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That may be a grandiose headline for a post that won’t deliver. But I have never understood the rationale for keeping a separate and semi-autonomous chain of command for Special Operations Forces in a counterinsurgency. If the perspective of the local population is “strategically decisive,” then it’s hard to understand why it’s acceptable to keep a command structure in place that allows some forces to place greater value on objectives other than population protection. Matt Gallagher relates a story in Kaboom about a Special Operations task force that came into his area of responsibility in Iraq and stormed a mosque, something he would never be allowed to do and the consequences of which — the offense caused to the locals — he’d have to live with.
The ultimate commander of the task force that complicated Gallagher’s life back then was a three-star Army general named Stanley McChrystal. Now McChrystal has seen it from the other perspective, and issued guidance that consolidates greater Special Operations control under his command. Before he issued that guidance, it turns out, SOF elements raided a home near Gardez looking for insurgents, killed two men and three women — none of whom were in insurgents — and ISAF later issued a misleading statement about what happened.
Maybe the new SOF guidance will get all U.S. and NATO elements in Afghanistan singing from the same strategic sheet music. But McChrystal’s guidance didn’t go all the way:
Only detainee operations and “very small numbers of U.S. S.O.F.,” or Special Operations forces, are exempted from the directive, Admiral Smith said. That is believed to include elite groups like the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s Seals.
This makes sense… why? Justin Elliott highlighted a statement from McChrystal at a recent town-hall meeting with his troops expressing displeasure at the number of times troops’ very understandable force-protection concerns have led them to shoot “an amazing number of people and [kill] a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.” That’s clearly an admirable sentiment and a responsible instruction. But why continue to keep a structure in place that allows different forces to play by different and potentially counterproductive rules?
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I do not know how closely Gen. McChrystal has been affiliated with our neo-con secret government. You probably have heard of the Goldman Sachs Multinational Foreign Advisory Board that tells the President what to do, run by Bankster and Fraudster Stephen Friedman. But I give the General some credit for being honest. Perhaps the military is getting tired of taking orders from new world order Chickenhawks.
I don’t know about Neo-con secret governments but Rumsfeld and Chaney did get the idea to take SOCOM out of the regular military chain of command. They basically created an independent force that could be run directly out of the OVP. Since Chaney had nothing but contempt for the CIA in general and it’s Congressional oversight in particular anything he could do to degrade their mission was a bonus. With Chaney gone it remains an interesting question as to who is directing SOCOM now. Neo-con “Left Behinds” in the bureaucracy? An ability to run rogue and unaccountable is heady stuff and it will be very difficult to get things back to the way they used to be even for Gen McChrystal.
60 Minutes tried to do a “puff piece” about a SOF embed a few months ago. It instead seemed to show the shocking extent to which the quality of SOF troops has been degraded by the necessity of adding tens of thousands to their ranks over a relatively short period. A scary depiction of a group of very deadly Keystone Cops/Drama Queens was the impression many people took away from the segment.