Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (59 page)

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No JSOC unit evolved more during the post–September 11 period than the Ranger Regiment, which went from being simply the muscle behind the special mission units' scalpel to an organization that assaulted the same set of targets as those units. As part of this evolution, the Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment was expanded to become the Regimental Reconnaissance Company, and took on many of the same characteristics and advance force operations–type missions as Delta's G Squadron and its Team 6 counterpart, Black Squadron. In fact, the regiment created reconnaissance platoons in the Ranger battalions because JSOC kept calling the regimental-level reconnaissance unit away for special missions, mostly in Afghanistan. The changes were reflected in the regiment's abandonment of its signature “high and tight” hairstyle in favor of the regular Army's grooming standards during Colonel Craig Nixon's tenure as regimental commander between 2003 and 2005. (The rules for the Reconnaissance Detachment were even looser. Its members were allowed civilian-style haircuts and to grow beards—what the Army calls “relaxed grooming standards.”)
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The fact that McChrystal, a former Ranger Regiment commander, was running JSOC was no doubt a factor in the elevation of the Rangers. But so was the wealth of combat experience that the unit had built up during the first years after September 11. When McChrystal put a Ranger battalion commander in charge of Task Force North in Iraq, it was the first time Delta operators had worked under a Ranger officer at the battalion/squadron level. Then he put the regimental commander at the head of Task Force 17, the first time that the Rangers had been in charge of a task force at the colonel/Navy captain level. But stymied by politics, 17 was always the secondary task force in Iraq. In the summer of 2009, however, having taken command of JSOC from McChrystal the previous year, Bill McRaven went one better, putting the Rangers in charge of a theater: Afghanistan.

Several factors underpinned McRaven's decision, which he had been planning since the winter of 2008–2009, according to JSOC officers. The Taliban were clearly resurgent, leading to a perceived need for more strike forces in Afghanistan. McRaven could find those additional strike forces most easily in the Ranger Regiment, which had several times more shooters than either Delta or Team 6. The impending drawdown in Iraq also meant that more Ranger companies were available to deploy to Afghanistan. The admiral also told subordinates that with the conventional Army surging forces into Afghanistan, it made sense to put a Ranger officer in command of the JSOC task force. Rangers are, after all, infantrymen. McRaven figured that a Ranger officer would already know many of the Army battalion, brigade, and division commanders deploying to Afghanistan, enabling greater coordination between the two forces.

McRaven's idea was to shift the Ranger Regiment commander, Colonel Richard Clarke, from Iraq, where he had been running Task Force 17, to Bagram, and to replace Clarke with the SEAL captain who commanded Naval Special Warfare Group 2, the “white” SEAL organization that had been contributing platoons to Task Force 17. Meanwhile, McRaven planned to put the Team 6 commander in charge of JSOC's operations in the Horn of Africa and Yemen.
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By mid-2009, the Ranger Regiment was in command of JSOC forces in Afghanistan, which now included: a Team 6 squadron minus (i.e., a squadron command cell, but less than a full squadron's worth of operators) in the east; a Delta squadron minus in the north (which was just setting up at Mazar-i-Sharif); and a Ranger battalion in the south. More importantly, in the eyes of junior leaders, Ranger platoons were doing the same sort of missions as Delta or Team 6 troops. While no Ranger officer would make the case that a Ranger infantryman had the same level of individual training or skills as a special mission unit operator, “on the ground in we had the same job,” said a Ranger officer. “That's where Regiment changed. We went from kind of the stepchild to [where], at least in Afghanistan, we were equal.”

The United States' Iraq War was winding down, and that freed up units and other assets for JSOC's Afghanistan task force. No longer was Afghanistan the sideshow for the U.S. military in general and JSOC in particular. It was now the main effort. But there was a sense, particularly among Ranger officers, that compared with the conventional U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the task force now had so many resources that it had to show results. “Ranger platoons had more helicopters than friggin' infantry brigades had,” noted a Ranger officer.

In August 2009, Erik Kurilla became the regimental commander and, therefore, the overall task force commander in Bagram. (When Kurilla was not physically present, the deputy regimental commander, Colonel Christopher Vanek, would run the task force.) Just as he did in Mosul as the Task Force North commander, Kurilla was keen to raise JSOC's operational tempo even higher. But doing that required the regional task forces to “lower the threshold” for targeting, said a Ranger officer. “You couldn't just go after very senior, high-level guys,” he said. “You had to go after everybody that was a potential target.… So any type of IED cell … that we could target, we would target.” However, this decision caused the FBI to pull its agents from strike forces in Afghanistan. “They were there for Al Qaeda,” not the rank-and-file Taliban, the officer said.

The different regional task forces—and therefore the different units around which they were organized—had target sets that were almost unique to them. Team 6's strike forces in the east focused on foreign fighters; in the north, Delta concentrated on what were code-named the “Lexington” targets, which were primarily Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; the Ranger-run Task Forces South and Central targeted the Haqqani Network and other Taliban groups. (There was always one Ranger battalion deployed to Afghanistan. Its commander ran Task Force South, based at Kandahar airfield, while the executive officer oversaw Task Force Central at Forward Operating Base Salerno, in Khost, which is actually in eastern Afghanistan.) For a while, Delta also had a troop functioning as a vehicle interdiction strike force in Kandahar, reporting to the Ranger battalion commander. “They were absolutely laying it down, to the tune of ten to twenty-five EKIA [enemy killed in action] per op,” said a Ranger officer.

The Marines were the “landowning” conventional force in Helmand province, which stretches almost 300 miles from the Pakistan border to central Afghanistan. The Corps targeted the senior Afghan insurgents who lived year-round in Afghanistan, while the Rangers would target the leaders who went back and forth across the Pakistan border. Although the Rangers in the south had Strykers and, later, more heavily armored Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected, or MRAP, vehicles in the south, they rarely used them because of the distances they had to cover and the threat of roadside bombs. Instead they relied on helicopter assaults almost exclusively. “We were completely dependent on helicopters,” said a Ranger officer. “More helicopters equaled more missions.”

But JSOC found targeting in the south more difficult than in the rest of Afghanistan, and much more challenging than it had been in Iraq. Southern Afghanistan lacked a robust cell phone infrastructure, and the Taliban soon got wise to how JSOC used the networks that did exist for targeting. Taliban leaders removed the batteries from their cell and satellite phones at the end of the day, and forced cell phone providers to shut down their entire networks at night, reducing to almost nothing the signals available for the task force to zero in on. “It was hard,” said a Ranger officer. South of Kandahar there were no cell phone networks anyway. As a result, signals intelligence was “limited at best,” a Ranger source said. However, senior insurgents in the south did use satellite phones, which the National Security Agency collected on, he added. (As in Iraq, the Rangers went to some lengths on raids to hide the importance of phones to the targeting process, for instance by using words like “handset” and “selector” instead of “phone” when talking to each other while searching a house. “If I have the ability to lead them to believe they were turned in by an informant, then I'm going to do that,” the Ranger source said.)

The signals intelligence challenges served to raise the value of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, particularly those with imagery capabilities. The strike forces would zero in on their targets' phone signals during the day. Once they had located the individuals, they would follow them using a combination of Predators and manned aircraft flown by military pilots and contractors. “You had to be very, very effective during the day, or you didn't go out at night,” said a Ranger source. Squad leaders—staff sergeants whose traditional job was to control seven or eight infantrymen—were now spending their days in the operations center, on the phone with pilots flying the Predators (remotely) and other ISR aircraft.

The JSOC task force headquarters in Bagram distributed the ISR aircraft among the regional task force commanders, who in turn decided how to allocate those resources between their different strike forces. Colonel Mark Odom, the Ranger battalion commander in Kandahar during the 2009–2010 timeframe, used two criteria: what were his operational priorities, and which strike forces were getting out and doing missions. “If we could get another mission, another statistic, then he would give us [the assets],” said a Ranger. “It was all about generating the optempo.”

How much of that operational tempo was driven by military necessity, and how much by a desire just to post numbers for the sake of the statistics, became “a very controversial question across Task Force, because Red [i.e., the Rangers] ran it,” said a Ranger source, alluding to the view commonly held by Team 6 and, particularly, Delta, that the Rangers often failed to exercise tactical patience. For instance, while the Ranger chain of command would want to launch a mission as soon as ISR aircraft had located someone exhibiting a suspicious pattern of life, such as visiting a mosque and then a compound associated with the Taliban, “a Green officer would develop it, say ‘Let's see where the guy goes the next three nights,'” the Ranger source said.

“There was a lot of pressure,” the Ranger source said. The battalion commander would ask, “Why aren't you executing this target? Are you sure it's not good enough?” If the strike force commander replied, “Sir, we have no fidelity on this target,” the battalion commander would be insistent. “I don't care, you're going,” he'd say. As a result, the Ranger source said, in early 2010 “every strike force is going out almost every night.” Pressure from above meant that the Rangers hit a lot more “empty holes”—objectives where there were no Taliban present. As the operational tempo increased, “the percentage of jackpot went down,” meaning the percentage of raids that netted their targets declined to where as many as 30 percent of the Kandahar strike force's raids came up empty, a figure that rose to 40 or 50 percent for the strike forces in outlying areas, a Ranger officer said. Ranger commanders at the task force level “knew they were kicking in tons of doors that they shouldn't,” but other than handing out cash to homeowners whose property they had damaged, they evinced little concern. “Red doesn't care,” said a Ranger source. “Odom wants results, and if that means we're going to kick in the wrong guy's door, so be it.”

Others in the JSOC community were convinced that this approach created more enemies than it removed from the battlefield. “We will lose because of it,” said a senior Team 6 source. But a Ranger officer stationed in southern Afghanistan saw it differently. Odom felt “a moral obligation” to use the considerable assets at his disposal to help the conventional forces bogged down in a grinding counterinsurgency campaign, noting that Delta and the Rangers have closer links to the conventional Army than other JSOC units do. “Every frickin' Green and Red guy was in the regular Army, so we know how hard it is,” the Ranger officer said. “We feel like we have to help them. We can't just sit by and be like, ‘Oh, that target's not good enough for us.'”

“What the Rangers would do is target what the conventional Army landowning brigades wanted them to go after,” agreed a senior Team 6 officer. Those targets were typically lower-level homemade bomb networks, rather than the senior leadership that the JSOC task force should have been targeting, he argued. The Rangers' efforts “to make friends across Afghanistan in the Army way” allowed the enemy to regroup, he said.

The Rangers had a harder time making friends with the Marines. There were “massive arguments” between Task Force South and the Marine headquarters in Helmand, according to a Ranger officer. “They wouldn't give us the airspace that we needed to bring in AC-130s or A-10s,” he said, referring to the task force's fixed wing gunships and the conventional Air Force's close air support aircraft, respectively.

In 2007, the Ranger Regiment added a fourth company to each Ranger battalion, at least partly in response to McChrystal's desire to have three more Ranger strike forces in-country. Each Ranger company had three platoons, which became strike forces in Afghanistan. Prior to 2007, a Ranger battalion had three companies, meaning it could field nine strike forces. By adding a fourth company, each battalion could bring twelve strike forces to Afghanistan. In contrast, Team 6 and Delta rarely had more than two troops each (with each troop functioning as a strike force) in Afghanistan at any one time.

A Ranger platoon was almost twice the size of a Delta or Team 6 troop, which gave it more firepower and more flexibility as a strike force. With attachments like dog handlers, snipers, mortars, a tactical psychological operations team, a combat camera unit, and an explosive ordnance detachment, a Ranger strike force would number about sixty or sixty-five personnel. Support and administrative personnel meant a Ranger outstation would have about 100 people in it.