Special Ops Forces: How Elite Forces Became Military Muscle

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/special-ops-retro.html

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When it comes to just about every policy set by Barack Obama, President Trump has proved to be a dedicated Marxist. As in Groucho Marx. In the 1932 film “Horse Feathers,” Marx sang, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The same holds for Mr. Trump, who has made dismantling the Obama legacy his goal, one program at a time.

There is a notable exception. Like his predecessor, this president has favored, and even augmented, military actions that rely heavily on Special Operations forces. But skeptical experts say this is one holdover policy that Mr. Trump really should rethink. Their concern is that these elite forces — Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers and Delta Force among them — are stretched thin, with about 8,000 of them active on any given day in more than 80 countries.

“The force has been stretched to the max,” said Wade Ishimoto, a former adviser to the Defense Department on Special Operations. He added: “Special operations should not be the panacea for every kind of difficulty that we find ourselves around the world facing, to include terrorism.”

Mr. Ishimoto spoke to Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that examine important news stories of the past and the way they still shape developments today. Looking back across four decades, this episode shows how two major events — one a spectacular success, the other an abject failure — figured mightily in creating the Joint Special Operations Command, which is central to the United States counterterrorism campaign and other missions.

The success was the 1976 Israeli commando raid on the Entebbe airport in Uganda, where Palestinian militants and allied German radicals had flown an Air France plane they hijacked. Abetted by Uganda’s erratic dictator, Idi Amin, the hijackers held more than 100 hostages for a week. Nearly all were Israelis, threatened with death unless their country and several others released Palestinian prisoners. They seemed doomed, given that Israel had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists and that Uganda seemed too far away for even the long arm of the Israeli military.

But in a stunning operation that began late on July 3, 1976, Israeli commandos swooped in. They killed the hijackers and dozens of Ugandan soldiers, gathered the hostages and flew them to safety. The raid was carried out with near perfection, though it cost the lives of four hostages and of the commando leader, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

A new era in counterterrorism had dawned. Joshua Shani, a retired Israeli brigadier general, was there, having flown the first C-130 Hercules cargo plane to land at Entebbe. He told Retro Report: “It was like the whole world say, ‘Wow, they have chutzpah, these guys. They are damn good.’”

They were so good that the United States tried something similar in April 1980 to end a hostage crisis in Iran that traumatized this country. Fifty-two United States diplomats and other citizens had been taken captive five months earlier under a new Iranian theocracy hostile to America. From the get-go, this rescue mission, code-named Eagle Claw, would not be an easy assignment for a Delta Force commando unit still in its infancy. “The only difference between this and the Alamo is Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in,” said Mr. Ishimoto, who was an intelligence officer on the Delta Force raid.

Almost everything that could have gone wrong did. Two American helicopters were disabled by severe dust storms over Iran. Separately, a third one broke down. Still another crashed into a tanker aircraft; eight servicemen were killed. It was a disaster that left America humiliated — and left the hostages stuck for nine more months.

But failure can be a powerful teacher. Eagle Claw was. What emerged within a few years was a well-trained, disciplined force of special operators groomed for counterterrorism, hostage rescue and other demanding missions. The force today is perhaps 10 times as big as it was in 1980, when its numbers, Mr. Ishimoto said, were between 6,000 and 8,000. As for successes, one need look no further than the 2011 SEALs raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found and killed.

With Americans weary of war without end since Sept. 11, 2001, President Obama withdrew most conventional soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, he turned the Joint Special Operations Command into a dray horse. Its members are just about everywhere: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, you name it. Their impact can be deadly. But their footprint is lighter, and less costly, than that of a fully decked-out Army operation.

This commando force plainly appeals to Mr. Trump, who has shown scant faith in “soft power,” the use of diplomacy and humanitarian example to win friends and influence nations. His budget proposals have included many billions more for the Defense Department and billions less for the State Department and the Agency for International Development. In his first half-year in office, military special operators were sent on about five times as many lethal missions in what for the United States are non-battlefield countries — Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia — as there had been during Mr. Obama’s final six months.

Relying on them so heavily has a price. Though they make up roughly 5 percent of the total armed forces, they have accounted for at least half of the nation’s combat deaths since 2015. The risks were evident mere days into the Trump presidency when a member of the SEALs was killed on a flawed night mission in Yemen that also left more than a dozen civilians dead.

It’s easy to romanticize commandos. Just ask any Hollywood director. But they are not supermen. Even Israeli forces have lost their post-Entebbe glow, with blemished missions in Lebanon and Gaza that led to their own men and innocent civilians being killed.

Some military experts worry that even though the American teams also have chutzpah and are damn good, they are being asked to do too much too often. “These guys truly are amazing warriors,” Russell D. Howard, a retired brigadier general who was a special forces commander, told The Cipher Brief, a website focused on security issues. “But they’re more than that. They’re smart, flexible, adaptable and unafraid.” The problem, General Howard said, is that “the guys are still deployed all the time.”

“These guys are a national treasure,” he said. “In my day, it cost an average of $1 million to train a special forces soldier. Now it probably costs closer to $1.5 million, and you don’t waste that asset. You use them judiciously when you really need them.”