Anna M. Gielas
Introduction
After the George W. Bush administration designated the United States (U.S.) Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to plan and synchronise the global war on terrorism (GWOT), U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) became ‘vir-tually synonymous with the American way of war since 9/11.1 During the GWOT, SOF experienced substantial growth, doubling in size, tripling their budget and, at times, quadrupling their presence overseas.2 In 2011, Admiral William McRaven stated that the U.S. was in ‘the golden age of special operations.3 Adm. (ret.) McRaven’s perspective was shaped by his experiences as the head of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a component command within SOCOM. JSOC-based units, including 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (Delta Force) and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), primarily conducted Direct Action missions, such as kill-or-capture operations, often in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency.4 Having gained substantial military and political influence, alongside significant public interest, JSOC emerged as ‘an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine’.
The prominence of JSOC-based units often eclipsed the ‘less visible forces, such as Special Forces’ (SF).6 Although SF are similarly highly trained in Direct Action, including kill-or-capture operations, these forces, commonly referred to as the Green Berets, are traditionally linked with unconventional warfare (UW). Their proficiency in foreign languages, cultural awareness, and regional awareness enables them to work effectively ‘by, through and with surrogate forces’, undertake missions such as foreign internal defence and support civil government projects.7 The SF undertook these and other missions during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan.
Throughout the past two decades, scholars have consistently documented how SOF ‘have transitioned from a marginalized force structure to a prominent and vital part of U.S. military strategy’.8 However, this assertion is only partially accurate. JSOC-based units adopted novel organisational and bureaucratic structures, but SF largely remained within long-established military structures, often struggling to effectively apply their UW capabilities during OEF. Scholarship tends to either conflate the different U.S.
SOF ele-ments, or focuses primarily on JSOC activities, such as Task Force 714 opera-tions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.9 The task force has garnered scholarly praise for its novel organisational-structural approach and criticism for the implications of its targeted killing tactic.10 With academic focus predomi-nantly set on the new aspects characterising SOF during GWOT, less attention has been paid to the impact of the military’s long-established organisational structure and its cultures on SOF activities during OEF. Another trend in scholarship, that has limited deeper insights into SOF’s experiences during GWOT, is the emphasis on quantifying SOF growth.11 The significant numbers mask the reality that SOF constituted only around two to three percent of the U.S. armed forces, even at the height of GWOT.12 Consequently, SOF were inevitably immersed in the conventional military’s organisational structure and its cultures.
Based on a primary-source corpus of forty-five master’s (MA) theses authored by SF officers, this paper argues that conventional military’s organisational structure and culture significantly limited SF’s UW approach, resulting in isolated and short-lived UW activities
Unconventional warfare, and Indirect Action in general, usually require a sustained and steady commitment that did not materialise during OEF. JSOC units generally did not face the same challenges because they conducted their Direct-Action missions, which usually necessitate rapid and brief operations, largely outside the conventional military’s organisational and cultural architecture. Consequently, the article sug-gests that when scholars and commentators describe GWOT as a ‘push to super-empower the SOF community’, they primarily refer to JSOC and Direct Action rather than SF and Indirect Action.13 The paper further argues that, instead of empowering SF, the developments dur-ing OEF encroached upon their identity as the UW force within the U.S. military and highlighted broader challenges within SOCOM due to the GWOT.
The current primary-source corpus is particularly well-suited to learn about the challenges during the GWOT, as the MA theses blend aca-demic rigour with practitioners’ insights, illuminating the day-to-day processes during OEF which are largely inaccessible to most academics. Based on the information provided in the MA corpus, official military reports and the websites of the U.S. armed forces, it was possible to verify that the authors of these theses were members of the SF commu-nity at the time of their postgraduate research. The theses were written at the Army Command and General Staff College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, the Army War College, the Air War College and the National Defense University. Given that seven of the theses have multiple authors, the sample of forty-five MA dissertations (comprising 3,293 pages) includes a total of fifty-four authors all of whom were commissioned officers at the time of writing. To respectfully balance the privacy of these military personnel with scholarly referen-cing, the officers’ names are not mentioned within the body of the article but their names and bibliographical details of their theses are provided in the endnotes and references.
The article is structured in two parts. The first part introduces the struc-tural-organisational obstacles that SF encountered in Afghanistan during OEF, demonstrating how deeply embedded SF were within conventional military structures. A brief comparative discussion on how JSOC units circum-vented these structures is included to highlight the limitations faced by SF in pursuing UW. The second part delves into the cultural-conceptual difficulties that SF experienced. The origin of the article’s title, ‘Prima Donnas in Kevlar Zones’, is employed to elucidate the divide between SF and their conven-tional counterparts. The conclusion briefly outlines a couple of implications of these challenges for national security. Ultimately, this article aims to contri-bute new insights into the U.S’. continuing difficulties to conduct UW despite the apparent empowerment of U.S. SOF during GWOT.SMALL WARS & INSURGENCIES3
Organizational-structural challenges
When deployed overseas, the armed forces are organised geographically, through the Geographic Combatant Commands (GCC). Each command is responsible for a clearly defined area of operation, thus, maintaining a distinct regional focus. Similarly, five active SF Groups, each consisting of four battalions, headquarters and support elements, have a specific regional orientation. Prior to 9/11, SF played a supporting role to conventional forces, so much so, that SF Groups were considered tactical level organisations.14 They were not organised to plan and lead UW campaigns at the operational level.15 Thus, ‘the terrorist attacks of 11 September . . . found us scrambling to construct a command and control structure to wage unconventional warfare in Afghanistan against Al Qaida and the Taliban’.
SOCOM, SF’s parent organisation, also had existed in a supporting capacity since its creation in 1987. Following 9/11, the Bush administration elevated SOCOM to a supported command.17 SOCOM now maintained ‘primary con-trol of operations and [was] allowed to act independently from regional combatant commanders’.18 A central issue, however, was that SOCOM was not a geographic combatant command. As a so-called functional command, SOCOM’s role involved preparing U.S. SOF for their missions but it generally did not have command over SF once they deployed to Afghanistan.19 Although SOCOM developed a GWOT campaign plan and ‘was expected to arrange global military actions to ensure the optimum employment of force’, the GCCs had their own regional campaign plans and, due to the organisa-tional structure, the authority to execute them.20 So much so that ‘once the forces [SF] are employed by a Geographical Combatant Commander to sup-port major combat operations, it is difficult for USSOCOM to reassign those units to other efforts’.21 This created a Catch-22 situation in which SOCOM and SF had to operate: politically designated to lead GWOT they had to steer a global campaign without actually being in charge.
According to the DOD, the Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOCs) were ‘the tools it [SOCOM] will need to plan and execute missions in support of the global war on terror’.23 However, the sample of dissertations highlights a multitude of challenges surrounding TSOCs.24 Arguably, the most signifi-cant issue was that TSOCs were not SOCOM’s assets. Each TSOC was sub-ordinate to a GCC and, for most of GWOT, worked for a conventional Geographic Combatant Commander – as they were designed to since their inception in 1983.25 TSOCs supported their respective campaign comman-ders through both Direct and Indirect Action missions. Notably, TSOCs did not receive a portion of SOCOM’s substantial post-9/11 funding because the military services were responsible for financing them. Consequently, and contrary to their intended role as world-class integrators of SOF and their capabilities, TSOCs experienced chronic understaffing and faced difficulties contributing to mission planning due to a lack of higher-ranking officers.26 For instance, at the time the Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3–24 was published in 2006, the highest-ranking SF officer in Afghanistan was a Colonel while an Army General led the U.S. military campaign there.27 This Colonel did not ‘even have a “seat at the table” during many important decision meetings’.28 Simultaneously, while acknowledging the importance of TSOCs, SF personnel often viewed TSOC billets as detrimental to their careers and generally were not eager to join TSOC staff. According to a senior SOF member, ‘TSOC staffs are where special operators’ careers go to die’.29 Deemed ‘a critical component in the country’s special operations arsenal’, TSOCs were flawed organizational-structural elements during most of OEF.
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