US Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries Than You Can Imagine
January 20, 2015
A US Special Forces trainer supervises a military assault drill in Sudan in 2013. (Reuters/Andreea Campeanu)
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In
the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor
aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile
countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves
in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that
elite US Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist
Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.
On December 6, 2014, approximately 36 of America’s top commandos, heavily armed,operating with
intelligence from satellites, drones and high-tech eavesdropping,
outfitted with night vision goggles and backed up by elite Yemeni
troops, went toe-to-toe with about six militants from al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula. When it was over, Somers was dead, along with Pierre Korkie,
a South African teacher due to be set free the next day. Eight
civilians were also killed by the commandos, according to local reports.
Most of the militants escaped.
That
blood-soaked episode was, depending on your vantage point, an
ignominious end to a year that saw US Special Operations forces deployed
at near record levels, or an inauspicious beginning to a new year
already on track to reach similar heights, if not exceed them.
During the fiscal year that
ended on September 30, 2014, US Special Operations forces (SOF)
deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70 percent of the nations on the
planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs
officer with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a
three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in
more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions
ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this
year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that
ended Luke Somers life—just 66 days into fiscal 2015—America’s most
elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of
2014’s total.
Despite
its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the
planet is unknown to most Americans. Unlike the December debacle in
Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in
the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny. In fact,
aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through
highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to selland a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities,
much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to
meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen
blowback and catastrophic consequences.
The Golden Age
“The command is at its absolute zenith. And it is indeed a golden age for special operations.” Those were the words of Army General Joseph Votel III, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, as he assumed command of SOCOM last August.
His
rhetoric may have been high-flown, but it wasn’t hyperbole. Since
September 11, 2001, US Special Operations forces have grown in every
conceivable way, including their numbers, their budget, their clout in
Washington and their place in the country’s popular imagination. The
command has, for example, more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 today, including a jump of roughly 8,000 during the three-year tenure of recently retired SOCOM chief Admiral William McRaven.
Those
numbers, impressive as they are, don’t give a full sense of the nature
of the expansion and growing global reach of America’s most elite forces
in these years. For that, a rundown of the acronym-ridden structure of
the ever-expanding Special Operations Command is in order. The list may
be mind-numbing, but there is no other way to fully grasp its scope.
The
lion’s share of SOCOM’s troops are Rangers, Green Berets and other
soldiers from the Army, followed by Air Force air commandos, SEALs,
Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen and support personnel from the
Navy, as well as a smaller contingent of Marines. But you only get a
sense of the expansiveness of the command when you consider the full
range of “sub-unified commands” that these special ops troops are
divided among: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; SOCEUR, the European
contingent; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea; SOCPAC, which
covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; SOCSOUTH, which conducts
missions in Central America, South America and the Caribbean; SOCCENT,
the sub-unified command of US Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle
East;SOCNORTH,
which is devoted to “homeland defense”; and the globe-trotting Joint
Special Operations Command or JSOC—a clandestine sub-command (formerly headed by McRaven and then Votel) made up of
personnel from each service branch, including SEALs, Air Force special
tactics airmen and the Army’s Delta Force, that specializes in tracking
and killing suspected terrorists.
And don’t think that’s the end of it, either. As a result of McRaven’s push to create “a Global SOF network of like-minded interagency allies and partners,” Special Operations liaison officers, or SOLOs, are now embedded in
fourteen key US embassies to assist in advising the special forces of
various allied nations. Already operating in Australia, Brazil, Canada,
Colombia, El Salvador, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Poland,
Peru, Turkey and the United Kingdom, the SOLO program is poised, according to Votel, to expand to forty countries by 2019. The command, and especially JSOC, has also forged close ties with theCentral Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency, among others.
Shadow Ops
Special
Operations Command’s global reach extends further still, with smaller,
more agile elements operating in the shadows from bases in the United
States to remote parts of Southeast Asia, from Middle Eastern outposts
to austere African camps. Since 2002, SOCOM has also been authorized to
create its own Joint Task Forces, a prerogative normally limited to
larger combatant commands like CENTCOM. Take, for instance, Joint
Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) which, at its peak,
had roughly 600 US personnel supporting counterterrorist operations by
Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Abu Sayyaf. After more
than a decade spent battling that group, its numbers have beendiminished, but it continues to be active, while violence in the region remains virtually unaltered.
A phase-out of the task force was actually announced in
June 2014. “JSOTF-P will deactivate and the named operation OEF-P
[Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines] will conclude in Fiscal Year
2015,” Votel told the
Senate Armed Services Committee the next month. “A smaller number of US
military personnel operating as part of a PACOM [US Pacific Command]
Augmentation Team will continue to improve the abilities of the PSF
[Philippine Special Forces] to conduct their CT [counterterrorism]
missions…” Months later, however, Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Philippines remained up and running. “JSOTF-P is still active
although the number of personnel assigned has been reduced,” Army
spokesperson Kari McEwen told reporter Joseph Trevithick of War Is Boring.
Another unit, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Bragg, remained in the shadows for years before its first official mention by
the Pentagon in early 2014. Its role, according to SOCOM’s Bockholt, is
to “train and equip US service members preparing for deployment to
Afghanistan to support Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan.”
That latter force, in turn, spent more than a decade conducting covert
or “black” ops “to prevent insurgent activities from threatening the
authority and sovereignty of” the Afghan government. This meant night raidsand kill/capture missions—often in concert with elite Afghan forces—that led to the deaths of unknown numbers of combatants and civilians. In response to popular outrage against the raids, Afghan President Hamid Karzai largely banned them in 2013.
US
Special Operations forces were to move into a support role in 2014,
letting elite Afghan troops take charge. “We’re trying to let them run
the show,” Colonel Patrick Roberson of the Afghanistan task force told USA Today.
But according to LaDonna Davis, a spokesperson with the task force,
America’s special operators were still leading missions last year. The
force refuses to say how many missions were led by Americans or even how
many operations its commandos were involved in, though Afghan special
operations forces reportedly carried out as
many as 150 missions each month in 2014. “I will not be able to discuss
the specific number of operations that have taken place,” Major Loren
Bymer of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan told TomDispatch.
“However, Afghans currently lead 96% of special operations and we
continue to train, advise and assist our partners to ensure their
success.”
And
lest you think that that’s where the special forces organizational
chart ends, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan has five
Special Operations Advisory Groups “focused on mentoring and advising
our ASSF [Afghan Special Security Force] partners,”according to
Votel. “In order to ensure our ASSF partners continue to take the fight
to our enemies, US SOF must be able to continue to do some advising at
the tactical level post-2014 with select units in select locations,” he told the
Senate Armed Services Committee. Indeed, last November, Karzai’s
successor Ashraf Ghani quietly lifted the night raid ban, opening the
door once again to missions with US advisers in 2015.
There
will, however, be fewer US special ops troops available for tactical
missions. According to then Rear-, now Vice-Admiral Sean Pybus, SOCOM’s
Deputy Commander, about half the SEAL platoons deployed in Afghanistan
were, by the end of last month, to be withdrawn and redeployed to
support “the pivot in Asia, or work the Mediterranean, or the Gulf of
Guinea, or into the Persian Gulf.” Still, Colonel Christopher Riga,
commander of the 7th Special Forces Group, whose troops served with the
Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan near Kandahar
last year, vowed to soldier on. “There’s a lot of fighting that is still
going on in Afghanistan that is going to continue,” he said at an
awards ceremony late last year. “We’re still going to continue to kill
the enemy, until we are told to leave.”
Add
to those task forces the Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD)
elements, small teams which, according to the military, “shape and
coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and engagement
in support of theater special operations command, geographic combatant
command, and country team goals and objectives.” SOCOM declined to
confirm the existence of SOC FWDs, even though there has been ample official evidenceon
the subject and so it would not provide a count of how many teams are
currently deployed across the world. But those that are known are
clustered in favored black ops stomping grounds, including SOC FWD
Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen and SOC FWD Lebanon, as well as SOC FWD East
Africa, SOC FWD Central Africa and SOC FWD West Africa.
Africa
has, in fact, become a prime locale for shadowy covert missions by
America’s special operators. “This particular unit has done impressive
things. Whether it’s across Europe or Africa taking on a variety of
contingencies, you are all contributing in a very significant way,”
SOCOM’s commander, General Votel, told members of the 352nd Special
Operations Group at their base in England last fall.
The
Air Commandos are hardly alone in their exploits on that continent.
Over the last years, for example, SEALs carried out a successful hostage
rescue mission in Somalia and a kidnapraid
there that went awry. In Libya, Delta Force commandos successfully
captured an al-Qaeda militant in an early morning raid, while SEALs
commandeered an oil tanker with cargo from Libya that the weak US-backed
government there considered stolen. Additionally, SEALs conducted a
failed evacuation mission in South Sudan in which its members were
wounded when the aircraft in which they were flying was hit by small
arms fire. Meanwhile, an elite quick-response force known as Naval
Special Warfare Unit 10 (NSWU-10) has beenengaged with “strategic countries” such as Uganda, Somalia and Nigeria.
A
clandestine Special Ops training effort in Libya imploded when militia
or “terrorist” forces twice raided its camp, guarded by the Libyan
military, and looted large quantities of high-tech American equipment,
hundreds of weapons—including Glock pistols and M4 rifles—as well as
night vision devices and specialized lasers that can only be seen with
such equipment. As a result, the mission was scuttled and the camp was
abandoned. It was then reportedly taken over by a militia.
In
February of last year, elite troops traveled to Niger for three weeks
of military drills as part of Flintlock 2014, an annual Special Ops
counterterrorism exercise that brought together the forces of the host
nation, Canada, Chad, France, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
Senegal, the United Kingdom and Burkina Faso. Several months later, an
officer from Burkina Faso, who received counterterrorism
training in the United States under the auspices of SOCOM’s Joint
Special Operations University in 2012, seized power in a coup. Special
Ops forces, however, remained undaunted. Late last year, for example,
under the auspices of SOC FWD West Africa, members of 5th Battalion,
19th Special Forces Group, partnered with elite Moroccan troops for
training at a base outside of Marrakech.
A World of Opportunities
Deployments
to African nations have, however, been just a part of the rapid growth
of the Special Operations Command’s overseas reach. In the waning days
of the Bush presidency, under then–SOCOM chief Admiral Eric Olson,
Special Operations forces were reportedlydeployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75,according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that
the total would reach 120 by the end of the year. With Admiral William
McRaven in charge in 2013, then-Major Robert Bockholt toldTomDispatch that the number had jumped to
134. Under the command of McRaven and Votel in 2014, according to
Bockholt, the total slipped ever-so-slightly to 133. Outgoing Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel noted,
however, that under McRaven’s command—which lasted from August 2011 to
August 2014—special ops forces deployed to more than 150 different
countries. “In fact, SOCOM and the entire US military are more engaged
internationally than ever before—in more places and with a wider variety
of missions,” he saidin an August 2014 speech.
He
wasn’t kidding. Just over two months into fiscal 2015, the number of
countries with Special Ops deployments has already clocked in at 105,
according to Bockholt.
SOCOM
refused to comment on the nature of its missions or the benefits of
operating in so many nations. The command would not even name a single
country where US special operations forces deployed in the last three
years. A glance at just some of the operations, exercises and activities
that have come to light, however, paints a picture of a globetrotting
command in constant churn with alliances in every corner of the planet.
In
January and February, for example, members of the 7th Special Forces
Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment conducted a
month-long Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) with forces from
Trinidad and Tobago, while troops from the 353rd Special Operations
Group joined members
of the Royal Thai Air Force for Exercise Teak Torch in Udon Thani,
Thailand. In February and March, Green Berets from the 20th Special
Forces Group trained with elite troops in the Dominican Republic as part
of a JCET.
In
March, members of Marine Special Operations Command and Naval Special
Warfare Unit 1 took part in maneuvers aboard the guided-missile cruiser
USS Cowpens as
part of Multi-Sail 2014, an annual exercise designed to support
“security and stability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.” That same
month, elite soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines took part in a
training exercise code-named Fused Response with members of the Belizean
military. “Exercises like this build rapport and bonds between US
forces and Belize,” said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Heber Toro of
Special Operations Command South afterward.
In
April, soldiers from the 7th Special Forces Group joined with Honduran
airborne troops for jump training—parachuting over that country’s Soto
Cano Air Base. Soldiers from that same unit, serving with the
Afghanistan task force, also carried out shadowy ops in the southern
part of that country in the spring of 2014. In June, members of the 19th
Special Forces Group carried out a JCET in Albania, while operators
from Delta Force took part in the mission that secured the release of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. That same month, Delta Force commandos helped kidnap Ahmed
Abu Khattala, a suspected “ringleader” in the 2012 terrorist attacks in
Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, while Green Berets deployed to Iraq as advisors in the fight against the Islamic State.
In
June and July, twenty-six members of the 522nd Special Operations
Squadron carried out a 28,000-mile, four-week, five-continent mission
which took them to Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Japan, among other nations,
to escort three “single-engine [Air Force Special Operations Command]
aircraft to a destination in the Pacific Area of Responsibility.” In
July, US Special Operations forces traveled to Tolemaida, Colombia, to
compete against elite troops from sixteen other nations—in events like
sniper stalking, shooting and an obstacle course race—at the annual
Fuerzas Comando competition.
In
August, soldiers from the 20th Special Forces Group conducted a JCET
with elite units from Suriname. “We’ve made a lot of progress together
in a month. If we ever have to operate together in the future, we know
we’ve made partners and friends we can depend upon,” said a senior
noncommissioned officer from that unit. In Iraq that month, Green Beretsconducted a
reconnaissance mission on Mount Sinjar as part an effort to protect
ethnic Yazidis from Islamic State militants, while Delta Force
commandos raided an
oil refinery in northern Syria in a bid to save American journalist
James Foley and other hostages held by the same group. That mission was a
bust and Foley was brutally executed shortly thereafter.
In
September, about 1,200 US special operators and support personnel
joined with elite troops from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic,
Finland, Great Britain, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Slovenia
for Jackal Stone, a training exercise that focused on everything from
close quarters combat and sniper tactics to small boat operations and
hostage rescue missions. In September and October, Rangers from the 3rd
Battalion, 75th Ranger Regimentdeployed to
South Korea to practice small unit tactics like clearing trenches and
knocking out bunkers. During October, Air Force air commandos also
conducted simulated hostage rescue missions at the Stanford Training
Area near Thetford, England. Meanwhile, in international waters south of
Cyprus, Navy SEALs commandeered that tanker full of oil loaded at a rebel-held port in Libya. In November, US commandos conducted a raid in Yemen that freed eight foreign hostages. The next month, SEALs carried out the blood-soaked mission that
left two hostages, including Luke Somers, and eight civilians dead. And
these, of course, are only some of the missions that managed to make it
into the news or in some other way onto the record.
Everywhere They Want to Be
To
America’s black ops chiefs, the globe is as unstable as it is
interconnected. “I guarantee you what happens in Latin America affects
what happens in West Africa, which affects what happens in Southern
Europe, which affects what happens in Southwest Asia,” McRaven toldlast
year’s Geolnt, an annual gathering of surveillance-industry executives
and military personnel. Their solution to interlocked instability? More
missions in more nations—in more than three-quarters of the world’s
countries, in fact—during McRaven’s tenure. And the stage appears set
for yet more of the same in the years ahead. “We want to be everywhere,”
said Votel at Geolnt. His forces are already well on their way in 2015.
“Our
nation has very high expectations of SOF,” he told special operators in
England last fall. “They look to us to do the very hard missions in
very difficult conditions.” The nature and whereabouts of most of those
“hard missions,” however, remain unknown to Americans. And Votel
apparently isn’t interested in shedding light on them. “Sorry, but no,”
was SOCOM’s response to TomDispatch’s
request for an interview with the special ops chief about current and
future operations. In fact, the command refused to make any personnel
available for a discussion of what it’s doing in America’s name and with
taxpayer dollars. It’s not hard to guess why.
Votel now sits atop one of the major success stories of a post-9/11 military that has beenmired in winless wars, intervention blowback, rampant criminal activity, repeated leaks ofembarrassing secrets and all manner of shocking scandals. Through a deft combination of bravado and secrecy, well-placed leaks, adroit marketing and public relations efforts, the skillful cultivation of a superman mystique (with a dollop of tortured fragility on the side) and one extremely popular, high-profile, targeted killing, Special Operations forces have becomethe darlings of American popular culture, while the command has been a consistent winner in Washington’s bare-knuckled budget battles.
This
is particularly striking given what’s actually occurred in the field:
in Africa, the arming and outfitting of militants and the training of a
coup leader; in Iraq, America’s most elite forces were implicated in torture, the destruction of homes and the killing and wounding ofinnocents; in Afghanistan, it was a similar story, with repeated reports of civilian deaths; while in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia it’s been more of the same. And this only scratches the surface of special ops miscues.
In 2001, before US black ops forces began their massive, multi-front clandestine war against terrorism, there were 33,000 members of Special Operations Command and about 1,800members of the elite of the elite, the Joint Special Operations Command. There were then also 23 terrorist groups—from Hamas to the Real Irish Republican Army—as recognized by the State Department, including al-Qaeda, whose membership was estimated at
anywhere from 200 to 1,000. That group was primarily based in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, although small cells had operated in numerous
countries including Germany and the United States.
After
more than a decade of secret wars, massive surveillance, untold numbers
of night raids, detentions and assassinations, not to mention billionsupon billions of dollars spent, the results speak for themselves. SOCOM has more than doubled in size and the secretive JSOCmay
be almost as large as SOCOM was in 2001. Since September of that year,
36 new terror groups have sprung up, including multiple al-Qaeda
franchises, offshoots and allies. Today, these groups still operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan—there are now11 recognized al-Qaeda affiliates in the latter nation, five in
the former—as well as in Mali and Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, Nigeria
and Somalia, Lebanon and Yemen, among other countries. One offshoot was born of the American invasion of Iraq, was nurtured in
a US prison camp, and, now known as the Islamic State, controls a wide
swath of that country and neighboring Syria, a proto-caliphate in the
heart of the Middle East that was only the stuff of jihadi dreams back
in 2001. That group, alone, has an estimated strength of around 30,000 and managed to take over a huge swath of territory, including Iraq’s second largest city, despite being relentlessly targeted in its infancy by JSOC.
“We
need to continue to synchronize the deployment of SOF throughout the
globe,” says Votel. “We all need to be synched up, coordinated and
prepared throughout the command.” Left out of sync are the American
people who have consistently been kept in the dark about what America’s
special operators are doing and where they’re doing it, not to mention
the checkered results of, and blowback from, what they’ve done. But if
history is any guide, the black ops blackout will help ensure that this
continues to be a “golden age” for US Special Operations Command.
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January 20, 2015
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