ARTICLE

February 2003

Navy Special Warfare Expands Command Role in Joint Force

by Roxana Tiron

For the first time ever, a Navy SEAL was the commander of a joint task force, fighting 400 to 600 miles inland in Afghanistan, during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Navy special warfare commanders were placed in unprecedented leadership positions during the conflict in Afghanistan. The upshot is that the SEALs (Sea, Land and Air) are redefining their role in U.S. and multinational military operations, said Navy Capt. Robert S. Harward, who was the commander of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-South, or TF KBAR, in Afghanistan.

Harward assumed command of Naval Special Warfare Group One in August 2001, and soon after the September 11 attacks, he deployed to Afghanistan.

His task force included Army troops from the 4th Psychological Operations Group, Air Force Special Operations personnel, and Marine and Army helicopter units. He also operated alongside a coalition of special operations forces from Denmark, Germany, Australia, Norway, Canada and New Zealand.

“We are not only commanding SEAL assets, but also other entities of the special operations forces community under one umbrella,” he told National Defense. “It is the first time the Navy special warfare has had that leadership role in the command and control structures.”

Harward’s troops were tasked with raiding sites in southern Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and Taliban forces and equipment might have been located.

“In the end, I had 2,800 people working for me,” said Harward. “I even had my own special operations theater component, which was comprised of AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] Pave Hawk helicopters and AC-130 gunships. I had refuelers. I had the MC-130 Echo [Combat Talon] penetrators.” Even with all that equipment, he said, he could not have done his job without help from the other services.

Harward said that Operation Enduring Freedom validated the SEALs’ capability to fight inland. “SEALs add additional capability on the ground,” he said.

The expanding role, however, means that naval special warfare units will need more people in combat and support operations. The Navy is getting more people into the “pipeline,” said Harward, but it is a “lengthy process until those people are ready to be deployed. It takes at least two years to “create” a SEAL, he added.

A growth in the number of SEALs in the future also will require an expansion of what Harward called the “deployable special warfare package ... so critical to what we do downrange.”

A case in point are the Seabees, or Navy engineers, who make up the Navy’s construction battalions. “They make it livable for us when we go into these austere places,” he said.

Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Based on his experience in Afghanistan, Harward said that, in the future, the SEALs will need enhanced capabilities for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. That would boost “our ability to see targets and assess the risk before we assault and then help to mitigate risk, while we are assaulting them.”

As the commander of the task force in Afghanistan “those were key issues for me. The more I can enhance those capabilities the better,” he said.

The emphasis on ISR also is seen among Marines who now are being deployed in special-operations force packages.

Real-time position information location for all friendly units is paramount in combat, said Marine Col. Chris Gunther, the former commanding officer of the 13th MEU (Special Operations Capable). He spoke during a panel discussion at an expeditionary warfare conference in Panama City, Fla.

“We have been talking about this for years,” he said. “We do not have it, or have very limited capabilities in this area with Blue Force friendlies, but we really do not have a system [with which] we know where everybody is on the battlefield.

“If you consider the complexity of the battlefield, like we had in [Operation] Anaconda, in Afghanistan, where you had friendly units essentially surrounding the bad guys and sorting them out it is very demanding, and we learned this lesson many times in the past,” Gunther added.

Asked about the utility of unmanned aircraft in combat, Harward said that UAVs do not provide the full picture of the battlefield. While they cut down on the risk to human operators, Harward said, UAVs “are not the total solution.”

The Predator UAV, for example, was “a great asset,” but the picture it provides is limited, much like “looking through a straw,” Harward emphasized. “You only see the small part of the picture, you do not get the big picture and you do not have that capability.”

The next best technology Harward would rely on for ISR was the Navy’s P-3 surveillance aircraft. “I could not do a lot of things without those P-3s, where I could put a SEAL on board and he could watch the target, not only assessing it before we hit it, but also during the execution of that target, so that our guys could mitigate risk as they went in to hit it,” he said.

“Everybody loved the P-3 and it was remarkable in its performance in Operation Enduring Freedom,” said Vice Adm. Charles Moore Jr., the Navy’s director of fleet readiness and logistics. “But the thing that you have to remember about the P-3 is that we had a unique environment where we did have a sanctuary in the air for it,” he said at the expeditionary warfare conference. “Even under those circumstances, we were very methodical about making the decision to employ the P-3 over the land in Afghanistan, we had some really conservative rules.”

Despite improvements in airborne surveillance, humans on the ground still remain the “key link” to ISR, said Harward. “That guy could tell you exactly [whether] that was a man or a woman and why he was digging that hole,” he said. “That man on the ground could do things for you those unmanned vehicles can’t do.”

Harward said that he watched the battle at Robert’s Ridge—where search and rescue teams were attacked by enemy fire while trying to save a Navy SEAL—through the eyes of the Predator.

“I still can’t tell you to this day what happened, and I do not think anyone knows what really happened on the ground,” he said. “That is the difference from [using] this UAV as opposed to putting that guy on the ground.”

Harward emphasized that putting people on the ground, despite the risk involved, is necessary. In general, U.S. forces had trouble establishing a positive identification of the enemy, “depending on whom the local forces were allying with that day,” Harward said. “Those [Afghani] forces on the ground who had links to the SOF force on the ground really gave us the fidelity to positively identify who the good guys were and the who the good guys were and make sure that we did the right thing.”

In the future, he said, “I want to be able to use technology to help me positively identify the enemy, technology that makes me use my CAS [close air support] more accurately and closer to the target and more quickly, or preventing collateral damage and fratricide.”

Lack of interoperability among allies posed some problems for Harward’s task force. None of the technologies from the seven countries under his command was compatible with American weapon systems, he said. “They are all great shooters ... but they can’t integrate their systems ... they can’t bring their gunships.” That cuts down on their mobility, he explained, and may affect future combat situations.

Close-Air Support
Harward categorized the Air Force AC-130 gunship as the ideal close-air support platform that ground forces would like to have 24 hours a day, because of its precision. “We know they can’t do that, because of the threats during the day,” he said. “But the technology that can put that platform up at 2,600 feet 24/7 would be a tremendous asset.”

Gunther, the Marine colonel, said that close-air support has come a long way in recent years. But he cautioned that too much is made of the effectiveness of the JDAM, the joint direct attack munition, widely used in Afghanistan. The JDAMs are gravity bombs equipped with a GPS-guidance tailkit.

JDAM is not the answer to all air-delivered fires, Gunther noted. “It only works on fixed targets. It is not good on vertical aperture kind of things like caves. ... You have to use it where it is designed to be most effective, and not use it for everything, and then be disappointed with the effects.”

He emphasized that the single most critical element in CAS operations is the trained pilot. “In some cases, we tend to push away from that,” he said. “We aren’t using the right amount of briefs the way we should, and most especially we are not making sure that the pilots get the opportunity to get their eyes on the target before we pick them.”

In urban environments, particularly, the need for smaller diameter bombs is imperative, said Gunther. “Our aircraft are a lot more capable today than they were in the last generation of aircraft,” he said. “But we have got to be able to continue the whole training cycle of CAS. ... That involves having the pilot engaged in the process, because he is the guy who ultimately is the key link.”

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