 67 countries, practicing everything from combat casualty care and
marksmanship to small unit tactics and desert warfare alongside local
forces. And JCETs only scratch the surface when it comes to special ops
missions to train proxies and allies. Special Operations forces, in fact,
conduct a variety of training efforts globally.
A recent $500 million program, run by Green Berets, to train a Syrian force
of more than 15,000 over several years, for instance, crashed and burned in
a very public way, yielding just four or five fighters in the field before
being abandoned. This particular failure followed much larger, far more
expensive attempts to train the Afghan and Iraqi security forces in which
Special Operations troops played a smaller yet still critical role. The
results of these efforts recently prompted TomDispatch regular and retired
Army colonel Andrew Bacevich to write that Washington should now assume
when it comes to organizing, training, equipping, and motivating foreign
armies, that the United States is essentially clueless.
The Elite Warriors of the Warrior Elite
In addition to training, another core role of Special Operations forces is
direct action -- counterterror missions like low-profile drone
assassinations and kill/capture raids by muscled-up, high-octane operators.
The exploits of the men -- and they are mostly men (and mostly Caucasian
ones at that) -- behind these operations are chronicled in Naylors epic
history of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secret
counterterrorism organization that includes the militarys most elite and
shadowy units like the Navys SEAL Team 6 and the Armys Delta Force. A
compendium of more than a decade of derring-do from Afghanistan to Iraq,
Somalia to Syria, Relentless Strike paints a portrait of a highly-trained,
well-funded, hard-charging counterterror force with global reach. Naylor
calls it the perfect hammer, but notes the obvious risk that successive
administrations would continue to view too many national security problems
as nails.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608464636/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20When I ask
Naylor about what JSOC has ultimately achieved for the country in the Obama
years, I get the impression that he doesnt find my question particularly
easy to answer. He points to hostage rescues, like the high profile effort
to save Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama after the cargo ship was
hijacked by Somali pirates, and asserts that such missions might inhibit
others from seizing Americans. One wonders, of course, if similar
high-profile failed missions since then, including the SEAL raid that ended
in the deaths of hostages Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, and
Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, as well as the unsuccessful attempt
to rescue the late aid worker Kayla Mueller, might then have just the
opposite effect.
Afghanistan, youve got another fairly devilish strategic problem there,
Naylor says and offers up a question of his own: You have to ask what would
have happened if al-Qaeda in Iraq had not been knocked back on its heels by
Joint Special Operations Command between 2005 and 2010? Naylor calls
attention to JSOCs special abilities to menace terror groups, keeping them
unsteady through relentless intelligence gathering, raiding, and
man-hunting. It leaves them less time to take the offensive, to plan
missions, and to plot operations against the United States and its allies,
he explains. Now that doesnt mean that the use of JSOC is a substitute for
a strategy... Its a tool in a policymakers toolkit.
Indeed. If what JSOC can do is bump off and capture individuals and pressure
such groups but not decisively roll up militant networks, despite years of
anti-terror whack-a-mole efforts, it sounds like a recipe for spending
endless lives and endless funds on endless war. It's not my place as a
reporter to opine as to whether the present situations in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Yemen were worth the cost in blood and treasure borne by U.S. Special
Operations forces, Naylor tells me in a follow-up email. Given the effects
that JSOC achieved in Iraq (Uday and Qusay Hussein killed, Saddam Hussein
captured, [al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi killed, al-Qaeda in
Iraq eviscerated), it's hard to say that JSOC did not have an impact on that
nation's recent history.
Impacts, of course, are one thing, successes another. Special Operations
Command, in fact, hedges its bets by claiming that it can only be as
successful as the global commands under which its troops operate in each
area of the world, including European Command, Pacific Command, Africa
Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, and Central Command or CENTCOM,
the geographic combatant command that oversees operations in the Greater
Middle East. We support the Geographic Combatant Commanders (GCCs) -- if
they are successful, we are successful; if they fail, we fail, says SOCOMs
website.
With this in mind, its helpful to return to Naylors question: What if
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which flowered in the years after the U.S. invasion, had
never been targeted by JSOC as part of a man-hunting operation going after
its foreign fighters, financiers, and military leaders? Given that the even
more brutal Islamic State (IS) grew out of that targeted terror group, that
IS was fueled in many ways, say experts, both by U.S. actions and inaction,
that its leaders rise was bolstered by U.S. operations, that U.S. training
helped mold another of its chiefs, and that a U.S. prison served as its
boot camp, and given that the Islamic State now holds a significant swath
of Iraq, was JSOCs campaign against its predecessor a net positive or a
negative? Were special ops efforts in Iraq (and therefore in CENTCOMs area
of operations) -- JSOCs post-9/11 showcase counterterror campaign -- a
success or a failure?
Naylor notes that JSOCs failure to completely destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq
allowed IS to grow and eventually sweep across northern Iraq in 2014,
seizing town after town from which JSOC and other U.S. forces had evicted
al-Qaeda in Iraq at great cost several years earlier. This, in turn, led to
the rushing of special ops advisers back into the country to aid the fight
against the Islamic State, as well as to that program to train anti-Islamic
State Syrian fighters that foundered and then imploded. By this spring, JSOC
operators were not only back in Iraq and also on the ground in Syria, but
they were soon conducting drone campaigns in both of those tottering
nations.
This special ops merry-go-round in Iraq is just the latest in a long series
of fiascos, large and small, to bedevil Americas elite troops. Over the
years, in that country, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, special operators
have regularly been involved in all manner of mishaps, embroiled in various
scandals, and implicated in numerous atrocities. Recently, for instance,
members of the Special Operations forces have come under scrutiny for an air
strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan that killed at
least 22 patients and staff, for an alliance with unsavory partners in the
Central African Republic, for the ineffective and abusive Afghan police they
trained and supervised, and for a shady deal to provide SEALs with
untraceable silencers that turned out to be junk, according to prosecutors.
Winners and Losers
JSOC was born of failure, a phoenix rising from the ashes of Operation Eagle
Claw, the humiliating attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S.
Embassy in Iran in 1980 that ended, instead, in the deaths of eight U.S.
personnel. Today, the elite force trades on an aura of success in the
shadows. Its missions are the stuff of modern myths.
In his advance praise for Naylors book, one cable news analyst called
JSOCs operators the finest warriors who ever went into combat. Even
accepting this -- with apologies to the Mongols, the Varangian Guard,
Persias Immortals, and the Ten Thousand of Xenophons Anabasis -- questions
remain: Have these warriors actually been successful beyond budget battles
and the box office? Is exceptional tactical prowess enough? Are battlefield
triumphs and the ability to batter terror networks through relentless
raiding the same as victory? Such questions bring to mind an exchange that
Army colonel Harry Summers, who served in Vietnam, had with a North
Vietnamese counterpart in 1975. You know, you never defeated us on the
battlefield, Summers told him. After pausing to ponder the comment, Colonel
Tu replied, That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.
So what of those Green Berets who deployed to 135 countries in the last
decade? And what of the Special Operations forces sent to 147 countries in
2015? And what about those Geographic Combatant Commanders across the globe
who have hosted all those special operators?
I put it to Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich, author of Breach of Trust: How
Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country. As far back as Vietnam,
he tells me, the United States military has tended to confuse inputs with
outcomes. Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped,
or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made. Today, tallying up
the number of countries in which Special Operations forces are present
repeats this error. There is no doubt that U.S. Special Operations forces
are hard at it in lots of different places. It does not follow that they are
thereby actually accomplishing anything meaningful.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award and American Book Award winner for his book
Kill Anything That Moves, his pieces have appeared in the New York Times,
the Intercept, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch. His latest book is Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Copyright 2015 Nick Turse
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