Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces by Tom Clancy
Unlike the somewhat makeshift Guardia Nacional barracks back in San Fernando de Apure, this was a true military barracks, with neatly trimmed grass and shrubbery, solid buildings, and lots of lean, healthy Venezuelan SF soldiers. As I looked around I couldn’t help but feel that here the “first team” was running things, and that a good man had to be in charge.
Venezuelan soldiers of the 107th Special Forces Battalion learn trauma treatment skills from ODA 746 troopers.
JOHN D. GRESHAM
A good man was in charge, an officer in the style of the GAC FAC commander; his name was Colonel Jose Grant.
In the comfortable SF team room, I was introduced to Captain Jeff, the ODA 746 commander, who filled me in on what the team was up to.
Colonel Grant’s soldiers, he explained, ran three- to five-day patrols along the border region—some on foot, some in helicopters, and some in trucks or 4WD vehicles. The one capability that they lacked was the ability to patrol and interdict traffic along the many rivers that crisscross the border region. To overcome this shortcoming, the Venezuelan Army had ordered for the 107th large inflatable rubber boats with powerful outboard motors (which would be arriving during the coming summer). To prepare them for this—as well as to improve their overall readiness—the U.S. had sent ODA 746. In addition to general light infantry refresher training, they were also training the Venezuelans to handle 12 ft./4 m. versions of the Zodiac-style units that would soon arrive.
Soon after that, I joined Colonel Grant and his men for lunch (like GAC FAC, the 107th has a single mess area for all personnel), after which I went off to a nearby ranch to observe a rubber boat class.
Ninety minutes later, I was clambering through a swampy meadow toward a large freshwater pond, where ODA 746 (under the supervision of Colonel Grant and Captain Jeff) would be exercising a company of Venezuelan SF soldiers.
The objective was to teach them how to rapidly assemble boats, get them into the water, and to safely handle them. Later would come other water exercises, including handling the boats under river conditions.
Since the men had already had some run through back at the barracks, they were ready to go when they arrived. There were only a couple of safety matters to be dealt with, and then the exercise could start. Each man was issued a life preserver, and a sentry was set up with a loaded M4 carbine at the ready... not to ward off a FARC attack, but to scare off the 6 ft./2 m. long anaconda that lived in the pond. (It only made a single appearance that afternoon.) With safety issues under control, the fun began.
Soldiers of the 107th Special Forces Battalion conduct training in rubber boats. Their counterdrug mission includes riverine operations.
JOHN D. GRESHAM
The 107th troops were broken into twelve-man teams, which then competed with one another through each phase in the training. Races were held for assembly and inflation of the boats, for moving them to the pond and getting them afloat, and for handling them in the water. This last involved rowing the boats out to the middle of the pond, overturning, righting, and reentering them, and then dashing back to shore. The competition was spirited, with a cliffhanger tie for first at the finish.
And that was it.
With the end of the boat races, my visit to ODA 746 came to a close. Now there was only the long flight home.
It had been a good, productive trip. And I’m grateful to my SF friends for the opportunity to share their labors. It’s hard to imagine better ambassadors for our nation’s deepest, strongest values.
Into the Twenty-first Century
It’s always the guys that fight who count the most. Not technology. Not the hardware that emerges from technology. This is true of all branches of military service—and even of space warriors. But it is most true of Special Forces. The people in that community define the community, not the hardware they carry ... or that carries them.
Sure, SF soldiers can’t help but look lustfully at the “gee-whiz” technology their Army brothers and sisters will receive over the next decade. It’s just that very little of the new gear will be of any value to the majority of SF missions: Over 90 percent of these will continue to be small training and assistance missions to developing countries, usually involving no more than a few A detachments, supported by a B detachment for command, control, and logistics assistance.
Still, new technologies—and high-tech gear—will play a role in SF missions, but it will play it primarily in the “big” ones. That is, in those large-scale operations where Special Forces are one constituent among many, such as, in the 1990s, the operations in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and Haiti.
Some of this gear will find its way into every SF rucksack.
Inevitably, there will be other changes—in planning, in communications, in systems. There must be. Let’s look forward into the SF world of the twenty-first century and explore some of the likely ones.
The Twenty-first Century Special Forces
So, just what will SF soldiers look like in the years to come?
Just like they do today, I hope and pray. Right now, the mix of education, training, mental and emotional skills, and esprit approaches an optimum balance. Though there can always be improvements and increased efficiencies, it is likely that the standards and skills emphasized in the early phases of the SF Qualification Course at the JFK school can be retained in their current format for a long time to come.
The news is far from all good, however.
While the “Q” Course produces extraordinary men, and will continue to do so, the military force those men serve is in trouble. Like the rest of the U.S. military, Special Forces are having a tough time recruiting and retaining the personnel they need to carry out their assigned roles and missions. Worse, the demands on the SF community continue to grow, especially in areas like Foreign Internal Defense (FID) and Humanitarian Assistance (HA).
In some ways, the high qualities and standards of the SF community have created more problems for that community than any enemy efforts. Today the average SF ODA contains nothing like its official allotment of twelve soldiers. An ODA is considered lucky if it has a complement of just eight or nine. That means, simply, that there aren’t enough people to do the work, and the average SF soldier assigned to a team spends over six months a year “downrange.” The result is a plague of burnouts. Too many SF soldiers are resigning.
Clearly, if the qualities and capabilities the community requires are to be retained, the Special Forces Command leadership needs to take serious action. And that is happening. While the details of the leadership’s thinking are highly classified, some outlines have filtered out:
The first twenty-first century SF challenge is recruiting the raw material of the teams—extraordinary men.
Over the last decade, the size of the U.S. Army has been reduced by about a third. Additionally, many of the billets previously held by active-duty personnel are now filled by reserve and National Guard troops. This translates into a huge recruiting problem for Special Forces Command.
Not only are too many SF soldiers leaving, the pool of possible replacements is shrinking.
The movement of a soldier through the traditional career path leading to an SF team is something like passage through a series of progressively finer filters. At each career stage—Airborne School, Ranger Training, etc.—fewer and fewer personnel are qualified or desire to move to the next step. At the same time, because the Army as a whole is smaller, only about two-thirds of the candidates that were available to the SF just ten years ago are available today.
An old engineering adage goes something like this: “You can have good; you can have fast; you can have cheap. Pick any two.” Today, SF leaders are facing similar options ... in their terms: quality, quantity, and operations tempo. “Quality” speaks to the overall attributes of the candidates admitted to the SF “Q” Course, the standards and toughness of that training, and the resulting SF soldiers that graduate. “Quantity” speaks to the number of billets needed to fill out the various SF u
Quality, quantity, and OpTempo are linked. A change in one affects the other two. Run OpTempos too high, and more SF soldiers will leave, requiring training of new personnel to replace them. But then if word gets back to recruits that veterans are resigning because of high OpTempos, fewer will take the “Q” Course, causing a further shortfall of numbers, which means that those left on the teams are run even harder. This negative feedback loop lies at the heart of the dilemma faced by Special Forces today.
What can be done to redress the shortfalls in recruiting, training, and retention?
One option, of course, is to reduce the standards for entry into the “Q” Course and for graduation into an SF team. As you might imagine, this is about as popular among SF types as an oil spill at a Greenpeace beach party. More than a few old SF soldiers still remember Vietnam, where the expansion meant that almost anyone could get into SF. Dilution of standards resulted in disaster. There’s no reason to expect better results in the future. In other words, quality of personnel and training must remain a line etched in steel. It cannot be compromised.
The choice then is to adjust numbers and OpTempos. And Special Forces Command has been considering changes in both areas.
If the ODAs are to be brought back to their prescribed allotment of twelve men per team, the number of teams overall must be cut by roughly one third. Furthermore, the number of downrange missions must be cut by the same percentage, if the personal and professional needs of the SF personnel are to be met.
Such a move will of course inconvenience the customer base of the Special Forces—including foreign governments, regional CINCs, the Secretary of State, and sometimes the president—not normally a group that gleefully suffers inconveniences. In fact, if a message like this: “Sorry, we have to cancel the mission you’ve just assigned us; not enough bodies,” were dropped on the State Department some Monday morning, you can expect the Secretary of the Army to be reading a blistering memo by early afternoon.
Inconvenience or not, only God can make something out of nothing, and it may well be time for the leaders of the “Green Machine” to inform their civilian masters that American military power has practical limits. Clearly, those limits have not only been reached but exceeded, and it is time for responsible military leaders to pull back and regroup. Quality has a price. The State Department, regional CINCs, and foreign governments will just have to accept the limited size of the active-duty Special Forces community. Simply, there will not be enough SF soldiers and teams to do everything they might desire.
In practical terms, the SF regrouping will probably result in a reduction of the number of ODAs in each SF company from six to four. This will allow the personnel thus freed to fill out the teams and bring them up to full strength. In addition, the company headquarters or Operational Detachment Bravo (ODB) will be reinforced, which will allow it to be split in two if needed, and thus to provide two support teams for downrange operations. The actual effects are shown in the table below:
Regrouping is not the only means to make up the personnel shortfall. Another possibility is to expand the pool of “Q” Course candidates. But here also there are limits. Half the population, for starters, as long as Title 10 of the United States Code continues to exclude females in line combat units (and SF units belong in that classification).
Another source of candidates might be recruits from the other services. Not only are interservice transfers perfectly legal and proper, but there’s no inherent reason why a few sailors, marines, or airmen wouldn’t find life in the Special Forces an attractive alternative to their present assignments. Practically, however, recruiting from other services would almost surely raise up more problems than it solved. The other services have their own recruiting and retention problems; they wouldn’t look kindly at poaching anyway, and the likely political firestorm would be both bloody and harmful.
A better idea might be to establish new National Guard SF Groups (in addition to the existing 19th and 20th SFGs, which have given outstanding contributions to supporting SF operations worldwide). These could be tasked to take over missions to some of the more “permissive” environments around the world. However, there are not enough candidates for National Guard SF soldier billets. This means that the Army is having problems filling even desirable National Guard slots. There are no easy answers to the question of finding more SF soldiers.
Twenty-first Century Tools of the Trade
After decades of living at the “rump” end of the military supply system, the Special Forces are finally getting control of their procurement system, and the new SFC G7 shop is starting to deliver the tools and supplies needed by their customer base.
Does that mean the SF soldier of the twenty-first century will be the computer-packing, phaser-shooting terror some Army lab engineers see in their PowerPoint briefing charts? Hardly.
The Special Forces have always been about people, and not the stuff they carry and use. Besides, as we’ve already seen, toting classy, new high-tech “gizmos” into a Third World country may not be the image our guys want to present to local troops, some just weeks out of backwater villages. If you have to train a native soldier whose kit consists of an antique AK-47, dusty rucksack, and worn-out sneakers, showing off a new twenty-first century infantry weapons system is at best patronizing, at worst insulting ... not a clever way to build rapport and show sensitivity to their culture and situation.
So we’ll see SF soldiers equipped with high-end, high-tech gear, but in a much more limited way than other Army soldiers, and most often when SF units are involved in major, joint operations.
So with these assumptions in place, what are the new technologies and equipment SF soldiers will likely pack when they head overseas to a major conflict? The following are good candidates:• Satellite Communications—The revolution in wireless communications has taken another giant step with the recent launch of hybrid satellite/cellular phone systems. Despite the likely failure of Iridium (a phone-satellite system that has not proved popular enough to make a profit), Orbital Science’s competing Globalstar phone system should go online within months. Globalstar has potential for supporting SF operations, particularly in low-threat, permissive operations and environments. The actual hardware soldiers would carry is not significantly larger than cellular phones of a few years ago (batteries take up most of the weight and space); the baseline units have both voice and data transfer capabilities; and with prices under a thousand dollars and dropping, they could be issued to individual soldiers. Though they are currently limited to baud rates of less than 9,600, that speed is adequate for most present SF applications, and system improvements will probably increase throughput by several hundred percent within a few years. As a bonus, both systems are fully digital, meaning real-time encryption chips can easily be added to the sets. This could make such units credible backups in the event of a primary military SATCOM system failure. Already, the Department of Defense is looking closely at these and other commercial space services, which might in time include capabilities like one-meter resolution photographic imagery and direct broadcast teleconferencing.
• Navigation—No new technology has affected warfare more in the last decade than the NAVISTAR Global Positioning System (GPS). In less than that time, millions of military and commercial GPS receivers have been built, creating a new kind of service utility: positioning and timing. In the recent campaign against Yugoslavia, for instance, GPS-guided air-to-ground missiles and bombs carried much of the load.Today, the drive in GPS technology is toward improving overall system accuracy, and imbedding receivers into an ever greater number of systems, so they can be used in an ever greater number of missions.
Greater accuracy will arrive with the laun
Meanwhile, on the ground, you can expect to see equipment and clothing imbedded with GPS receivers.
One simple and obvious example would be a multifunction wrist device, combining a digital wristwatch (such as the high-end Casio models favored by SF soldiers) with a miniature GPS receiver. If every SF soldier had such a device, hardly any of them would ever again “get lost,” and the timing and coordination of small unit operations would greatly improve. GPS receivers with moving map databases could also be imbedded in other day-to-day devices, such as the Ground Mobility Vehicle, laptop/palmtop computers, or handheld radios. With civilian GPS receivers now selling for under $100, the cost of these advances is almost insignificant. But the benefits can only be imagined.