Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (60 page)

In the spring of 2010, Kurilla decided to capitalize on the amount of firepower a Ranger strike force could bring to bear by keeping two 2nd Battalion platoons in-country for an extra two months. He combined the two platoons into Team Darby, named for Brigadier General William Darby, who was influential in the establishment of the first Ranger battalions during World War II. Kurilla had big plans for Team Darby, which was part of a larger JSOC surge that arrived in summer 2010, in concert with the conventional buildup in the country. Delta deployed an entire squadron, with a troop at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika, a troop in Kunduz in the north, and a troop that roamed where the action was. Team 6 remained steady with a troop in Jalalabad and another in Logar. The Rangers added a company headquarters and two platoons. “This was Kurilla's big plan,” said a Ranger officer. “Kurilla was going to have extra Rangers the whole time. The regular Army was surging, so Kurilla was going to surge.”

Team Darby was renamed Team Merrill, a 120-soldier force named after Brigadier General Frank Merrill, who led a long-range jungle penetration force in Burma in World War II. Team Merrill's mission was very different from that of the single platoon-size strike forces into which the rest of the Rangers in Afghanistan were organized. “The idea is we're going to do movement to contact, we're going to do clearing operations,” said a Ranger who fought in Team Merrill. “We're not going to do single human targets. We're going to go to the very, very worst places and we're going to clear those areas.”

Team Merrill conducted operations in Kandahar province's Arghandab, Zhari, and Panjwai districts, and the Khost-Gardez pass in eastern Afghanistan. Unlike other strike forces, the team would spend up to a week figuring out which areas to hit, and then launch a night raid. But the fights in which it found itself were so big that the team was usually still in combat at daybreak, which would lead to an even bigger fight during the day. Initially, the team did not come supplied for such lengthy battles and had to rely on airdrops. During one such daylight resupply in Zhari, the Taliban shot down a Task Force Brown Chinook, albeit with no fatalities. (The task force was able to repair the helicopter and fly it away.)

Kurilla quickly made Team Merrill his main effort in Afghanistan. “They [were] the biggest show in town,” said a Ranger officer. In addition to two Ranger platoons, Team Merrill included a radio intercept unit from regiment headquarters. “They're not as special as the Orange guys, but same idea,” said a Ranger, adding that the unit “had all the boxes for intercepting” the Taliban's handheld Icom VHF radios, “so this all becomes about VHF traffic.”

The size of the firefights into which Team Merrill was getting during daylight hours got Kurilla thinking. “This is when the lightbulb goes off in Kurilla's head—if we stay out during the day, we get into an even bigger fight, meaning we went from killing five guys to killing fifty guys,” a Ranger said. So instead of being dragged reluctantly into daylight fights, Team Merrill planned for them.

The missions evolved from both platoons clearing an area, to one platoon air-assaulting in to do the clearing while the other established a command post in a compound. It would spend all night turning it into a strongpoint, knocking holes for firing ports in the walls, digging a trench for the mortars, and setting out Claymore mines. The compounds were family houses. At first the Rangers let the families stay in them, but it soon became clear that was too dangerous for the civilians, as the house became a magnet for Taliban fire. Thereafter, the Rangers would “give them a bunch of money and boot them out, because their place is going to get destroyed,” a Merrill veteran said. “It turns into World War II.” The payoff to a subsistence farmer for getting kicked out of his home with his family and then having that home destroyed was usually “a couple of thousand” dollars, the Merrill veteran said.

Team Merrill began encountering Iraq-style house bombs—entire homes rigged to explode—in the Taliban strongholds in which they fought. When Rangers discovered such booby traps, they got very “kinetic” as the military would say, very fast. “You go up to one building and it's booby-trapped and we back away and we level everything,” said a Ranger officer. “We're dropping bombs and firing HIMARS [High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System] at a rate that's ridiculous. In Arghandab on multiple nights we leveled villages. Empty villages, but we leveled villages.”

The Rangers on Team Merrill did not feel bound by even JSOC's rules of engagement, which were looser than those that governed conventional units. “The rules go out of the window with Merrill,” recounted a Ranger source. “When the sun comes up, when the fighting starts, if there's a male outside, we're going to kill him.… We would hear intercepts on the VHF radios and we couldn't triangulate it, but we'd be like, ‘Well, it sounds like those guys over there,' and then we would just kill them. We were in massive fights, so it's not like we were murdering out of vengeance. It was more like we were in a fight and the enemy looked like the friendlies.”

After tough fighting in Kandahar province during late summer 2010, Team Merrill conducted a series of operations in Helmand. “The Taliban in Helmand are organized and effective fighters,” using mortars, RPGs, and recoilless rifles, said a Ranger who fought there. The Rangers listened to intercepted radio calls as Taliban observers adjusted mortar fire on U.S. positions. “These guys were not playing,” he said.

Team Merrill had a variety of ways to kill Taliban, the most lethal of which flew. “We had everything,” said a Ranger. “At night, Little Birds, AC-130, A-10s.” During the day, the Rangers could call on Apache attack helicopters and A-10s, as well as larger bombers. But these fights took a toll on the Rangers too. In a “massive fight” called Operation Matthews in Helmand on October 1, 1st Battalion suffered more than a dozen wounded and lost Sergeant First Class Lance Vogeler, who was on his twelfth combat deployment, to Taliban fire. “On that day we dropped fifty bombs,” said a Ranger. “We emptied two B-1 bombers.”

As winter bore down, Team Merrill moved north to conduct operations in Kunduz province to support the Delta task force based in Mazar-i-Sharif. By now, JSOC's regional task forces were competing for the team to operate in their areas, because it brought so many ISR and close air support aircraft with it. “They did some pretty amazing missions—the tough, difficult fights,” said a senior officer in the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the official name of the Coalition military effort in Afghanistan. “They went right into the most remote places where these guys were hanging out and really stirred things up.”

But the team's mounting losses meant some Rangers became very conflicted about its operations. “For a Ranger, it's good and bad,” said a Merrill veteran. “This is the highlight of what a Ranger wants to do. He wants to get in these massive fights, kill as many people as he can kill, destroy as much as he can destroy, but at the same time, we start to take serious casualties.”

At least twenty Rangers were killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. Scores more were seriously wounded. By late 2011, the Afghanistan task force, now run by Colonel Mark Odom, had abandoned the Team Merrill concept. “They lost a bunch of guys, and that was it,” said a Ranger officer. “It stopped.”

In 2011 the operational tempo issue also reared its head again, creating what a Ranger officer called “a toxic relationship” between the Delta troop at Sharana and the Ranger-led Task Force Central headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost. Again the cause was the more aggressive approach taken by the Rangers, when compared with some special mission unit strike forces, who thought the Rangers were not exercising enough tactical patience. Of JSOC's fourteen strike forces in Afghanistan at the time, ten were Ranger platoons, while two were Delta troops and two were Team 6 troops. However, only at Sharana was a special mission unit troop working directly for a Ranger officer, in this case 2nd Battalion's executive officer. The Delta troop commander finally became so resistant to the Ranger chain of command's insistence that his operators mount raid after raid that he all but stopped his troop from doing any operations. As a result, a platoon from 2nd Battalion's A Company was moved to Sharana “to hit Green's targets for them,” a Ranger source said. When it came time for the next rotation of units, Delta declined to send another troop to Sharana. The replacement troop went to Kunduz instead, giving Delta two troops in the north.

“The optempo thing becomes ridiculous,” said a Ranger officer. The strike forces were conducting a raid a night, which was very low compared with the height of the Iraq War, but a lot for Afghanistan. “Red goes too far,” said the officer. “Green gets really, really pissed off. They don't believe that going out every night is valuable, because you're kicking in people's doors that aren't bad.… One out of every two missions resulted in grabbing the wrong guy.”

Organizational egos were also a factor. “Green was running it [in Iraq], Green was winning,” said the Ranger officer. “In Afghanistan, Green was marginalized. Green came in at the end and got Task Force North. They got the least amount of ISR, they got the least amount of [close air support]. Out of all four [regional JSOC task forces], they were the least important. Green I don't think was used to being the least important.”
13

Delta's presence in Afghanistan increased as its Iraq commitments subsided, allowing it to put a squadron headquarters at the airfield in Mazar-i-Sharif. Its task was to prevent Al Qaeda establishing a sanctuary in northern Afghanistan. The German army provided the Coalition's main conventional force in northern Afghanistan, but the U.S. military held out little hope that the Germans could take care of business. “The Germans weren't going to do it, obviously, or didn't have the means,” said the senior ISAF staff officer. “Our guys obviously did.”

Delta's area of operations extended east to Kunar province, targeting the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, among other groups, said a Special Forces officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan.

The unit tried to repeat the success of its Mohawk human intelligence program in Iraq, but quickly discovered that Afghanistan was not nearly as conducive an environment in which to establish a spy network. “It doesn't work in Afghanistan,” said a task force officer. “They tried it. The Mohawk program works because you can get a local Iraqi to go into any [city like] Mosul, Baghdad, and he'll fit in. But if I took my recruited Afghan source and sent him into Sangin [in Helmand], they would know in a fucking heartbeat that this guy didn't belong, and then he would die.”

*   *   *

In June 2009, Stan McChrystal received his fourth star and took charge of the International Security Assistance Force. He had been in the job a year when a
Rolling Stone
magazine article that quoted his staff speaking in disparaging terms about officials in the administration of President Barack Obama forced his resignation. (Obama, a Democrat, succeeded George W. Bush as president in January 2009, but the change in administration did little to change the White House's reliance on JSOC.) McChrystal was replaced by David Petraeus, whose command lasted until July 2011. During the tenures of each general in Kabul, the twin issues of JSOC's night raids and civilian casualties gained a prominence that they hadn't before. “In '01, '02, '03, the occasional night raid might generate some local [protest] but in those days, the American presence was generally considered to be a good thing [by the Afghans],” said an Army civilian who made numerous visits to Afghanistan in the years after the September 11 attacks. However, with the passage of time, “you had less tolerance among the Afghans for any of that,” as the population tired of the corruption in the Karzai government, which Afghans associated with the United States.

In rural Afghan society, even more so than in many other cultures, having foreign, non-Muslim troops force their way into homes was seen as a grave violation of dignity. In particular, it was an offense against the concept of purdah, in which women are kept segregated from men who are not family members. In the later years of the war, JSOC forces were virtually the only Coalition military units conducting night raids, in part because they operated under rules of engagement for Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States' post–September 11 war against Al Qaeda. The conventional U.S. military operated under ISAF rules of engagement, which were much more limiting, requiring an extensive approval process for any night raid. “Our rules were totally different,” said a Ranger officer. “That's key. And that's [why] Task Force was able to do this at such a higher level, because we didn't have the bureaucracy or the approval authority [issue]. We could get a target that morning and execute it that night.”

As ISAF commanders, McChrystal and Petraeus each adhered to counterinsurgency doctrine that held that victory required separating insurgents from the civilian population so that civilians could be protected and insurgents targeted. This was devilishly difficult in Afghanistan's Pashtun tribal belt, where the insurgents sprang from the local population. It also placed the senior military leaders on the horns of a dilemma. They knew that more than any other Coalition force, it was JSOC that was taking the fight to the Taliban. (The ISAF press office regularly issued press releases about Coalition operations, without detailing the units involved. The vast majority of those that involved offensive action against the Taliban were JSOC operations.)
14
But McChrystal and Petraeus also knew that night raids had become a political sore spot for Karzai and were hugely unpopular with the population, particularly when JSOC made mistakes and killed civilians, threatening the Coalition's ability to remain in Afghanistan.