U.S. special operations forces have a well-established role as the nation's
unconventional fighters, who often tackle dangerous and sensitive combat assignments.
Increasingly, however, they find themselves in peacekeeping roles. In recent
months, for example, special operations personnel have:
- Assisted Australian troops in setting up a civil/military operation center for
the international peacekeeping force in East Timor.
- Produced television programming and publications, including even comic books,
to warn people throughout the war-torn Balkans about the dangers of land mines.
- Helped monitor ceasefire agreements ending a border war between Peru and Ecuador.
- Trained soldiers from seven African nations to serve, when needed, on peacekeeping
forces on that strife-wracked continent.
- Flown 19 tons of disaster-relief supplies into Vietnam, helping an old enemy
of the United States to recover from its worst flooding in a century.
Don't get the wrong idea. Special operations forces have not been given a makeover.
They still perform plenty of the unconventional, combat-related assignments.
Many of these assignments are secret-or "black"-operations. It is
acknowledged, nevertheless, that special operations play a principal role in
U.S. strategy to counter terrorist attacks. They also are deeply involved in
U.S. efforts to counter the flow of cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru,
through Central American and the Caribbean into the United States.
When U.S. embassies are under siege and need help quickly, special operators
often are called in to beef up security and-when necessary-evacuate the diplomats
and their families.
Special operators were active-though usually covert-players, in addition, during
the 1999 air war against Yugoslavia. Twice during that brief war, combined teams
of Air Force special operations aircrews and Army Special Forces troopers rescued
downed pilots, one from an F-117, the other from an F-16. Each time, the teams
flew helicopters into Yugoslavia, located the pilot and picked him up before
the Serbs could reach him.
Growing Demand
While such combat-related missions continue-usually without fanfare-special
operations forces find they are in growing demand for assignments aimed, in
one way or another, at preventing wars, teaching the soldiers of other nations
to defend themselves, limiting casualties after the fighting stops, and even
providing humanitarian relief in natural disasters around the world.
In fact, special operations forces are conducting more missions, in more places,
and under a broader range of conditions than ever before.
During fiscal year 1998, according to the most recent figures, special operations
teams, usually groups of 12 to 15, deployed to 153 countries around the world.
That is about triple the number of missions in 1991, at the end of the Cold
War. Since then, the special operations budget has grown from $2.4 billion to
$3.4 billion today.
"In any given week, 7,000 special operations personnel are deployed in
60 countries worldwide," said George Grimes, spokesman for the U.S. Special
Operations Command.
Officials cite two reasons for the growing popularity of special operations
units:
- Their special training and language skills give U.S. decision makers a wider
range of options in dealing with the kinds of regional crises that have erupted
repeatedly since the fall of the Soviet Union.
- U.S. military commanders and ambassadors around the world are coming to recognize
these capabilities and how to use them.
The Special Operations Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, in
Tampa, Fla., consists of more than 46,000 troops, active and reserve, including:
- Army Special Forces, Delta Force, 75th Ranger Regiment, 160th Special Operations
Aviation Regiment (Airborne), psychological operations units and civil affairs
teams, all based at Ft. Bragg, N.C.
- Navy Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) forces, special boat units and SEAL delivery units,
headquartered in Coronado, Calif.
- Air Force special operations squadrons (fixed and rotary wing), special tactics
squadrons, a foreign-internal-defense (FID) squadron and a combat weather squadron,
centered at Hurlburt Field, Fla.
During the Cold War, special operations units were reorganized and expanded
to compete with the Soviet Union in a long series of unconventional struggles
in the Third World. They began to gain fame in 1961, when President Kennedy
gave Special Forces the right to wear their green berets. Special operators
played major roles in the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early '70s.
In addition to their traditional war-making skills, such as parachuting behind
enemy lines and swimming through mine fields, special operators now were asked
to take on more unconventional tasks-to train Third World soldiers, to dig wells
and to provide medical treatment in remote villages-all in the name of "winning
the hearts and minds" of Third World populations.
Special operations units remained assigned to their separate services until
the 1980s, when a series of events pointed out a need for greater coordination.
First, in 1980, an attempt to free hostages from the U.S. embassy in Iran failed
spectacularly, when helicopters collided at an isolated site called Desert One.
Then, in 1983, another operation aimed to rescue U.S. medical students from
a perceived communist takeover on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It succeeded,
but the operation revealed "some truths that could not be ignored,"
said Defense Secretary William Cohen in an address at Special Operations Command
headquarters.
"At that time, the services' special operations forces coordinated neither
among themselves, nor with their own service's conventional commanders."
As a result, he said, they "were out of sync."
To correct this flaw, Congress in 1987 combined all special operations units
into the current command. Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine, was co-author
of the legislation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought an end to special operations'
Cold War missions, but the command experienced a sharp increase in demand for
its services in the regional conflicts of the past decade. Special operations
forces were active, that same year, in the invasion of Manuel Noriega's Panama
and in the 1990 Persian Gulf War.
More and more of the new missions are aimed at preventing wars or-when fighting
does break out-bringing it to a halt before it can threaten regional peace.
Peacekeeping, however, can be dangerous work. In December, a member of the
10th Special Forces Group, Staff Sgt. Joseph E. Suponcic, died in Kosovo after
his vehicle struck a land mine.
In 1993, special operators were part of a United Nations peacekeeping force
of 38,000 troops from about two dozen countries, which tried to bring peace
between warring clans in famine-stricken Somalia. When U.S. rangers and members
of Delta Force tried to arrest Somali warlord Mohamad Farah Aidid, the U.S.
force was surrounded by heavily armed clansmen in downtown Mogadishu and had
to fight its way out.
In the Balkans
Special operators have been active in U.S. peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia since
1995, and in Kosovo, since last summer.
Hundreds of special operators served in the two regions. Special Forces soldiers
trained civilian demining teams. SEALs performed underwater reconnaissance to
help build bridges over rivers. Air Force special operators provided search
and rescue services for air operations and flew in emergency supplies.
To teach Bosnian and Kosovar children about the dangers of land mines, psychological
operations personnel are distributing specially designed comic books-with the
permission of their publisher, DC Comics-featuring the world-famous characters
of Superman and Wonder Woman.
To relieve the deployment burden on U.S. forces, Special Forces units are teaching
military personnel from other nations to perform such tasks. In Africa, for
example, they have trained battalion-sized contingents from seven of that continent's
nations-Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, Ghana, Benin and Cote d'Ivoire-to participate
in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions in that civil war and famine-plagued
region. The program, known as the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI),
is sponsored jointly by the United States, participating countries, the Organization
of African Unity and the United Nations.
ACRI aims to provide equipment and training to 10,000 to 12,000 African soldiers
before 2002. It is intended, according to a Defense Department official, "to
create highly effective, rapidly deployable peacekeeping units that can operate
jointly in the event of a humanitarian crisis or in a traditional peacekeeping
operation."
Also, under a program known as Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET), special
operators participate in more than 200 training exercises with foreign military
services all over the world.
JCET exercises are held in places as diverse as European states seeking admission
to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, former republics of the old Soviet
Union, U.S. allies along the rim of East Asia, struggling nations of Africa
and drug-producing countries in Latin America.
The primary purpose of JCET is supposed to be training for U.S. special operations
personnel themselves, helping them learn to operate with other military services
and to become familiar with local terrain and cultures. But defense officials
admit that the exercises have an important "collateral" benefit. "JCETs
open doors-politically, diplomatically, and militarily-for the United States,"
said a special operations official.
"By working and training with foreign militaries, special operations forces
can reduce tensions, enforce democratic values and build trust among nations,"
said Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a
former commander of the Special Operations Command.
Human Rights Complaints
Not everybody, however, buys that argument. Some critics, such as Ivan Eland,
director of defense policy studies for the Washington-based Cato Institute,
propose that the JCET program be abolished. Eland's reasoning, in part: In some
countries-such as Colombia and Indonesia-training has been provided to military
personnel believed to have committed gross violations of human rights.
Defense Department officials admit that this may have been a problem in the
past. But Brian Sheridan, assistant defense secretary for special operations
and low-intensity conflict, recently told senators that, since 1998, steps have
been taken to prevent such problems from recurring.
All planned JCET activities must now be reported in advance to the secretary
of defense for review, Sheridan said. The review, Sheridan said, encompasses
all information relevant to current U.S. foreign policy, including alleged violations
of human rights.
The secretary would not approve proposed training if the department has received
"credible information" from the State Department concerning "gross
human rights violations by the foreign military force in question, Sheridan
said. Exceptions to this rule could be made, he explained, if "all necessary
corrective steps" have been taken or if the secretary grants a waiver "for
extraordinary circumstances."
In Indonesia-where military forces have been accused of taking part in attacks
against residents of East Timor, that country's independence-minded province-the
Defense Department suspended JCET training in 1998, according to spokesman P.J.
Crowley.
Another special operations program is aimed at helping countries in former
war zones create programs to remove land mines within their borders. An estimated
70 nations around the world are plagued by perhaps 110 million uncleared land
mines, buried during wars that ended sometimes decades ago, but still are lethal.
They claim about 500 lives each week and maim even more people.
The United States has refused to sign an international agreement banning all
anti-personnel land mines, insisting they are still necessary to protect U.S.
forces, especially in Korea.
Instead, the United States has launched an initiative aimed at eliminating
all land mines that endanger civilians by the year 2010. Under this program,
special operations troops have set up demining programs in 16 countries, including
Kosovo, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Honduras.
U.S. personnel do not participate directly in mine clearance operations. Rather,
Special Forces train indigenous demining teams to do the work. Civil affairs
personnel work with host governments to set up the infrastructure necessary
for demining activities to continue.
Dangers of Mines
Psychological operations troops conduct mine-awareness programs, teaching people
about the dangers of mines, what they look like and what to do if a mine is
located.
In all, U.S. special operations forces have trained more than a quarter of
the world's specialists in finding and disposing of land mines.
Special operators also participate in humanitarian missions. They speed the
flow of relief following natural disasters, such as Hurricane Mitch in Central
America and the recent flooding in Vietnam and Venezuela. They fly in supplies,
set up emergency shelters, help rebuild roads, and provide medical care.
The steady increase in deployments, however, is attracting a growing chorus
of criticism. Presidential candidates as divergent as Democrat Bill Bradley
and Republican George W. Bush protest that U.S. forces, in general, are-to quote
Bush-"overused and underfunded."
But the Special Operations Command says its personnel are managing quite well
under the increasing tempo. "Many of these missions are short in duration,
and we rely on our reserve units to perform a lot of them," noted command
spokesman Grimes.
"It is a hardship to a certain extent, but the people in special operations
don't take it that way," added retired Special Forces Col. Albert DeProspero,
currently director of the Aberdeen (Md.) Defense Group.
"The bulk of these troops are triple volunteers," DeProspero said.
"They volunteered for the military, they volunteered for special operations,
and they volunteered for their specialty training. They love deployments. That's
what they do."
The most serious problem facing special operations forces, according to Sheridan,
"is modernization-particularly the need to modernize [the force's] mobility
and fire support platforms." Both are essential, officials said, even in
peacekeeping missions, where getting in and out quickly can be critical and
heavy combat is a frequent possibility.
Twenty years have passed "since the failure at Desert One forced the department
to focus on the adequacy of the resources dedicated to special operations,"
Sheridan said. To be effective, he added, special operations "require robust
land, sea and air infiltration, exfiltration and support capabilities."
The command is in the process of acquiring:
-
The CV-22, a variant of the tilt-rotor aircraft being procured by the Marines.
- The Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS), a dry mini-submarine that greatly
increases the range, duration, payload and diversity of clandestine maritime capabilities.
The command also is procuring three off-the-shelf radio systems. The Special
Mission Radio System (SMRS) will replace high-frequency radios, the Multiband
Inter/Intra Team Radio (MBITR) will replace all intra-team radios, and the Multiband
Multimission Radio (MBMMR) will replace SATCOM radio systems. Eventually, the
Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), currently under development, is planned
to replace all of the command's tactical radio systems.
Additionally, the command is modernizing the avionics and defensive systems
of its aging aircraft. In cooperation with the Air Force, special operations
is upgrading its C-130 transport fleets with new avionics equipment.
These and similar upgrades, Sheridan said, are needed for special operations
to play an important role in national defense.
"Over the past 20 years, special operations forces have moved from being
a peripheral player to being a vital asset," he said. "As we move
into the future, the department must ensure that ... special operations ...
remain able to support the needs of the national command authorities and the
theater commanders-in-chief."