The Special Operations Cluster Fuck

The Special Operations Cluster Fuck 

Right up front, a confession: I have never served in a special operations unit, or even an infantry unit, and, during my brief military career, the USAF never sent me to Vietnam. Despite being a fitness fanatic and doing extreme sports, even as a young man I would never have made the cut. But perhaps an outside observer can see things people on the inside might miss — or might not want to see. And, as with all of our military, there are serious problems with our special operations units and with our whole approach to special operations. If you think of a continuum of different kinds of warfare ranging from mechanized and air war on one extreme to spies and saboteurs in civilian clothes on the other end, special operations units come closer to spies than to pilots or tank crews. Typically, they are elite infantrymen who commute to work in exotic ways, by parachute insertion or by using SCUBA or rebreather gear and swimming to (and hopefully from) their targets. They do things like reconnaissance, sniping, sabotage and demolitions, prisoner snatches, assassinations, hostage rescue, and calling in air strikes and applying terminal guidance to “smart bombs.”

Traditionally, military leaders distrusted elite or special units, considering them difficult to control, harmful to the morale of the “non-elite” troops, and prone to recruit high quality personnel who might be needed in more conventional units. Nevertheless, in WWII the U.S. formed a great many special units, including Army Rangers, Marine Raiders, and UDTs (Underwater Demolition Teams, the ancestors of SEALs). All but the UDTs were disbanded during or right at the end of the war, although Ranger units, now airborne, were organized and trained again for Korea — only to be disbanded yet again. Today we have Rangers, SEALs, Special Forces, Delta Force, Marine Force Recon, MARSOC (Marine Special Operations Command), and USAF special operations units, such as the Para Rescue Jumpers (PJs), the Combat Control Teams (CCTs), and the Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs, whose mission and training overlap with that of the CCT people). The USN and USMC also have their own JTACs, and then the services have sniper teams and Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) teams. The Army has the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) who take commandoes to work, and the Navy has its equivalent, the Special Warfare Combat Crewmen (SWCC).

The famous Navy SEALs are a good illustration of the irrationality of our present organization. True, they are boastful publicity hounds (their primary school is next to and overlaps with a public beach in San Diego), but they are, indeed, superhumanly tough, dedicated, and highly capable warriors. SEALs are trained in SCUBA diving and in the use of oxygen rebreather gear, and their dive training is far more extreme than what we civilian sport divers endure. They can do reconnaissance underwater, and hydrographic surveys, attach limpet mines to enemy ships, and place electronic listening devices in enemy ports and naval bases. They are also extensively trained in land warfare, advanced weapons and tactics, helicopter rappelling and fast roping, rock climbing, and parachute insertion. Many are also HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening, or freefall parachuting) qualified. They have their own snipers. They are trained to do almost anything — and this is the problem.

Either it is practical to train all the members of a single unit to do all these different missions, operate on land and sea and under the sea, and use all these methods of insertion and exfiltration, or it is not. If it is, we only need one main special operations unit for all the services; there is no point in having as many as we do now. But if, as I suspect, units are more effective if they are a bit more specialized, then there is no point in trying to train one unit to do everything. This looks to me suspiciously like empire building and a desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” If one spec ops units parachutes, they all want to do it, or if one uses underwater breathing gear, they all want to do that. For example, some, but not all Army Rangers, Special Forces, Marine Force Recon, and MARSOC warriors are trained in SCUBA and the use of rebreather gear, allowing them to duplicate SEAL missions. All USAF CCT men are fully dive qualified, and the PJs are SCUBA trained. While CCTs may accompany SEALs on missions, why are the PJs, whose mission is air rescue and first aid, trained to dive? Are they going to rescue someone whose plane has just happened to crash in water shallow enough for SCUBA? Generally, that is not much over 100 feet, and the average depth of the world’s oceans is almost three miles. Also, submerged plane crash victims tend to be dead — it’s called “drowning.” Is it for recovery of dead bodies? Under a mile or two of water? I think not. As for surface swims, SCUBA tanks and a weight belt make surface swimming much harder; with just a wetsuit, mask, fins, and snorkel you float like a cork. And here I speak from experience.

All that time, money, and energy spent on training SEALs for land missions could be spent making them even better at underwater missions. After all, we have a unit for land warfare — it’s called the Army. And the cost of dive training for units who don’t need to dive is a waste as well.