ARTICLE

May 2003

Demand for Special Ops Forces Outpaces Supply

Commanders worry back-to-back wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are stretching the force

by Roxana Tiron

Senior officials at the U.S. Special Operations Command are grappling with a looming force structure crisis. At their current level, special operations forces can meet today’s demands, but it will be difficult for SOCOM to sustain the pace, given the rapid growth in their worldwide commitments.

Nearly 20,000 special operators are involved in ongoing conflicts in Iraq (more than 12,000) and Afghanistan (about 8,000). That is nearly half the entire special operations force of 47,000.

Special operations forces can’t be mass-produced on short notice, said Army Lt. Gen. Bryan Brown, SOCOM’s deputy commander. “The worst thing we can do right now is to try to add a bunch of people. We have a thoughtful system that has proven itself. We need to increase our recruiting and the troops.”

People cannot simply be assigned as special operators and be rushed through the training process, he emphasized. It takes at least two years to train a member of the Army’s Special Forces, for example. According to a SOCOM spokesperson, the Army is continuing to recruit and train Green Berets even during the escalating operation tempo.

SOCOM is not structured to meet the growing demands of the war on terrorism, said Marshall Billingslea, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

Despite funding increases, “we are going to fight the war on terrorism with the resources that we have today for the next year,” he said. In fiscal year 2004, SOCOM received a $1.5 billion budget boost, which brings the command’s annual budget to $6.7 billion.

Regional Commanders
“There is a level of activity going on a daily basis, which only gets noticed in a crisis,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. William Tangney, former deputy commander of SOCOM. A large portion of SOF troops generally are committed on a daily basis in support of the regional commanders.

In the case of the Army’s Green Berets, for example, before the conflict in Afghanistan started, a couple of hundred operators were deployed to South America to fight the war on drugs. The Seventh Special Forces Group deals with South America. The First Special Forces Group was deployed to countries in East Asia, while the 10th Group was assigned to support U.S. European Command, with operators working in places like Bosnia and Kosovo. The Fifth Group focused on the Middle East, while the Third Group has responsibilities in Africa.

Special operations units are heavily involved in both Afghanistan and Iraq on a larger scale, “but they are still to be able to deal with their contingencies” in other parts of the world as well, said a SOCOM spokesperson.

“Afghanistan spiced-up the op tempo, and now with Iraq is a lot higher, plus, at the same time, you have the commitments around the world, even though they have been reduced,” Tangney said. The operational tempo for special operations started to grow after the Gulf War in 1991, he said.

“Ever since 1991, the op tempo has been fairly high, but manageable,” he said. It increased even more a few years later with the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, he said. However, he said, that was still manageable.

In the Afghani war, “we were able to execute those months of conflict without overly stretching the force,” he added. But with the fighting in Iraq, coming so shortly after Afghanistan, “they stretched out,” he said.

“With the size of the force that you have today, especially in the Army, you are not going to be able to create another Special Forces group,” Tangney said. But he noted that SOCOM has a larger force today than it had in 1991, even though the conventional services downsized dramatically.

When the Air Force went from 22 fighter wing equivalents to 13 fighter wing equivalents, the size of the Air Force special ops increased, with the addition of the MC-130H Combat Talon aircraft and the AC-130U gunships, said Tangney.

“There was a fair amount of growth when everybody was decreasing,” he said.

Currently, the Navy Special Warfare Center is planning to increase the SEAL teams from eight to 10. “We want to grow more SEAL teams into a crisis response force, which will increase our ability to react,” said Capt. Randy Goodman, from the Naval Special Warfare Command.

It takes about three years from the time a SEAL is selected into the program until he is combat ready, said Cmdr. Ryan Zinke.

Ideally, the Navy would like to recruit about 250 SEALs a year, but right now the service is falling short, with only 200 a year. The Navy selects operators from a pool of 900 applicants out of which roughly 150 do not make it through the first day of training, said Zinke. It costs about $800,000 to train one SEAL in his first year.

He said that the Navy is competing with corporate America for the same people. “Even though our retention is great among the special operations level, it is still not at the level where we could sustain it,” Zinke said.

According to Zinke, the SEAL force structure is so small that NSW cannot find enough SEALs to train the incoming freshmen and the rest of the SEALs. NSW is looking at participating in the Army’s airborne trooper program and plans to contract out some of the communications courses, as well as some of the shooting courses.

One area of special operations that is hurting for both people and better technology is the psychological operations, or PSYOPS units.

“The world has evolved greatly since the creation of PSYOPS,” Billingslea said. “We are going to capitalize on the revolution in communications technology that has happened and yet in some way passed us [PSYOPS] by today. We are going to focus on things such as bandwidth, satellites, satellite radios, unmanned aircraft, digital media, to upgrade our PSYOPS capability to increase our reach and our ability to message into denied areas.”

Brown said that SOCOM intends to grow the psychological operations force and “will increase our planning, our coordination capability and increase command power to our geographic combatant commanders.”

Restructuring
SOCOM will be restructured and will take on a new leadership position, said Billingslea. “We will move from a supporting commander role to one of the supported commander roles for specific missions,” said Brown. “Since its inception, SOCOM has always had such authority but was seldom executed. Now it needs to do it more.”

Continuous regional presence and sustained operations in various theaters is going to require additional combat and service support to SOF from the conventional services, said Billingslea. “We are going to need conventional forces to step in and [...] pick up certain missions that are not SOF unique missions necessarily,” such as combat search and rescue and civilian evacuations. Regional commanders are relying on the SOF troops to do such missions, “because of the competence attached to their abilities.”

Regional combat commanders will also no longer be able to own SOF units assigned to their area of operations. “Assets needed one day in one country are going to be needed somewhere far the next day,” said Billingslea. “We are going to change how SOF organize and execute their missions.”

He explained that the conventional services will have to provide more weapons platforms and logistics support. “They have already done so,” he acknowledged. “But we are going to be calling on them again.”

Brown explained that extended SOF missions mean that a new type of combatant command headquarters will be needed. “The traditional trained organizations and the equipped missions that we have done so well in the past will be joined with a capability to execute the war against terrorism. We have established a 24/7 joint operation center available to the CINCs and special operation centers [of] command,” said Brown.

SOF units will be needed for missions such as special reconnaissance, information operations and extended logistics. Improved reconnaissance capacities could come from unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as unmanned underwater vehicles, said Billingslea. More technicians and analysts are also needed to analyze and interpret data, he added.

Extended logistics are under review right now, said Billingslea, because fighting war on terror is placing an additional burden on the support systems that were designed to react only in episodic deployments, in conjunction with conventional forces. “SOCOM has a modest organic command and control and logistics structure to enable SOF to conduct short duration contingency operations,” he said.

Improving airlift capabilities is a top priority. The war in Afghanistan has left the special operators’ community with aircraft shortages, particularly MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

During the conflict, 11 MH-47s were damaged and two were totally destroyed, said Brown. “Today, we can’t meet all the requirements we have with this helicopter.” He said the increase in the SOCOM budget is going to help replace those aircraft.

The C-130 fleet is also overtaxed, said Brown. “Resources are being made available to quickly provide Air Force Special Operations Command with the additional aircraft.” Four C-130s are going to be converted into AC-130 gunships, one of the most popular platforms among special operators.

The new gunships will “include enhanced survivability assets, such as directional infrared countermeasures, decoy and jammers,” said Brown. “We are also looking at a single barrel 30-mm cannon to replace the 25-mm.”

Production for the MC-130 air refueling system has been accelerated to have 24 systems by the end of 2005, Brown noted.

Command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies, meanwhile, need serious improvement, said Brig. Gen. (Select) Bruce Burda, the vice- commander of AFSOC.

He said that the Air Force continues to work with stove-piped functions and over-classification. That has resulted in incidents of fratricide and a “few close calls.”

“Integration/deconfliction needs to be an area we need to improve on,” he said. “Part of it is an education and training issue with our personnel, [for] them to understand the conops [concepts of operation] better.”

He emphasized that the Air Force operators need to get a continuing flow of information and “share the fratricide incidents with the force to make sure that they know what happened and that it does not happen again.”

According to Brown, SOCOM is developing new technology for ground operators to acquire precision locator data for the use and targeting of GPS satellite-guided and laser-guided munitions.

“It’s got to be small, lightweight,” he said. “The PTLD [Precision Target Locator Designator program] has envisioned such a device, but we are not there yet.” The device needs to be able to transfer the information directly to the overhead platforms, “so that we can eliminate the problem of fratricide.”

The use of tactical UAVs in conjunction with other systems enhances reconnaissance and helps with the positive identification of targets, said Burda.

UAV video feeds were made available to the AC-130 gunship during the war in Afghanistan. Burda said that AFSOC “acquired the ability to integrate UAVs into terminal attack control operations.”

Brown said he would like to be able to transfer UAV data directly into aircraft platforms at all times. Real-time video and the ability to reach back to overhead platforms and UAVs should be available to Special Forces and SEALs at “the farthest end of the earth, without requiring to carry a myriad of computers and radios.”

Navy Special Warfare is working to develop UAV programs for situational awareness, as well.

NSW is also working with the surface Navy on futuristic programs, such as the Littoral Combat Ship and the DDX land-attack destroyer. “They are building these ships with the employment of SEALs and special operations as a big part of the program,” he said.

The Advanced Seal Delivery Vehicle (ASDS) will achieve operational capability this summer, after significant schedule delays and cost overruns, according to Brown. NSW also developed a $5.5 million simulator for the ASDS. The ASDS is a mini-submersible that transports SEALs from submarines to the shore.

Special operators play an important part in evaluating their new equipment and making recommendations for future investments, said SOCOM officials.

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