Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (58 page)

By early 2004, the task force headquarters was housed in a large set of connecting tents at Bagram. JSOC's mission in Afghanistan was to hunt senior Al Qaeda figures, who had disappeared from view in the wake of Tora Bora. But task force leaders knew there was little chance of them gaining actionable intelligence at Bagram. “The mind-set was, you've got to be active when seeking out intel, and how are we going to be able to find these folks if we're not going out there and actually looking for them,” said a special operations officer who spent time at Bagram during this period. The Rangers appeared to have little to do there, he said, so the task force “came up with this concept of the Ranger Action Plan, where the Rangers would go through a village and meet with the village elders and kind of go door-to-door and see what was going on.” It was a mission more suited to Special Forces than young, aggressive Rangers, and it didn't turn up any valuable intelligence, he said.

One Ranger mission on April, 22, 2004, did, however, cost the regiment the life of its most famous member and threaten the careers of several officers in his chain of command. On that date 2nd Ranger Battalion sent a mounted patrol through Khost province that resulted in a confusing firefight in which Corporal Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire.
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Tillman had walked away from a successful career as a player with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army and join the Rangers, together with his brother Kevin. Although the Tillmans assiduously avoided the limelight after enlisting, their story had attracted a lot of favorable publicity for the Army, and in particular, to the Ranger Regiment. Even though some Rangers on the patrol knew immediately
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that he had been killed by friendly fire, in a series of mistakes that spawned a controversy that continued for years after Tillman's death, the Rangers and JSOC reported that he had been killed by the enemy. That official line persisted long after the truth was known, with the Pentagon finally notifying Tillman's family on May 28 that he died at the hands of his fellow Rangers. It seemed as if the incident might derail the career of Stan McChrystal, but he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

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During the war's early years, special mission unit (SMU) operators emplaced disguised listening devices and cameras along the Pakistan border in an attempt to sniff out bin Laden and Zawahiri. “The SMUs didn't like doing that sort of work,” said a senior JSOC officer. “They were difficult to put in, they were risky.” They were also ineffective. “Nothing was ever actioned on those devices,” he said, adding that their value declined even further as Predators and other ISR aircraft became more readily available.

Around 2005, JSOC also began contributing small numbers of Team 6 operators and, eventually, Ranger noncommissioned officers to form Omega teams with CIA Ground Branch officers. These were combined CIA-JSOC teams that trained and commanded the Agency's Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams—Afghan units that reported to the CIA, not to the Afghan government. In many cases they were the same Afghans that the CIA and Special Forces had recruited in late 2001 and early 2002 to chase the Taliban and hunt Al Qaeda. Originally known as the Afghan Combat Applications Group (a play on Delta's 1990s cover name, “Combat Applications Group”), the unit began life at a brick factory on the outskirts of Kabul, which was significantly expanded in 2003 and later housed a secret CIA prison.

The group soon numbered several hundred fighters. As it grew, and the Agency realized the importance of agents in the provinces who could blend in, the CIA divided the group into regionally and ethnically homogenous subunits. The Agency put these “pursuit teams” at its bases in Asadabad, Jalalabad, Khost, Shkin, and Kandahar, among others. At each location the CIA had a chief of base, Ground Branch operatives, and independent contractors (often former U.S. special operations personnel) training and leading the pursuit teams. The Agency gave each pursuit team a different name: the team at Jalalabad was known as the Mustangs, while the Asadabad team was the Mohawks. The Omega teams at each location were numbered: Omega 10, Omega 20, Omega 30, and so on. “We always sent at least two Blue shooters to each one of those, each deployment,” said a senior Team 6 source. Team 6 operators were welcome on the Omega teams in part because they were all qualified to call in close air support.

Some pursuit teams grew very large (the team at Khost numbered 1,500), but for the most part they and their Agency handlers focused on minor insurgent and criminal kingpins in the areas around their bases. The CIA's ambition to have the teams conduct missions in Pakistan ran into problems because the Afghans lacked basic military skills.
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During the decade's middle years, one of JSOC's two one-star deputy commanders was usually in Bagram. The one-star had formal command of the JSOC forces in-country, but his day-to-day job was to deal with the other Coalition flag officers. Tactical command of the Afghanistan task force alternated between Team 6 and the Ranger Regiment, with either the commander or deputy commander of one of those units in Bagram at all times. But no matter which colonel or Navy captain was running the show, there wasn't much going on. Operators called those years “the dark times,” said a senior Team 6 operator. “We'd do a [ninety-day] deployment and you might get one mission.” By late 2005, it was clear something had to change. The Afghanistan task force was an all but forgotten offshoot of JSOC. During the daily operations and intelligence video-teleconferences that McChrystal held to bind his global network together, the Iraq task force leaders would get up and walk away when it came time for the Afghanistan task force leaders to brief, so limited were the latter's operations. “We were truly the B team,” said a senior Team 6 officer.

What changed was a massive expansion of the target set that the task force was allowed to pursue.

Since arriving in Afghanistan in late 2001, JSOC forces had focused exclusively on Al Qaeda targets. That meant that even if solid intelligence linked an individual to the Taliban, the JSOC task force was forbidden from launching a mission against that person. “If there was no link [to Al Qaeda] there, we weren't doing it, period,” said a senior Team 6 operator. “No matter how hard we fought for it: ‘Hey this guy's a financier for the Taliban'; ‘It doesn't matter, we're only here for Al Qaeda because this is the national mission force.'” This approach, along with the priority JSOC gave to Iraq, “basically took the pressure off the insurgency and let them build a strong base,” the operator said.

McChrystal finally directed his task force in Bagram to go after Taliban targets as well. Having focused exclusively on Al Qaeda, it took the task force a little time to get smart on the Taliban, but once it had done so, its operational tempo increased dramatically, to an average of three missions a night. “It was a very ripe target set,” said a senior Team 6 source.

By the time the task force turned its attention to the Taliban, the guerrillas “were very well established” and confident enough to move in large formations, said another senior Team 6 operator. But sometimes the Taliban were overconfident. Such was the case during Operation Niland II, a battle in late summer 2006 near Kandahar. A Predator had picked up a long line of fighters moving from one village to another. “It is a full serpentine column of dudes moving out, and they're moving at a good clip,” recalled an operator. A troop from Team 6's Blue Squadron geared up and, together with a Ranger platoon, flew from Bagram to Camp Gecko in Kandahar (Mullah Omar's old compound now used by the CIA and Special Forces), where they continued to study the Predator feed, waiting for the order to launch. When the Taliban column halted at a compound, the SEALs and Rangers stood down, because they didn't want to take the collateral damage risks that an assault on a compound holding more than 100 people would incur. Back in Bagram, Captain Scott Moore, the deputy Team 6 commander who was running the Afghanistan task force, decided to use Air Force A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft to strike the column as it moved through a valley. “As soon as they get back on the road and they clear the compound, they roll the A-10s in to strike,” the operator said. But the jets missed their targets. The Taliban fighters scattered. Moore sent in the ground force, while continuing to pound the militants with air strikes. By now an AC-130 gunship was overhead, firing at the insurgents with its 105mm howitzer and 20mm cannon. The Rangers set up a blocking position at one end of the valley while about twenty or twenty-five SEALs swept through from the other end.

The result was a massacre. By battle's end, the task force estimated that 120 Taliban lay dead (most killed by air strikes), with the Rangers and SEALs having taken no casualties. But Moore was worried about the implications of reporting such a high number of enemy dead. “We can't say 120, the Pentagon will freak,” he told his operations officer, a Ranger, who passed a lower number—eighty—up the chain of command.
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Even with authorization to target the Taliban, the task force never reached the operational tempo of its Iraq counterpart, for several reasons. One was the rural nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, and the size of the area in which the Taliban operated, which prevented quick turnarounds of the sort possible when striking several targets in the same Baghdad or Fallujah neighborhood. At McChrystal's direction, the task force established more outstations to lengthen its reach. Despite this, virtually every mission required a helicopter assault, which in turn required helicopters, for which demand exceeded supply in Afghanistan. Another factor was the shortage of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) aircraft.
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“The big one was ISR,” a senior Team 6 source said. “We [didn't] have the support there to build those networks, to go after the little guy to work our way up the ladder.” A third factor hampering the task force was what the Team 6 source described as “a certain degree of talent management” on JSOC's part when it came to which staffers it deployed to which theater. During the middle of the decade, “the cream of the crop's going to go to Iraq,” he said.

Nonetheless, the task force mapped out the various Taliban groups that were sowing chaos in eastern and southern Afghanistan's Pashtun provinces. “We knew those networks very well, so it was very network-centric targeting,” a senior Team 6 source said. At about the same time that Captain Brian Losey turned over command of Team 6 to Scott Moore in 2007, McChrystal decided to put Team 6 in charge of Afghanistan indefinitely, with the Ranger Regiment leadership running Task Force 17's operations against Quds Force and Shi'ite militia targets in Iraq. McChrystal also leaned on his task force in Bagram to ramp up their operational tempo. “The one thing I learned from McChrystal was if you can't get quality, get quantity of missions,” said a senior Team 6 source. “‘Even if you can't find the guy you're going after, continue to pressure the network,'” McChrystal would tell subordinates, he said. “Which meant, if you're not going out, you're wrong.” The task force duly complied with McChrystal's directive. In 2008, it hit 550 targets, killing about 1,000 people.
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As was also the case in Iraq, such a high operational tempo, when combined with the pressure to launch raids based on incomplete intelligence, resulted in the task force assaulting a lot of targets where no insurgents were to be found. Even when successful, JSOC's raids created problems for the conventional units in whose areas of operations the missions were conducted. The task force would arrive in the night, assault or bomb a target, and leave. The next morning the townspeople would wake up to see a smoking pile of rubble where a house used to be, and turn their anger on the local “landowning” conventional Army or Marine commander. This in turn led to friction between the conventional military and the JSOC task force. “Sometimes our actions were counterproductive,” McChrystal later acknowledged.
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Despite the vastly increased target set, Afghanistan's immense scale still hampered the task force, which was largely based at Bagram. Most operations required long helicopter flights to and from the objective, limiting the number of missions possible per night. In 2007, McChrystal told the task force to solve the problem by making more bases. So the task force built itself two new compounds: one at the Coalition's massive base at Kandahar airfield, and one at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika province, between Kandahar and Bagram. McChrystal also deployed another Ranger platoon to Afghanistan.
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Team 6 used its years in Afghanistan to hone its tactics, which “had evolved over the years into being as sneaky as we could, so we could keep the element of surprise until the very last second,” said Matt Bissonnette, the Team 6 operator writing under the pen name Mark Owen. He noted that Team 6 had given up “flying to the X”—i.e., landing right at the objective—in Afghanistan. “We were more comfortable being dropped off and patrolling to the compound.” Contrary to the unit's reputation among some in the military as shoot-'em-up cowboys, Team 6 also learned early to creep into buildings and catch their targets off guard whenever possible.
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It helped that Team 6 had conducted nonstop rotations to Afghanistan—and particularly its eastern provinces—since late 2001. “They are the only tier that more or less has been in the same region for a decade,” said a Ranger officer in 2012. “And so those [operators] … have a phenomenal understanding of that terrain, a phenomenal understanding of risk mitigation in terms of mission planning, maneuvering in those mountains, and so they have become very effective out east.”

But Team 6's domination of the Afghanistan task force was ending. By late 2009, McRaven had tweaked the McChrystal-era arrangement that placed each special mission unit in charge of a combat theater or another portion of the globe. In doing so, he would write another chapter in the storied history of the 75th Ranger Regiment.