Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command

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Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command
BY SEAN D. NAYLOR

An idea that wouldn't die may be getting a new lease on life. Despite years of the idea being shot down at the highest levels, there are again growing calls from inside and outside the military for the establishment of an "unconventional warfare command" that would oversee those special operations forces whose primary mission is not killing and capturing the enemy.

Recent leadership changes in Congress, the Defense Department and U.S. Special Operations Command have given supporters of the idea fresh hope that the PowerPoint slides might finally become reality.

At the core of the debate are the Army's Special Forces, who specialize in working "by, with and through" indigenous forces. They have long complained that they play second fiddle in U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCom) to those units that specialize in direct action, i.e. missions focused on capturing or killing enemies. SOCom gives direct-action units, particularly those that fall under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), priority in resourcing, and it is from those units that most of SOCom's leadership is drawn, they say. Only by the creation of an unconventional warfare command will the special ops units that emphasize indirect action get a fair shake on the battlefield and inside the bureaucracy, their argument goes.

People on all sides of the debate trace the priority SOCom gives to JSOC and its component units — such as the Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 75th Ranger Regiment, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and the Navy's SEAL Team 6 — back to the failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 mission to rescue the Iran hostages that met disaster at a remote landing strip codenamed Desert One. The debacle eventually led to the formation of SOCom.

"The nation was embarrassed, the Army was embarrassed, special ops was embarrassed," a retired Special Forces colonel said. "Desert One was a disaster. For 25 years, the message that has been given to the senior leadership of the special operations community has been: 'No matter what else you do, no matter how much it costs, we will never have another Desert One.' Now it's not surprising that for 25 years, when that has been the national priority, that SOCom has oriented on the forces that make sure that we never have a Desert One. They're good soldiers. They do what they're told, and it's not surprising if that has been the priority that the leadership from the priority units have risen to the top of SOCom. So when you ask for something for 25 years and give it unlimited resources, you shouldn't be surprised when that's what you have when you're done."

"Now, all that changed on Sept. 11," the retired SF colonel said. "The No. 1 priority of the nation for special operations was no longer episodic direct action to surgical standards. ... verybody recognized we had to be able to do unconventional warfare like we did in Afghanistan, but many places at the same time. And everybody understood that it was no longer about airplane takedowns and ship recoveries and these episodic events, it was about a sustained presence in a country to destroy an infrastructure."


Rest of article at: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/09/3049653