Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (29 page)

The AQSL ExOrd's birth was labored, involving multiple briefings to Rumsfeld and Bush over the course of the next year. Throughout the process, it was clear that JSOC would have the authority to execute the order, with Holland exercising oversight as the “supported CinC.” Just as Holland had feared, this phrase created friction with his fellow four-stars. “‘Supported CinC' means he is going to get the support of all the [regional] combatant commanders,” said the Joint Staff officer. For the first time, the SOCOM commander had the power to deploy JSOC forces into a regional commander-in-chief's area of responsibility without asking for permission. “He can basically say [to the regional combatant commander], ‘We're coming [and] we need this kind of level of support,'” the Joint Staff officer said. “Most of them did not like that. Franks did not like it at all, was very much against it.”

The CENTCOM boss aired his grievances in summer 2002 when Rumsfeld brought the CinCs back to the States for a conference at the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. The subject of Holland's role as the “supported CinC” arose. Pointing at Holland, Rumsfeld told the four-stars that he knew they were all opposed to the change. “I don't care,” the secretary said, according to a staff officer who observed the conversation. “That's not my concept of doing business.” “Franks then speaks up, kind of like he's speaking for everybody else,” the staff officer recalled. The Army general objected strongly to the notion of JSOC operating without his say-so in his area of responsibility. But Rumsfeld brooked no dissent on the issue. “Franks takes a beating,” the staff officer said. “Rumsfeld, if he wasn't clear enough when he pointed at Holland the first time, he makes it absolutely clear.”

Franks's opposition was finally quashed on November 13, 2002, during an “off-site” meeting of the senior military leadership in a modern auditorium at Washington, D.C.'s, Fort McNair. Myers, Marine Lieutenant General Pete Pace (the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs), the four service chiefs, the regional “combatant commanders” (Rumsfeld had banned the phrase “commander-in-chief” as of October 24), Army Lieutenant General John Abizaid, who was the director of the Joint Staff, and Casey. During a briefing on how Holland's newfound authorities would increase JSOC's role, “Franks pushed back pretty hard,” complaining about “the centralization” of special operations forces under SOCOM, said an officer who was present. “He argued forcefully that he needed most of JSOC to fight in the CENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility] fighting CENTCOM targets.” By then, U.S. forces were deployed not only in Afghanistan, but also in small numbers working with Jordanian special operations forces training Yemeni security forces, as well as in Kuwait, preparing for a possible invasion of Iraq. In response, and in what the source said was “a somewhat uncharacteristic move for General Myers,” the chairman “shut him down and basically just said, ‘The president's decided that we're doing this,' and that was that.” (Franks's objections were ironic, because in the end he got just what he wanted, which was the preponderance of JSOC's effort committed to his region.)

But Franks and the other regional combatant commanders were by no means the only flag officers digging in their heels when it came to expanding JSOC's role via the AQSL ExOrd. The Joint Staff, and in particular the intelligence directorate, headed by Rear Admiral Lowell Jacoby, “non-concurred” with its implementation. (Although it might seem odd to outsiders, it is not unusual to have the Joint Staff as a corporate body take issue with products that originated within one of its own directorates.) Wolfowitz also had some legal questions about the ExOrd, and the Joint Staff's new vice director of operations was dispatched to brief the deputy defense secretary one weekend to persuade him of the ExOrd's utility. “He sat down that evening with Wolfowitz and went through it, probably page by page, and convinced the depsecdef that it was worthwhile,” said another Joint Staffer. The officer who worked so hard to sway Wolfowitz was a lean, hatchet-faced brigadier general who had spent the early 1990s on the JSOC staff and the later years of the decade commanding the Ranger Regiment. He may not have realized it at the time, but in the new century no officer would benefit from the AQSL ExOrd more than he would. His name was Stan McChrystal.

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Embedded in the AQSL ExOrd was the time-sensitive planning concept, which was the brainchild of the Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group (CTCSG), an organization Myers had established in October 2001 to support JSOC. “Its main purpose was to interface, coordinate, and collaborate with the Joint Staff and the National Command Authority to expedite decision-making,” said a Joint Staff officer who worked closely with it. Working out of trailers at Pope and led by Special Forces Colonel David Schroer, who doubled as JSOC's director of global long-range plans, the group was “basically an interagency task force built to support JSOC,” said the Joint Staff officer. The group's chain of command was fuzzy. Holland and Dailey thought Schroer worked for SOCOM, but Rumsfeld was adamant that the CTCSG was an “extension of him and the Joint Staff,” said another officer familiar with the group. Rumsfeld gave Holland no veto over the group's creation or its recommendations. In other words, in all but name the CTCSG was the joint interagency task force that Holland had tried to block. It became “how JSOC actually pulls itself into Washington, and then how Washington tries to influence JSOC,” said the Joint Staff officer.

By the spring of 2002, despite his admiration for JSOC's operators, Rumsfeld had become frustrated with the command itself, “because JSOC had a standard way of doing business, and Rumsfeld could not break them of that,” said an officer who attended meetings with the secretary. In particular, Rumsfeld thought it took too long for JSOC elements to deploy in response to fleeting intelligence. But the fault did not lie entirely with JSOC. The military's planning system, as well as the need to clear such deployments through numerous other government agencies, also served to slow the process to a walking pace. This issue came to a head in a Pentagon meeting attended by senior Defense Department figures and the deputies of other government agencies that had a counterterrorism role. Rumsfeld chided CIA deputy director John McLaughlin for what the secretary perceived as the Agency's failure to deliver timely intelligence on the location of Al Qaeda targets. But McLaughlin argued that the blame lay with the Pentagon. “It's because you're too … slow,” the CIA man told Rumsfeld. “The world is not like that. This isn't the buildup to D-Day, where you get a little intelligence and more and more and more [before acting]. This is, ‘You get something and you're either there or you're not.'” McLaughlin was right. The fastest that the Pentagon could get JSOC combat forces to a regional combatant commander using the military's expedited planning process was seventy-two hours, and “that was like if everybody was running down the hallway with a big lighter in each hand setting their hair on fire,” said the officer who attended meetings with Rumsfeld. “McLaughlin would just laugh and say, ‘If you think that I'm going to get the nugget [of intelligence] and be able to pass it to you guys and let you have seventy-two hours' planning to do something, you're nuts.'” Rumsfeld turned to Schroer then and there and told him to fix the problem.

Within a couple of days Schroer and a handful of subordinates had drafted a process that, by relying on secure video-teleconferences, liaison officers at all the key agencies, having non-JSOC personnel “read in” on the command's programs, and an alert roster of about 100 personnel across the government, could have a recommendation for the president twelve hours after getting the initial intelligence. The CTCSG's role in this process extended beyond JSOC, however. Its charter was to come up with a recommended course of action from the entire Defense Department. Sometimes that course of action might be an air strike rather than the deployment of Dailey's JOC and a Delta squadron. As such, Schroer's staff included F-18 and B-52 pilots as well as one of the Navy's most knowledgeable officers on the Tomahawk cruise missile.

JSOC now had the authority to go after Al Qaeda and its allies in about a dozen countries, although the exact rules under which it could do so varied from place to place. The command was soon conducting advance force operations in many of the countries. “It's a massive increase in JSOC's authority to do things,” said a Joint Staff officer. “It elevates JSOC to being a critical component of this whole war on terrorism, or, one could argue, the critical component to the war on terrorism,” he said. “From it … in the space of two and a half to three years, JSOC's resources and staffing and their connections to all the intelligence organizations and all the supporting organizations for intel are magnified several times over.”
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The AQSL ExOrd was the key to giving JSOC the authority to wage a global campaign. “When we got an execute order to go after Al Qaeda senior leaders, that became the document” that codified JSOC's transformation, a retired special ops officer said.

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For all the effort Schroer's Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group put into expediting the joint and interagency planning process, there was little point having the president approve a mission within twelve hours of receiving actionable intelligence if JSOC wasn't able to respond in a timely manner. Events in spring 2002 suggested that the command had yet to internalize the need for greater agility in the post–September 11 world.

Solid intelligence reports out of Iraq's Kurdish region indicated hundreds of Al Qaeda–linked militants displaced by the U.S. military action in Afghanistan had joined a terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam) in the village of Khurmal. The intelligence further suggested that the hardened fighters in the camp were experimenting with biological and chemical weapons, including ricin. The Pentagon considered a range of air strikes to destroy the camp, but each had drawbacks: cruise missiles might destroy the camp's buildings and kill terrorists, but they would also kill families believed to be living there and might spread any toxins; a bombing raid would likely destroy the toxins, because of the bombs' more powerful warheads that burn at hotter temperatures, but would otherwise share the disadvantages of the cruise missile strike. Neither option would give the Bush administration any proof that the terrorists were working on weapons of mass destruction.
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“If you want to be discriminating and you want to bring back evidence, then you have to have boots on the ground,” said a senior Joint Staffer.

So the Joint Chiefs tasked JSOC—through SOCOM—to present options for attacking the camp. JSOC's response left them sorely disappointed. “What they came back with was a massive large slow option that would have taken a month and a half and [was] completely impractical to the objective,” said the Joint Staffer. JSOC's proposal involved staging out of Turkey and “involved C-5As, C-141s, the covered aircraft,” he said. “It was huge and took a long time to build up and would have deceived no one.”

For reasons that would remain unclear, in the last week of June, the president decided against an attack, despite the Joint Chiefs' unanimous support for action. The week after Bush made his decision, Rumsfeld expressed his displeasure with JSOC's proposed courses of action, which were all “mini-JRXs,” according to a special operator briefed on them. “I'm really disappointed,” Rumsfeld told a special operations officer. “You've got to do better than this.… If I wanted a D-Day invasion I could call the 82nd. Why can't you come up with things that don't involve six C-17s?”
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While any JSOC mission into Khurmal would have involved risks, the decision to take no action also incurred risk. Among the terrorists who had arrived in Khurmal from Afghanistan—after, in his case, sojourns in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran—was a thuggish Jordanian who had been running a training camp in Herat. Unknown to all in the West but a few analysts who closely tracked militant Islamism, his name—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—would soon echo around the Middle East while his hands dripped with the blood of JSOC operators.
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Dailey's preference for large, infrastructure-laden deployments was a contributing factor—but not the only one—behind a widely held view at Bragg, MacDill, and the Pentagon that by summer 2002 the demands of the “war on terror” were straining JSOC to its limits. Although Afghanistan was the only high-profile campaign in which the command was fighting, the AQSL ExOrd and other Pentagon initiatives meant new theaters beckoned in the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and elsewhere. JSOC's staff numbered about 800, and in November 2001 the Army had given the command another general officer—Brigadier General John Scales, a Vietnam veteran and reservist with no previous JSOC experience—to enable the command and control of multiple deployed task forces. But JSOC still had to keep an alert force at home in the United States for the 0300 counterterrorism and 0400 counter-proliferation missions. And in the background, the possibility of a major war in Iraq loomed closer.
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The command was also the victim of its own success. As Franks's protests later that year demonstrated, the regional CinCs' appetites for JSOC's forces—by reputation the military's most elite units—were unbounded. Indeed, on July 19, 2002, a Rumsfeld order to CENTCOM stated that Franks could use the JSOC task force in his area of responsibility only for hunting the “two-plus-seven” Al Qaeda targets and neutralizing weapons of mass destruction.
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On August 15, Myers flew down to JSOC for a series of meetings. Brigadier General Eldon Bargewell, a former Delta commander now on the SOCOM staff, came up from MacDill to brief the chairman. Bargewell told Myers there was deep concern at SOCOM that the “war on terror” was pulling resources and attention from two missions in particular: the 0400 counter-proliferation mission and Power Geyser, the code name for JSOC's—really Team 6's—domestic mission to protect top government officials when so ordered.
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