Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (27 page)

As Franks was meeting with JSOC's advance force leader in Bagram, Dailey was planning the next phase of JSOC's war in Afghanistan. Kabul had fallen and the Taliban were retreating in disarray to Kandahar, but the United States' top three high-value targets—bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar—were still at large. In addition, thousands of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters remained in the field, massing in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The opportunity presented itself to destroy Al Qaeda's leadership and crush its fielded forces. But rather than consolidate his own forces in an effort to finish the campaign in short order, the JSOC commander opted for a more conservative approach.

Dailey thought that by withdrawing some of his force, he could deceive Al Qaeda into believing all U.S. special ops forces had departed the battlefield. He pulled the Rangers' 3rd Battalion, Delta's B Squadron, and most of TF Brown back to the States, replacing them with 1st Battalion, the rest of A Squadron, and a small AFO element, who deployed to Afghanistan.
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After flying its JSOC contingent to Masirah December 6 and 7, the
Kitty Hawk
returned to Japan.
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The move confused the Sword staff and was poorly received in Delta, where operators were openly skeptical that “the bad guys would let down their guard,” as Greer put it. “The naivete of that idea still boggles my mind today,” he wrote more than six years later. “‘Aren't we at war?' we asked. Why were we not pouring all available assets into Afghanistan, rather than withdrawing our strength?”
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But as he prepared to deploy to Afghanistan from Bragg in late November 2001, Greer had little time to dwell on the vagaries of his higher command. The mission of a lifetime awaited him in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

 

12

Rumsfeld Falls for JSOC

On September 24, as Pete Blaber and his colleagues were stewing in the Delta compound, 300 miles up Interstate 95 Don Rumsfeld was in a packed Pentagon conference room also getting impatient with the military brass.

Less than two weeks previously, in the hours after the September 11 attacks, with smoke still billowing through Pentagon corridors, the defense secretary had moved to the Executive Support Center, a suite of rooms protected against electronic eavesdropping and designed to host the most senior Defense Department officials during a crisis. From there
,
surrounded by other senior Pentagon officials, he had spoken via videoteleconference with Charlie Holland, head of U.S. Special Operations Command. As SOCOM commander, Holland's job was to prepare U.S. special operations forces for operations overseas. JSOC fell under SOCOM for administrative purposes, but SOCOM did not command overseas missions conducted by JSOC or any other U.S. special operations forces. JSOC's operations were run under the auspices of the National Command Authority (the president and defense secretary), with responsibility sometimes delegated to the regional commander-in-chief, who also ran any non-JSOC special operations missions. But Rumsfeld seemed unaware of this distinction, and tasked Holland to come up with a plan to strike back at Al Qaeda. “I don't want you to wait around for a 100 percent plan,” he told the Air Force general. “This is going to be an iterative plan. Come up here with a 50 percent solution so I can look at it.”

Now Holland was in the Pentagon to answer Rumsfeld. Dozens of senior defense officials and their aides had gathered to hear the SOCOM commander. Thirteen days had passed since Al Qaeda had struck America. The U.S. military, which Rumsfeld commanded, had yet to hit back. The defense secretary was expecting his top special operations officer to specify how that might happen. He was to be bitterly disappointed.

“Holland started out saying, ‘You tasked us to get some possible targets for us to go after Al Qaeda,' then he talked about Al Qaeda or extremist elements in the tri-border area in South America, in the Philippines, Mauritania, and then some transshipment points off the Somali coast, loading weapons and stuff,” said an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). As Holland spoke, “Rumsfeld was getting sort of excited about the idea of being able to go to Bush and say ‘We're going to hit these sons of bitches tomorrow night all around the world.' So then Rumsfeld said, ‘When can we get these guys?… Let's hit them,' because what Rumsfeld wanted to do originally was to [get] back at Al Qaeda with a series of blows around the world to show our reach.”

But Rumsfeld's question didn't elicit the answer he wanted. “Well, you know, we don't have the actionable intelligence to go after individual leaders in those areas,” Holland said. “We don't know who they are or where they are.” His comments “took Rumsfeld by surprise,” the OSD official said.

Another nasty shock was waiting for the secretary. When would the first Special Forces A-teams fly into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan and link up with the Northern Alliance, he asked. “Well, when the CIA gives us clearance,” Holland replied. “That got Rumsfeld's goat, too,” the OSD official recalled. “Rumsfeld said, ‘You mean we have to get clearance from the CIA to go in there?' And Holland said, ‘Yeah,' sort of lamely. And everything sort of fell apart there.”

The meeting began to break up, but there was still time for one more awkward, telling exchange between Holland and Rumsfeld that simultaneously revealed the SOCOM commander's reluctance to seize the initiative and the defense secretary's ignorance of special operations. Although he was on his second tour as defense secretary, neither SOCOM, JSOC, nor any of the special mission units had existed during his previous tenure in the mid-1970s. During the course of the meeting it had become clear that Rumsfeld thought Holland had direct command of special operations forces around the world, according to the OSD official. Rumsfeld was wrong, but on the basis of this assumption, he announced a far-reaching decision.

Holland was chatting with another special operations official when Rumsfeld approached the pair. “This is a global fight, and I want you to be the global commander,” he told the general. Holland, a mild-mannered, nonconfrontational officer, wasn't keen on that idea, which would have required him often to go toe-to-toe with the regional commanders-in-chief. He preferred to work through the theater special operations commands—offices inside the regional commands that reported to the CinCs. Holland also knew he had no real command authority over forces overseas. But the SOCOM commander wasn't about to correct his boss. Instead, Holland's response was along the lines of “Yes, I hear you,” not “Yes, I will,” said an OSD official who observed the exchange.

“So Rumsfeld that day learned that we didn't have actionable intelligence, we needed a global command capable of fighting a global war, and that we relied on the CIA to tell us when to go in,” the official said. Those three lessons would shape much of the defense secretary's approach in the coming months, the OSD official said. “Rumsfeld had just gotten a sobering look at how tough it was going to be.”
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Even in those early weeks, it was apparent that the Bush national security team—and Rumsfeld in particular—was envisioning a greatly expanded role for JSOC and its higher headquarters, SOCOM. In his September 20, 2001, address to Congress, the president had declared a global war on terrorists. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he said. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
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Those words were easily spoken and would reverberate for many years, but the U.S. military machine, the most expensive and powerful ever built, was not designed for such a conflict. Caught tragically off guard by the September 11 attacks, Bush and his advisers were searching for an answer to the problem of how to wage a global conflict against non–nation-state actors. JSOC, a specialized counterterrorist force with boundless self-confidence, a can-do attitude, and peerless operational capability, all suffused with the aura of secrecy, seemed to offer the perfect solution. The Bush team grasped at it desperately.

The day after Bush's address, Dailey issued updated guidance via video-teleconference. He told his staff to work on “global targeting.” The JSOC commander added that “the president knows more about our organization in the first eight months [of his tenure] than the previous administration knew in the last eight years.”
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The prevailing view was “we're in business,” said a Delta source. “This is a war and we got the right president.… This is what we came in for. It was very exciting.”

Rumsfeld wanted SOCOM to run the “war on terror” in part because he didn't trust his regional commanders-in-chief “to adopt a global view of the war,” according to Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.
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The secretary was frustrated with what he perceived as outdated thinking on the part of many of the conventional military leaders. The irony was that in his search for a dynamic and innovative alternative he turned to Holland, whose reputation was that of an officer reluctant to buck the system or threaten the consensus.

Holland had already shot down at least one innovative concept since September 11. JSOC's forces in the Balkans had learned quickly that “unity of effort” with other government agencies, especially the CIA, was a key to success. The best way to formalize that would have been to create a joint interagency task force, or JIATF (pronounced jie-att-iff), that reported to the defense secretary but included a CIA representative as deputy commander. “That was in almost every AAR [after-action review] that we wrote,” said a Delta operator with much Balkan experience. The JIATF concept would soon become almost synonymous with JSOC, but in September 2001 it was an idea whose time was yet to come. Holland quickly vetoed it. “We came back from [Europe] and our first concept was to make JSOC a JIATF and bring in the interagency,” said a retired special ops officer. “But Holland didn't want to do that.”

This was in keeping with what sources uniformly described as Holland's go-along-to-get-along leadership style. At well over six feet tall, the gray-haired pilot with more than 5,000 flight hours—including more than 100 combat missions
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—under his belt cut a towering figure as he strolled the corridors of power in the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and his own headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. But those who worked closely with him in the months after September 11 said he appeared more worried about upsetting the other four-stars than eager to assume the mantle of leadership Rumsfeld wanted to bestow upon him. This was particularly true of his relations with the regional commanders-in-chief. Congress had established SOCOM as a headquarters with responsibility only to train and equip special operations forces that the president, the CinCs, and U.S. ambassadors could use for operations. Now Rumsfeld was asking Holland to run a global war. That made the general, who had been appointed to his position by Defense Secretary Bill Cohen at the tail end of the Clinton administration, very uncomfortable.
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Holland was “likable” but not well suited for his present boss, said a senior member of the Joint Staff. “He might have been good for Secretary Cohen, but he was anything but for Secretary Rumsfeld.” A brief exchange during a Pentagon meeting several months after the September 24 briefing exemplified this personality conflict. “I don't have the authority, Mr. Secretary,” Holland told his boss. “I didn't hear you ask me for the authority, General,” replied Rumsfeld acidly. “Everybody sort of looked at their feet and said, ‘oh shit,'” said Bob Andrews, the acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, who was in the room.

JSOC chafed under Holland's conservatism. “We were very aggressive with what we wanted to do, and he was less aggressive,” the retired special operations officer said. JSOC sent director of operations Army Colonel Frank Kearney and Lieutenant Colonel Scotty Miller to the Pentagon to brief Rumsfeld on how SOCOM could take the lead in the “war on terror,” but Holland got ahold of their slides ahead of time and changed the brief's content. “Holland didn't like the fact [that the brief] told people how it could be done,” said the retired special operations officer. “Basically he didn't want to take the lead.”

But the result of Holland's resistance to turning SOCOM headquarters into a war-fighting command was that that role in effect devolved to JSOC. “General Holland immediately turned to JSOC for everything,” the retired special operations officer said. “The opportunity was there for SOCOM to take over the ‘war on terror' and they chose not to and chose to turn the combatant command [i.e., SOCOM] into a support function for JSOC,” an OSD source said. Dailey soon became a frequent visitor to Rumsfeld's office—a rare privilege for a two-star whose headquarters was more than five hours' drive from the Pentagon.
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As indicated by the briefing Kearney and Miller were set to give Rumsfeld, key personalities at JSOC headquarters took an entirely more expansive and ambitious view than did Holland of the possibilities afforded by the newly declared “global war on terror.” In a classified “vision statement” called
JSOC XXI,
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a team led by Delta veteran Lieutenant Colonel Bennet Sacolick and Lieutenant Colonel William C. “Bill” Mayville, respectively chief of current operations and chief of plans and training in the command's operations directorate, outlined a future for JSOC that entailed “getting out of Fort Bragg, having global resources, global reach, prepositioned forces,” said a special ops officer who was briefed on the document. “It was Sacolick's vision,” said a JSOC staffer. That vision was of a “holistic approach, instead of all direct action,” the staffer said. “It's more boundary spanning, problem solving, bringing the interagency together.” But to reach this goal, JSOC required even more resources. “They understood sooner than anyone else that this [war] was not going to go away, and the country needed more than they had to give … and Rumsfeld understood that,” said a special operations officer on the Joint Staff.