by Mark Moyar.
In May 1980, British television was interrupted by a live broadcast of balaclava-clad Special Air Service men storming the Iranian Embassy in London to rescue hostages taken by an Iranian separatist group. Such operations were not perhaps a surprise for the baby-boomer generation. After all, we had been brought up with celluloid heroics in which Dirk Bogarde —it was nearly always Dirk Bogarde—snatched German generals from Crete or raided Rommel’s supply lines in North Africa. But for younger generations of Britons, the embassy raid had an enormous impact, spawning a new fascination with special-operations forces. Their growing mystique has led to a stream of often lamentable books with “SAS” on the cover as well as, more seriously, a misleading confidence in their superiority to conventional forces for many missions.
As Mark Moyar’s “Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces” demonstrates, there has been a similar trend in the U.S. The various American special forces, which date from the formation of the Army First Ranger Battalion in 1942, now number 70,000 members. They have moved from being a secondary weapon to a primary weapon. Gen. Peter Schoomaker became the first special-forces officer to be Army chief of staff in 2003, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal the first special-forces officer to be given direction of an entire campaign—in Afghanistan—in 2009.
But, at best, unconventional units have offered tactical rather than strategic success. The one exception was the ousting of the Taliban from Afghanistan in support of the Northern Alliance immediately after 9/11; operations against al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan were not as successful. There has been a litany of failures, including Operation Eagle Claw in Iran in April 1980 and Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia in October 1993. Successive presidents, however, have fallen under the spell of special forces, although their support has often been qualified and quickly withdrawn, as was the case with President Bill Clinton after Somalia.
It is Mr. Moyar’s contention that the problem has been that few incumbents of the White House have understood special forces’ limitations. Special forces, he says, are best suited to counterinsurgency. He sees little likelihood of future opportunities to use special forces in the strategic role they played in Afghanistan in 2001, for example. Indeed, he argues that given the persistence of conventional threats, “the best solution at the present time would be to expand conventional forces rather than special operations forces.” New roles and missions may evolve, but special forces must be properly integrated into broader strategic enterprises. Successive presidents, he writes, have made decisions about unconventional units “based on superficial and romanticized views.”
Franklin Roosevelt, for example, was persuaded by his son James, a Marine captain, to push the creation of the Corps’ Raiders units against the views of the Marine Corps commandant. Young Roosevelt had been captivated, in turn, by the ideas of his mentor, Maj. Evans Carlson, who had observed early Maoist guerrilla tactics in China. Carlson ended up being played by Randolph Scott in 1943. (Mr. Moyar tactfully omits the name of the film—“Gung Ho!”) Carlson is by no means the most flamboyant character populating Mr. Moyar’s story. Special forces seem to attract mavericks, such as “Wild Bill” Donovan; Carl Eifler (who as commander of the Army’s Detachment 101 in Burma would introduce himself to potential recruits by “asking them to punch him in the stomach as hard as they could”); hard-drinking Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko ; and Charlie Beckwith, first leader of the Army’s Delta Force.
Even John F. Kennedy, who did so much to re-establish the Green Berets in response to Khrushchev’s declaration of Soviet support for “wars of national liberation” in 1961, had “little idea of the practical realities of special operations forces, the mundane details that put limits on what could actually be achieved,” Mr. Moyar writes. Rapid expansion came at the expense of lowering standards. Too often, conventional forces have been robbed of their best personnel. Following a policy preference instituted by Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama embraced “surgical strikes” as a substitute for a real strategy, because “they enabled him to show the American public that he was combating terrorism forcefully and efficiently.”
Ironically, at the same time that Mr. Obama was seduced by the supposed utility of ever-expanding special forces, the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance eschewed building genuine counterinsurgency capability of the kind that has often shown special forces at their most effective. The Village Stability Operations in Afghanistan—part of what Mr. Moyar characterizes as “white” operations—were reminiscent of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program in Vietnam. Like the Vietnam program, Village Stability Operations, in which Americans “rented compounds within their assigned villages, forgoing the concrete cocoons of the forward operating bases,” were tactically successful to a degree but overtaken by the increasing integration of special forces into large conventional operations. In passing, it might be noted that, while Mr. Moyar has published important studies of the Phoenix Program and of the early years in Vietnam, there is relatively little discussion in “Oppose Any Foe” of the debate over the merits of special forces’ involvement with the CIDG as opposed to the more conventional strike role imposed on them after 1965. J.P. Harris’s recent “Vietnam’s High Ground” (2016), for example, provides an altogether more comprehensive account.
Of course, Mr. Moyar aims at an overall assessment of the development of special forces and has to cover over 70 years of lessons. In so doing, he falls occasionally into the kind of narrative associated with popular history. To an extent, this arguably detracts from his analysis, but his book needs to be taken seriously by policy makers. As Mr. Moyar concludes, “for the sake of the special operations forces, their history must be published, the good as well as the bad, and it must be read.”
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