Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (19 page)

On September 20, President Bush had delivered a televised address to a joint session of Congress in which, without naming the command, he hinted at the role JSOC would assume in the months and years ahead. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen,” he said. “It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”
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For JSOC, the ultimate covert special ops organization, the irony was that the command's first missions would fall into the former category, rather than the latter. After the demise of the plan to assault the fertilizer factory, Central Command proposed two targets
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that quickly became JSOC's priorities. One came directly from Franks: a desert airstrip about 100 miles southwest of Kandahar built for Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the United Arab Emirates' military chief of staff. A keen falconer, the sheikh had had a 6,400-foot paved runway installed in a dry lake bed to give him access to a nearby hunting camp. After the September 11 attacks he alerted Franks to its existence and suggested U.S. forces use it to reduce the number of troops they might need to deploy to Pakistan. Franks wanted the Rangers to seize the airfield so the United States could use it to deploy a Marine task force into southern Afghanistan.
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The airstrip, which planners quickly dubbed Objective Rhino, also appealed to JSOC planners because it offered the possibility of putting a helicopter forward arming and refueling point there.
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The other target, named Gecko, was Mullah Omar's compound on the north side of Kandahar city, the Taliban's base of power.

The Rangers had been examining the possibility of seizing Rhino about a week after September 11,
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when there were still hopes Pakistan might allow the United States to launch raids from its territory. They planned to use a company-plus of Rangers to take the airstrip, which JSOC could then use as a forward support base. Once the fertilizer factory faded into oblivion and Masirah and the
Kitty Hawk
entered the equation, the planning cell at Benning turned its attention to first Rhino, then Gecko, as the most likely candidates to fulfill the chain of command's desire for a highly visible “boots on the ground” mission. Rhino was to be a Ranger mission while Delta would be the lead force assaulting Gecko.

The plans for the two missions evolved over the course of four weeks. Although Rhino was the first of the two targets to emerge, it soon became a supporting element to the assault on Gecko: a place where the helicopters involved in the latter mission could consolidate, refuel, and rearm. In late September the planners' intent was for the Rangers to take the airstrip forty-eight hours before a combined Delta and Ranger air assault on Omar's compound. D-day for the Rhino mission was set for October 14. But as with the canceled assault on the fertilizer factory, that date continued to slide to the right. As it did so, the plan changed. Now the raids were to take place simultaneously. That caused another late alteration to the plan. Less than a week before the missions launched, both were planned as air assault (i.e., heliborne) missions.
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The Gecko raid would involve the Delta and Ranger elements aboard the
Kitty Hawk
flying 575 miles straight to the target on Chinooks and Black Hawks.
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The Rhino assault force, made up of 3rd Battalion Rangers, was to land in three Chinooks launched off the
Kitty Hawk,
supported by three other MH-47Es—one for combat search and rescue, one carrying a quick reaction force, and one configured as a “fat cow” refueling aircraft. Two DAPs—the Black Hawks configured as attack helicopters—would provide fire support. But as the size of the Ranger force assigned to Rhino steadily grew, planners realized there weren't enough helicopters to run each operation as an air assault.
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The Rangers would have to jump in. So it was that Rhino, originally planned as a “somewhat minimal” helicopter assault to support Gecko, morphed into a substantial and telegenic airborne operation launched from Masirah.

The desire on the part of Dailey, Franks, and Bush for a televised spectacle undoubtedly factored into the decision to make the Rhino raid a parachute assault. “I absolutely remember Dailey talking about the president wanting footage,” a planner said. But some observers suspected that a hankering for glory, rather than any tactical necessity, was also behind the increase in the Rhino assault force, which eventually included both Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Banach, the 3rd Battalion commander, and Votel, the regimental commander, as well as other headquarters personnel (even the 3rd Battalion chaplain) jumping in to command and control a force consisting of little more than two infantry companies. It had been almost twelve years since the Rangers had jumped into Panama and, the cynics said, the chance to gain their “mustard stains”—the coveted gold stars on their jump wings that denoted a combat jump—was apparently irresistible to some. “Numerous [personnel] that normally would not be involved in an operation like that that did it purely to get a combat jump,” said a Masirah source. But Command Sergeant Major Walter Rakow, the regiment's top enlisted man, who did not make the jump, denied this was Votel's motive. “That was not Votel's reason for going,” he said. Rather, with Rangers in several different locations that night, “the commander felt that his best position to work from would have been from Rhino.” Votel saw his role as communicating with the operation's other moving pieces and Masirah while Banach focused on “the ground fight,” Rakow added.

To many experienced operators on the
Kitty Hawk,
on Masirah, and back at Bragg, the growing size and complexity of the missions, with their many moving parts and refuelings, bore an unsettling resemblance to the operation whose failure had given birth to JSOC. Indeed, attacking Omar's compound would require the Chinooks and Black Hawks to fly farther than the Sea Stallions had in Eagle Claw, with each helicopter needing two aerial refuelings en route to the target
,
another while the assaulters were on the objective, a fourth refueling on the ground at Rhino, and a further two aerial refuelings en route back to the carrier.
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The risks inherent in such long-haul, complex missions over denied territory were one factor behind a growing opposition in Delta and JSOC to conducting the Gecko and Rhino raids at all. “We really didn't want to go to Desert One again as the primary option,” a retired special operations officer said. Franks himself described each assault as “a moderate-to-high-risk operation.” However, he added, “I had confidence that the Rangers and the SMU operators could handle themselves deep in enemy territory.”
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But there was another reason voices in Masirah were raised against the proposed raids: intelligence suggested each target was empty. “When an intelligence officer first presented ‘the targets' to us in a briefing, he nonchalantly added that there wasn't any enemy on either target,” Blaber wrote.
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“A lot of people were of the opinion that it was probably a dry hole,” said Hall. “I think we would have been surprised if Mullah Omar was on Gecko. I think we would have been surprised to find anything significant on Rhino.”

In his autobiography, Franks said Central Command had “chosen” not to bomb Omar's compound, “hoping it would serve as a magnet for Omar and his deputies.” But he cited no intelligence indicating the target was occupied. Rather, the CENTCOM boss gives two other reasons for assaulting Gecko and Rhino: an expectation that JSOC forces would find a wealth of exploitable intelligence on Omar's compound, and the desire to conduct a surprise attack in the Taliban “heartland,” thus demonstrating that the United States “could strike anywhere, at any time of our choosing” while fixing the Taliban's reserves in the south, preventing them from reinforcing the northern positions that the Northern Alliance would soon be attacking with help from their American friends.
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Although Franks claimed credit for the decision to have the task force assault Gecko and Rhino, the idea of attacking empty targets in order to send a message to the Taliban was pure Dailey, the self-styled information operations expert. “He believed that if we raided empty targets in Afghanistan and filmed the raids for the world to see (he always said CNN), we would have some kind of morale-breaking effect on the enemy,” Blaber wrote.
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But using the JSOC task force to raid Gecko and Rhino just to show the Taliban that U.S. forces could do it rubbed many in the command the wrong way. “This was a demonstration mission, which is not exactly what JSOC ought to be used for,” said a retired special operations officer.

Several senior JSOC officials advised Dailey against conducting the raids.
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“I gave that counsel to the general, I absolutely did,” based on the level of risk and the likelihood that the targets would turn out to be “dry holes,” said Mike Hall, Dailey's senior enlisted adviser. “You were hanging some people out there in the middle of nowhere with not tremendously good plans to back them up,” he said. “I just did not think it was a good idea.… I'm not sure anybody really thought Omar was there and I just thought it was a lot of risk with so many enemy forces so close by.”

To a Delta operator familiar with the planning, the decision to raid the airstrip and Omar's compound originated from the same misguided thought process that came up with the fertilizer factory target: “That got killed off and so what do we do?
Let's go raid Mullah Omar's empty house and this empty airfield out in the middle of the desert.
” Although others, including Franks, suggested the targets originated with Central Command, the operator blamed Dailey for the decision to proceed, which he described as “monumental recklessness that can't be emphasized enough.”

But Dailey overrode these objections, to the dismay of senior Delta personnel. “It's like a nightmare unfolding in front of us,” said the operator. “There were no fucking off-roads at this point. The plan was the plan.” This view was not unanimous, however. A planner who had opposed the fertilizer plant mission was less worried about this one. “Of course we were concerned, because the time/distance issues and the amount of aircraft made it extremely complex and extremely difficult,” he said. But he added that the detailed planning “prepared us extremely well for having the ability to pull this off.”

The JSOC commander's determination to drive on with the missions reflected his faith in the units involved, according to his senior NCO. “General Dailey had a tremendous amount of confidence in those organizations, especially the special mission units, but also the Rangers,” Hall said.

JSOC also tried to find a mission for Team 6. Some planning went into a possible assault on what a TF Brown source described as “a set of power line stanchions that they wanted to take down”—named Objective Badger—about twenty-five miles southeast of Gereshk on Highway 1 between Kandahar and Herat. However, Rumsfeld withheld approval. Instead the Blue operators on the
Kitty Hawk
busied themselves preparing for a much higher profile mission: a hostage rescue from under the Taliban's noses in Kabul itself.
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*   *   *

Planning for Rhino and Gecko entered the final phase. Another rock drill was held on Masirah October 14.
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The operation was growing more complex by the day. As was often the case with JSOC, the complexity revolved around the helicopters. The distance a helicopter can fly depends on a variety of factors, including the altitude at which it's flying, the air temperature, the weight of any passengers or cargo, and the amount of fuel in its tanks. Keeping these in balance so the aircraft had enough fuel to get where they needed to go, but not so much that the fuel's weight overly restricted what could be carried, challenged TF Brown's planners and meant the helicopters did not top up their tanks when being refueled, but instead “managed” their fuel levels to ensure they could still carry their passengers. For the Gecko raid, in order for the Black Hawks to carry the gas they needed, they could only take five operators each. “Those five operators were probably planning to be 300 pounds apiece, with all their kit,” said a TF Brown source. The distances the aircraft would have to fly to and from Gecko and the number of operators they'd be carrying required an exquisitely choreographed refueling ballet, with the helicopters being refueled in midair by turboprop MC-130P Combat Shadows, which in turn would cycle back and forth to a KC-135 Stratotanker jet at a higher altitude for their own aerial refueling. (It was this need for the MC-130Ps to hit the KC-135, and the timing of it, that required the helicopters to land at Rhino for one of their refuelings.)
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A couple of days before the raids two AC-130s flew from Masirah on a path that took them over Rhino and Gecko before returning to the island. Although the gunships hit what a TF Sword source described as “targets of opportunity” en route to and from the objectives, they made the flight to confirm the mission timeline and to desensitize anyone on the ground to the sound of the planes overhead.

The flights detected no enemy on either objective, yet in a bizarre twist the closer the missions loomed, the more paranoid the intelligence briefings became about what the task force might encounter on the targets.
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Having initially suggested the targets were empty, intel folks now warned the operators to “assume” there might be enemy forces on Rhino equipped with advanced night vision goggles. Much talk centered on the Taliban's air defenses, which—in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary—some alarmists in the intelligence community were hyping out of all proportion to the actual threat. A September 28 briefing warned that Rhino was mined, and that a ZSU 23-4—a tracked, radar-guided, four-barreled antiaircraft weapon—was on the objective. The planners were particularly focused on the threat from Stinger and Redeye antiaircraft missiles that the United States had given the Afghan mujahideen during their 1980s struggle against Soviet occupation forces. An October 1 briefing said Kandahar was defended by “a picket line” of man-portable air defense missiles. “There is a ring of fire around Kandahar,” an intelligence officer warned. “It consists of concentric circles of rockets, handheld missile launchers, and antiaircraft guns.”
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