Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

In 1966, Special Forces had seven active component groups — the 1st, 3d, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th Special Forces Groups, four of which were augmented with PSYOPs, civil affairs, engineers, support, etc., to meet other special requirements.

After Vietnam, Special Forces were drastically cut back, and by 1978 their force structure had been reduced to only three active groups — the 5th, 7th, and 10th. Promotions dried up and the overall scope of activities was severely diminished. The focus of the military establishment withdrew from operations involving foreign internal defense and development, and returned to the tried-and-true conventional doctrines and procedures in which professional soldiers had long found comfort. The main emphasis now was seen as preparing for a potential major land war against the Soviets, and that called for modernized conventional forces, not the more unorthodox ways of special operations.

The survival of Special Forces itself was never in doubt, but the survival of the organization that people such as Bill Yarborough had envisaged, capable of performing a multitude of roles on a big stage, was.

This was despite the fact that SF had had many successes in Vietnam. The 5th Special Forces Group had operated long and hard there; it was the most highly decorated unit in the conflict, and had more Medal of Honor winners than any other regiment-sized unit. Many young officers who served in SF assignments in Vietnam went on to achieve flag rank, and sevcral of them became four-star generals. Many NCOs retired with the rank of sergeant major. Nevertheless, many of the regular officers who had risen to higher positions of authority on the conventional side would see a lesser role for unconventional-type units in future conflict — and Special Forces did not have a champion in the higher levels of decision-making. There was a lot of discord between SF and the main army in Vietnam.

And it had to be said that Special Forces did not always help matters. Retired Special Forces Major General James Guest explains:

In Vietnam, the 5th Special Forces Group operated independently for the most part. It had a small staff section that would get missions from the field force commander, an Army three-star general. The SF units that came in to do the missions didn't work for the division commander or for the senior adviser, but for the overall commander, and were forbidden to brief lower commanders on their missions. Because of the urgency of the missions, it often happened that neither the field force commander nor the units explained them to the local division commanders, and in the process they also ran over a lot of bureaucratic staff officers. This inevitably led to bad feelings. What many division commanders and their staffs saw was uncontrolled wild men running around in the bushes.

Now we had our characters on those kinds of missions. And they were high-stress missions. That kind of stress sometimes leads to bizarre behavior.

Some of our guys stayed on teams three and four years, running some kind of intense operation. When they came back into a base camp, they often just let it all hang out in ways that upset the others.

The A camps, whose missions were area control and interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were particularly misunderstood. They were perceived by the conventional forces as country clubs established by SF, with all the amenities of home — refrigerators and things like that. Yet nobody stopped to think about how it would be to live in one of those places. They were exposed. The Camp at Lang Vie, for example, was overrun by North Vietnamese tanks.

A similar kind of situation went on out in the A camps themselves. They were normally out in the hills, but close to divisions, so the people in the divisions could see that the way the SF guys did things was not necessarily the way everybody else in the Army did them. And, of course, on occasion, SF might "liberate" equipment from the division — which had a lot of equipment. They needed it, so they took it.

Or one of the SF guys might come into the division, and he just didn't look like an American soldier. He might have long hair, and be wearing tiger fatigues and big, brass Montagnard bracelets (which meant a great deal to the Montagnards), and be carrying a Sten gun or other foreign weapons. In the context of the A camp, all this was perfectly appropriate (Special Forces have always trained to use foreign weapons), but to everyone else, it was bizarre — nonregulation.

Furthermore, the Special Forces habit of rubbing the rest of the Army the wrong way did not end with the war in Southeast Asia. Since most of the Army distrusted them, the Special Forces tended to react accordingly, to overplay their skills, and then rub in their triumphs in a way certain to cause resentment.

In 1977 and 1978, Jim Guest was with the 10th SFG at Bad Tolz in Germany, a unit often called upon to mimic Soviet special-operations units, particularly those trying to "penetrate" secure facilities. Guest's penetration teams were almost invariably successful — to their delight and the consternation of their targets.

On one occasion, the VII Corps deputy commander had Guest run an operation against the VII Corps Tactical command posts.

Jim Guest relates what happened:

"What do you want us to do?" I asked.

"I want you to attack the CP as if you were Russian operatives, Soviet Special Forces," the general answered.

"Yes, sir," I said. Then we went to work. Of course, he didn't tell the corps staff to expect us, and neither did we. Part of the game was to avoid tipping off corps headquarters.

We assigned one and a half A-Detachments to run the actual operation — ODA-6, reinforced by a six-man Ranger team from the Ranger detachment stationed at Bad Tolz, where they normally ran the USAREUR (U.S. Army Europe) survival training course. The team rehearsed in several ways. It moved into the operational area, occupied mission support sites, cached equipment, established observation on the targets, identified the critical parts of each target and selected routes into and out of the target areas. There were attacks on the targets, immediate-action drills, helicopter operations, sniper operations in which the snipers were used to secure the mission support sites and to provide overwatch for the attacking elements during attacks in the Corps areas, and finally, VII Corps field SOP — especially those items that would apply to the team as they conducted operations. The detachments were particularly interested in the way the Corps military police operated, since they planned to operate as MPs.

Meanwhile, we gathered all the open data on the corps we could find — how the Corps uniforms were worn, how their vehicles were marked, the normal separation distance between elements of the Corps field CP, how the VII Corps specifically provided security forces, and their estimated reaction time, and what kind of equipment we could expect to be confronted with. We also studied everything available about communication systems, about how to visually recognize secure facilities, and about antennas. We identified the different CP locations by the types of antennas, and we knew where the units were because of the orientation of their antennas. And finally, we made mock-ups of how the CPs looked laid out on the ground.

When the time came to run the operation, we did a little recon near the gates. I had soldiers hang around until they heard the challenge and the password, then we immediately passed the info on to the strike team. When they were ready to go, we put the strike team itself into VII Corps MP uniforms, and took our own jeeps and marked them up like MP jeeps. That's how our guys made the initial infiltration.

Once they were inside, they successfully penetrated and knocked out all the communications installations, simulated an attack on the operations complex with standoff weapons (81mm mortars carried in the trailers of our look-alike MP jeeps), and took out the critical technicians, such as the computer operators.

The teams successfully gained access to all its target elements in the Corps area, with the primary emphasis on the operational complex and on the areas with technicians.

Then, for show and tell, the team took pictures with KS 99 cameras. They photographed the antenna configurations, the operational complex, vehicles (with identifying markings prominently displayed). Corps security points, the technicians' living and working areas, helicopter pads with helicopters parked, the Generals' Mess, where all the key leaders and staff officers congregated on most nights for the evening meal, and routes in and out of the Corps areas, including the vehicle parks.

Here is how they took out the computers:

In those days, their scarcity value made computers more important than they are now; there were so few of them and they were so big and cumbersome. So our guys found the big van where they kept the ultracomputers, and went down, again dressed as MPs but carrying satchels like couriers, and banged on the hatch.

Naturally, the computer operators inside opened the hatch. "You know you can't come in," they said. "This is—"

"That's all right. We have a message from the Corps commander that they want you to send out." And it was two red smoke grenades. They chucked them through the hatch and slammed it shut.

Pretty soon, the fresh air generators cranked up, and red smoke came rolling out of the exhaust ports. It was quite a sight.

Other members of the strike team "killed" the remaining computer operators in their tents — with lipstick, their normal method of "slitting" friendly throats.

As one NCO described it: "We crawled into the tent where they were all sleeping and waited under the bunks where we could reach up with our fingertips and find them, and then we'd take the lipstick and draw it right across their necks.

"But one of them, a female, just gave me all kinds of problems. I kept trying to find the head, and I couldn't find it. Then 1 heard this screech: 'Eeeeeeek.' So I didn't move for a while. I just laid under her cot till she went back to sleep. But because of her eeeeek, I knew where her head was, and after she was asleep again, I found her neck."

(Incidentally, if all of this had been a real Soviet penetration, the loss would have been catastrophic for the Corps in the near term, but it would not have permanently stopped Corps operations, only significantly interrupted things for twelve to twenty-four hours until the damage could be repaired.)

When the day came for us to give the action report, the general said, "I want the team members to come up and give a debriefing to the entire Corps staff."

Soon after that, the strike team, in their regular uniforms, were setting up the debriefing in a big theater, when a suspicious colonel came in (it turned out he was responsible for security and counterintelligence operations). "What are you people doing?" he asked.

"We're up here to brief the general."

"What are you briefing the general on?"

"We're briefing the general on the infiltration of VII Corps tactical CPs in the field."

The colonel's face went white, and he turned around and left in a fury. In fact, pretty soon most of the corps staff, from colonels on down, were equally incensed — especially as the debriefing proceeded and we described, in detail how we had broken into everything they had.

This led to a lot of hard feelings.

Another example of the kind of thing that would really incense the rest of the Army happened in 1978, when we were scheduled to participate in that year's REFORGER (Reinforcement or Germany). Beforehand, all the leaders had to go up to the V Corps to be briefed about what everyone was going to do.

At the end of the briefing, the commander got up and said, "As the United States V Corps commander, I will not allow the so-called elite units to disrupt the exercise. They will not be allowed to run any mission I do not directly, personally okay." He didn't want to let us operate — that is, to make him or his exercise look bad.

Well, we were sitting in the back of the room, while the big chiefs — the Corps commanding general, his G-3 and G-2, and the Allied commanders participating in REFORGER — were up front on a kind of stage looking at us get painted as black sheep. It didn't sit well with us.

So REFORGER continued down the road, and we looked like we were just cooling our heels; but what we really did was select one of the division headquarters. "Before the exercise is over, we are going to destroy the division headquarters," we promised ourselves. And then we prepared and deployed a small reconnaissance team from one of the A- Detachments to check out the operational area.

The team, which wore civilian clothes and spoke fluent German, made the initial preparation by studying the operational area and deciding on individual cover stories, in case they were stopped by German authorities or in some way became involved with American military units. To the Germans, they were Americans on leave and carried the proper documents. To the Americans, they were local Germans, and carried authentic-appearing German documents.

The division field CP was the focus of the operation, with the operations center, communications center, and computer center the primary items of interest.

The strike team then remained in isolation /mission preparation at Bad Tolz and planned/rehearsed, according to the information they were receiving from the recon team. This primarily focused on movement by helicopter, rappelling from the helicopter with operational equipment, movement to the objective area, linkup with the recon team, attacking the division CP, movement out of the area, and pickup by helicopter in an isolated area. Again, we also rehearsed snipers to cover the attack and withdrawal from the target.

Finally, the general thought he'd delayed us long enough to keep us from running an exercise against him or one of his units. So eighteen hours before the end of the exercise, he okayed us to run operations. What he didn't know was that we already had the operations set up and cut.

At that time there were storms all over Germany, but we flew the helicopters carrying the strike teams in and out of them, putting the teams about five miles away from the division headquarters. It was all a piece of cake; we came straight through: the command post, the operations center. In fact, the SF guys were taking the maps down off the wall and rolling them up when the assistant division commander came in. Here's this general standing there with a fish-out-of-water look on his face, and here are these three or four other guys, all in black paint and balaclavas, dismantling his CP.

"Well, who are you?" he asked.

"We're Special Forces," they said. "We're destroying your division headquarters." And then one of them turned around and shot him with a blank and said, "And, General you're supposed to fall down on the floor, becau-se you're dead."

This next story comes from a strike team member at a nuclear weapons site we'd also decided to take out. "You know," he recounts, "there was this big ol' female lieutenant — she was really pissed off. She was just going wild at the idea that we would take down her little kingdom. I thought we were going to have to handcuff her before we finished. In fact, we did handcuff her. We not only handcuffed, her, we handcuffed her dog — a big German shepherd. We duct-taped his muzzle. I'm sure even today that lady still hates us, because, one, we got in her installation, and, two, we did what we were there to do."

When it was all over, we didn't actually do anything to the sites. We just went in, left them a card that said: "We would have destroyed you, " and left.

At the debriefing, the commander didn't like what he was hearing — at least at first; but as the debrief continued, he began to get very interested and to participate with some energy, particularly when he realized we were just doing what we had been instructed to do by USAREUR and were not laughing at him or his unit.

"We could have done whatever we wanted to do," we told him. "We took your CP and weapons sites. We passed through the outside security force like butter, and we took it all down so quickly that we didn't set the alarms off; and that gave us a window of time to do whatever we wanted."

We then submitted a detailed report to USAREUR, as required by our instructions, and they used the report to make improvements in their operations for real-world operations.

Small wonder that there was friction. Playing "Gotcha" made the SF guys feel good — and they were doing what they were trained to do — but it's hard to blame the "big" Army for not welcoming them as brothers.

As a result, Special Forces eventually became a bill payer for the rest of the Army. Pentagon finances tend to be a zero-sum game: Your gain is my loss — a battalion less for me, a battalion more for you. Those who have power, influence, or backers at the Pentagon are happier with their budget than those who are seen as marginal or out of fashion. That was the Special Forces.

When the cutbacks first began to hit Special Forces in the early '70s, they were assigned few real-world missions outside the United States, despite the fact that "slow-burn" wars, both Communist- and non-Communist-inspired, continued to fester in the Third World. So the Special Forces had to find ways to keep themselves occupied. Major General Hank Emerson, the SF commander, conducted benign real-world SF-type missions inside the United States — missions that had the added benefit of providing needed services to poor and isolated communities, migrant farm workers, prison inmates, and especially to American Indians.

Green Berets parachuted into Arizona and linked up with Indians at Supai. Together they built a bridge across Havasu Creek, which allowed the Indians to take their farm machinery across the creek and into their fields. Later, Green Beret veterinarians checked Indian livestock for disease, gave inoculations, and offered classes in animal care.

Among the Seminoles, Green Berets taught local officers law-enforcement techniques; gave written and spoken English classes for Seminole children and adults; provided instructional programs dealing with drug and alcohol abuse, first aid, and nutrition; and provided increased health and dental services. They provided similar services for the Cheyenne and other native peoples.

None of this was their "real" mission, but the training allowed the much weakened and reduced Special Forces to keep themselves tuned up and ready for when the call came again.

An example of the kind of challenge they faced came in 1982. The 5th SF Group at Fort Bragg had been given the assignment to support the recently created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) — which two years later became CENTCOM — in its planning for Southwest Asia. Iran was then a major focus. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviets could possibly roll down through Iran, grab its warm-water ports, and of course, its oil, thus affording them the strategic position to control the flow of all oil out of the Cuff. The RDJTF's mission was to make sure that did not happen.

Operating in Southwest Asia meant deserts, of course, but as a consequence of the chaos after Vietnam, no one in Special Forces had desert training.

Jim Cuest, then the 5th Group commander, tells the story:

The 5th was a big group. In 1982, we had fifty-four A-Detachments, but our entire training budget was only $350,000. Major General Joe Lutz, the commander of the JFK Center, told me, "I want you to train your group to go to war in the desert."

"Yes, sir," I said. "I'll do that."

But when I started checking into the realities of desert training, I realized that nobody in SF had actually trained there. I told General Lutz that we needed a site in the desert where we could start training the troops.

"We don't have any money for that," he told me. "But go ahead and do it, and we'll find the money somehow." And he did.

So we got started.

I sent a major and a couple of captains out west, and they found a post near Fort Hauchucha, Arizona, near Tombstone, where the local desert matched up pretty closely with the deserts in the Middle East; it was the harshest desert we could find. We then put a training unit out there.

At the same time, I commissioned a desert study, which concluded, "In Vietnam, the engagement range for the enemy was usually fifty to three hundred meters. In the desert, it starts at fifteen hundred meters. To fight there, you need bigger, more accurate weapons."

Other important conclusions: First, you must prepare yourself psychologically to operate in such a strange and hostile environment. Second, mobility is a must. You need a vehicle. You can't just walk in the desert very far and survive; the rough terrain nears you out. And you need something to carry water, equipment, and survival gear. In most other operational areas, we carry all this in rucksacks. But not in the desert. Third, you must be able to navigate by the stars, like ships at set. And then you also must know how to camouflage in the desert, how to estimate distances, how to make expedient repairs on vehicles and other pieces of key equipment (its a long way bach to your support).

Then we got the group together, and I told them right up front: "Most of you are veterans of Vietnam, where — unfortunately — we fought in the jungle. Now you're going into the desert to learn how to fight there, because you don't know how. That means we're going to have to shift the total thinking of the group."

We trained for seventy-six days, and the guys learned how to survive and navigate. Navigation is damned difficult. You either have a haze, which keeps you from seeing far enough to orient yourself, or if it's clear, everything appears far closer than it actually is, and when you get off the post, it's really harsh. We had a lot of trouble getting accustomed to navigating in the desert.

After four weeks of orientation and general learning, we put them out in the desert in A-Detachments, and took everything away from them — no food, no water — and they had to survive for two weeks. Live or die, it was up to them. (Of course, we had our own outpost to watch them.)

After they'd been out for a while, somebody came up to me and said, "You know, the guys out there look like that movie, Quest For Fire" (where cave-men roamed around a desert trying to survive.) He was right; they did. In the daytime, the sun was so hot they stayed under shelter, and when they had to go out, they tied rags around their heads, like Arabs. They hunted and traveled at night, with homemade spears, slingshots, anything they could get. And they hunted anything they could find — porcupines, birds, snakes.

Special Forces are very cunning. After they came back in, they told us, "As we wandered along the wadis, we kept seeing these little holes. 'What the hell are they?' we kept asking ourselves. And it finally dawned on us that they were rat holes. And that meant rattlesnakes were going to come out at night and hunt them. And that meant we could get them both.

"I don't know how many rattlesnakes we killed and ate, but we depopulated some of those areas."

After we found out about the rat holes, we always put guys in areas where there was a good supply of them.

The same thing went for water. We always put the guys in areas where they could find it. Before they went out, they'd study maps, which showed where they could dig down and get water; it would seep up under dried streambeds. In some places, little springs trickled up, but they had to be careful about these, because some of them were alkaline.

After we'd been doing this for a while, we realized we needed vehicles, not only for the reasons already mentioned but to use as weapons platforms for. 50-caliber machine guns and TOWs. Our area studies had convinced us that any enemy with the potential to hurt us in the desert would be mounted on vehicles — or, in some cases, camels.

We needed vehicles, but there was no money And since We couldn't get anybody to give us anything, we took our own trucks, painted them desert brown (for camouflage), and cut their tops off. We had to do that so the trucks could be easily dismounted — but also so we could mount the weapons and have 360-degree observation on the move. In the desert, you need to see in every direction — especially for protection against surprise or helicopters.

"Cut the tops off very carefully," I told our mechanics. "If we ever have to turn one of the trucks back in, we can just set it down and weld the top back on, and nobody'll ever know."

Sometimes we went to the Property Disposal Yard (the PDO yard) and picked up vehicles the army was throwing away or selling. We would take three or four broken-down and beat-up vehicles to a place our mechanics and maintenance people had set up out in the desert, and rebuild them ourselves. We cut two or three vehicles in pieces, and welded the good pieces together to make one workable truck.

A lot of people thought we were nuts, hut it was just Special Forces ingenuity once again.

The payoff came when we went on an exercise a year later with some elite Arab units, and it turned out that we were more at home in their desert than they were. We could navigate in the desert. We could live in the desert. And they couldn't. They didn't know how to live and fight there. In fact, we had to give them water. This gave us a great deal of confidence.

After the exercise, we asked them, "How do you guys get around in the desert when we're not here?"

"Oh, we get the Bedouins to help," they told us.

NEW LIFE

By the late 1970s, Special Forces funding stood at one-tenth of one percent of the total defense budget (it is now 3.2 percent) — and even this was an improvement over their earlier share of the pie. Training, tactical mobility, and optempo[18] suffered; and there was no significant modernization.

The world was changing, however. Insurgencies were spreading and international terrorism was on the rise. Operational failures, such as the Desert One tragedy and the failed Mayaguez rescue,[19] only emphasized the obvious: America was losing its ability to respond to unconventional threats, and something had to be done about it.

Actually, it wasn't obvious to most in the military high command, but a few people saw the writing on the wall. One of them was General Edward C. "Shy" Meyer, the Chief of Staff of the Army during the early '80s. In an article titled "The Challenge of Change," in the 1980—81 Army Green Book, an annual publication reflecting the opinions of the senior leadership of the Army, he wrote:

"Today, the cumulative effect we seek for the U.S. Army is the speedy creation of the following: Forces with the flexibility to respond globally, in NATO or in other more distant locations; forces capable of sustained operations under the most severe conditions of the integrated battlefield; forces equally comfortable with all the lesser shades of conflict." A graph showing the possible spectrum of conflict demonstrated why the last was particularly critical. Because "low-risk, high-leverage ventures, such as activities on the lower end of the spectrum, are the most likely military challenges to occur, [we need] forces that are created most wisely so as to make best use of our national resources."

And General Meyer was as good as his word. Putting his muscle and prestige on the line, he instituted sweeping initiatives, which led to the following:1. Changes in the Special Operations command structure, to include all Army units with related capabilities — all Special Forces, Ranger, Psychological Operations, Civil Affairs, and Army Special Operations aviation units.2. Immediate development of a Special Forces modernization action program, a Special Operations Forces Functional Area Assessment, and a United States Army Special Forces Master Plan.

General Meyer also ordered the activation of the Ist Special Forces Group, with orientation toward the Pacific region; gave instructions to upgrade the capabilities of psychological operations and civil affairs units; and directed that the authorized level of organization (ALO) for the other Special Forces units be upgraded to ALO-1 (the highest priority). This meant they were authorized to acquire the personnel and equipment they needed.

In Carl Stiner's words: "As a result of his understanding of the complex nature of the challenges that our nation would face, as well as the capability of Special Forces for meeting these challenges, in large measure General Meyer is due the credit for bringing the SF back from their lowest point ever, as well as for the many critical missions they have performed since."

It was a good start, but much more was needed. At this point, Congress picked up the ball.

In 1986, spurred by the same real-world concerns that had inspired General Meyer, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. A sweeping work of military reformation, it strengthened the unified combatant commanders (such as the CINCs of CENTCOM or EUCOM) and the organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs the President's chief military adviser, and in general integrated the forces of the different services more effectively.

That same year, Senators Sam Nunn and William Cohen proposed an amendment to the act to provide the same kind of sweeping changes to U.S. Special Operations. It passed, too — and the effects were stunning.

First, it established the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which was to be commanded by a four-star general and would include all active and reserve special operations forces stationed in the United States (outside the United States, such forces would normally be under the command of the CINC of a particular arca).

Second, it established an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflicts — ASD (SOLIC) — whose job was to supervise those areas, including oversight of policy and resources.

Third, it defined the mission requirements of special operations. These now included: direct action, strategic reconnaissance, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, civil affairs, psychological operations, humanitarian assistance, and other activities specified by the President or the Secretary of Defense.

Fourth, it gave the new USSOCOM its own funding and control over its own resources. A new major funding category was created — Major Force Program 11 1 (MFP-11) — which required the Defense Department to keep special-operations forces funding separate from general service funding. USSOCOM funding could be revised only by the Secretary of Defense after consultation with the CINC of USSOCOM.

Fifth, the amendment (and later follow-up legislation) specified in unusual detail the responsibilities of the new CINC and the Assistant Secretary of Defense, the control of resources in money and manpower, and the monitoring of SOF officer and enlisted promotions.

At long last, Special Operations had arrived.

The devil, of course, was in the details. Congress could mandate, but it was the military that would have to implement.

To begin with, a brand-new command had to be set up — created and staffed pretty much from scratch — and opinions varied on how to do it. For instance, General James Lindsay, the new commander (in late 1986) of the U.S. Readiness Command (REDCOM), had one idea. REDCOM's job was to prepare conventional forces to support the unified regional commands, a job that included deployment and contingency planning, joint training of assigned forces, and defense of the continental United States. Lindsay saw the mission of the new special operations command as similar to REDCOM's, in its own way, and reasoned, "Why not combine the commands? And make the special forces component subordinate to REDCOM?" He further refined the idea by proposing that they both be combined into a new command, called USSTRICOM (U.S. Strike Command).[20]

Neither his original idea nor its revision worked, because they failed to take into account the mandate of the Nunn-Cohen legislation to create a broadly service-like organization commanded by a full, four-star general — (not a three-star subordinate to a REDCOM/STRICOM commander) — but they got people thinking… and the result must have been a surprise to him.

In January 1987, Senator Cohen sent a directive to the JCS Chairman, Admiral Crowe, specifying that the new command had to be pure Special Forces and would have a "blank check. Subsequently, on January 23, the Joint Chiefs announced that it was REDCOM itself that would no longer be needed, and that SOCOM would be built on REDCOM's foundation, using its facilities, resources, infrastructure, and any staff that could handle the assignment. It was formalized by the Secretary of Defense in March of the same year, and on April 16, SOCOM was activated in Tampa, at the former REDCOM headquarters — with General Lindsay as its first commander.

Now that the infrastructure was settled, the commands had to decide exactly who was going to be in it — who were the "special forces"? Predictably, there was no little debate about this, too. The Army part was easy. It passed to the new command all of its Special Operations Forces — the SF groups, the special operations aviation units, and the 75th Ranger Regiment (PSYOPS and civil affairs came later, during Carl Stiner's tenure as CINC). For the rest, it was more complicated. The Air Force special operations forces, for instance, then under the Military Airlift Command (MAC), were transferred to USSOCOM, but the Air Force hoped to retain some control. The Marines had units that were labeled special operations — capable, but they had no actual special operations units. Though the Navy had never previously shown much love for its SEALs, it suddenly discovered that the SEALs were an indispensable part of the Navy family and tried to hold on to them — and their part of the special operations budget. The Navy managed to keep that debate going for the better part of a year, but it was a lost cause, and the SEALs went to USSOCOM. Finally, there was debate about whether the Joint Special Operations Task Force should become part of USSOCOM, or report directly to the national command authorities without the hindrance of an interim layer. In the end, it was placed under USSOCOM as a sub — unified command.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the "Functional Area Assessment" that General Meyer had inspired was beginning to produce results.

The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) had been tasked to conduct an in-depth analysis of how SF should be organized, manned, equipped, and trained. It was to answer the questions: "Where are we now? What is broken? How do we fix it? Where do we need to go in the future?"

General Maxwell Thurman, the vice chief of staff of the army, was the overseer of the analysis; the TRADOC commander, General Bill Richardson, supervised it personally; and other outside generals — Mike Spigelmire, Tom Fields, Fred Franks, and Ed Burba — headed the panels. The study was conducted by the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.

Thurman's leadership gave the analysis particular force. Everyone involved reported to him, and everything they reported was put on the front burner. He listened to everybody, heard every problem and every solution, and put a time clock on it. This was not some committee report to be filed away somewhere and forgotten. At the end of the process, there would be an implementation plan — approved by Generals Thurman, Richardson, and Lindsay, and then done: no complaining, no foot-dragging.

When it was all over, the analysis proposed the following:

First, Army Special Forces could no longer exist in the wilderness; there would be a separate SF branch (like Infantry, Armor, or Aviation) and an NCO career-management field. That meant that SF troops and officers could have a career path within Special Forces itself; previously, they'd had to rotate among other parts of the military if they expected to get ahead. This goal was accomplished in April 1987; the commandant at the Special War Center and School became the chief of branch, just as the commandant at Fort Benning was the chief of branch for the infantry. "At this point," Jim Guest remarks, "we went from being looked at as something kept in the dark and under the covers to sitting up at the head table with the rest of the big shots."

Second, the Green Berets needed to become a major, three-star (lieutenant general) command. This allowed Special Forces to become masters of their own destiny, and to oversee and execute their own training and readiness programs. When a three-star commander sat down at a table with other three- and four-star commanders, he carried weight that one- and two-star commanders didn't. Army Special Forces became a major command in 1989.

Third, the academic center, schools, and training facilities were upgraded, and the selection, assessment, and training made more professional and tough.

And, fourth, an equipment-acquisition plan was instituted to upgrade all of the SF communications, weapons, aircraft, and training facilities in order to meet mission requirements.

The modern Special Operations force was now ready to go.

MAKING PROFESSIONALS

Or almost ready to go. As previously noted, one of SF's problems was that many of the generation that emerged from Vietnam, or who came into the force after Vietnam, failed to attain the high levels of professionalism expected of men who make up a force that calls itself elite. In Vietnam, they'd operated out on the end of a string without much supervision. Others — recruited after the Army drawdown in the '70s — were not the best group of men to begin with. Some of them had simply been looking for greater freedom and intrigue than they could get in conventional units, and had found their way into SF. Meanwhile, back then SF did not give a strong enough professional orientation to its younger officers. As a consequence, some of them picked up "outsider" attitudes, simply because that was what was in the air.

On the other side of the coin, it was hard for them to get promoted, and that also didn't help their attitude any. Normally, if you were good, you moved through key positions in a variety of conventional units. Your performance and potential were recognized by people who counted, and in due course you were selected for promotion and for attendance at Leavenworth and later the War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or one of the other high-level service schools. Promotion and selection boards were composed exclusively of officers with conventional backgrounds.

Back in the '70s and the early '80s, however, most officers were dead-ended in Special Forces. The personnel assignment people in Washington were content to drop them there and "forget" about them. In many ways, assignment to SF was career suicide, and so it was small wonder that some officers just figured: To hell with it. Such people simply reinforced the perception that special operators were not "real" Army.

All of this came to a head soon after the passage of Nunn-Cohen, during Jim Guest's tenure as head of the Special Warfare Center and School. The four-star TRADOC commander sent Guest the following message: "I'm tired of having to apologize for Special Forces," he announced in no uncertain terms. "I am tired of their reputation. I am tired of having to deal with their lack of professionalism. Are they in the Army or not?

"If you don't do something about this, I am going to relieve you. I will run you out of the Army."

Jim Guest says:

So that caught my attention. That's when I realized that we couldn't let things go on the old way, and that's when we started saying, "Hey, we can't mess around any longer outside the Army system; we've got to do things inside it. We've got to make ourselves more knowledgeable of it. That means, first of all, that we've got to convince the senior generals that we are professionals, that we are capable of doing special missions, and that we're not just a camp of thugs."

At the same time, we started retiring the soldiers who did not or could not meet the new standards, or who refused to meet them. Some looked at the future and decided that they did not want to be in a more structured force.

After that, we raised the standards. We wanted smarter people, so we established an IQ level — a high one. If you wanted to come into Special Forces, you had to have an IQ of at least 120.

Then we had to do something about training.

In those days, when someone volunteered for Special Forces and was chosen to take the Q Course, he received a permanent change of station to Fort Bragg. In other words, he was ours. If he dropped out, something had to be found for him at Fort Bragg. This caused problems: We had more washouts than people who made the grade, and we had to find places for all those people at Bragg. Second, we had a lot of money invested in these folks. We needed to find a way to reduce the initial investment while making sure we let the good ones come through. Finally, we were being used by a lot of people who simply wanted a ticket into the 82nd Airborne Division or somewhere else at Bragg, so they would volunteer for Special Forces and then immediately drop out of the training, some by voluntarily terminating themselves, some by just flunking it somewhere along the line. That had to stop.

What we did was persuade General Vuono, the Army Chief of Staff, to institute a new selection and assessment program that would come in before the Q Course. We'd recruit the new people, then they'd sign up and come to Bragg TDY (temporarily, not permanently) and go through a two-meek selection drill that would pinpoint those men who could operate on their own but could also subject themselves to a team for a mission. "Our idea," as we explained to the Chief of Staff, "is to give them zero training — absolutely none. We want to get them out there and make them as uncomfortable as we can, put them through situations that are as ambivalent as we can make them, and stress them as much as they can bear. Then we want them to make a choice. Do I really want to be Special Forces or not?"

The course we came up with was designed by one of the men who had put together the selection course for our top special missions units. The volunteers were always in unbalanced situations. They never knew what to expect. They never knew what was going to happen to them. They'd think they were stopping for a meal break, and would get a mission two minutes before they were going to eat. "Move. Report here,"which might mean five miles of hard marching with heavy rucksacks.

We never told them where or why or how far they were going. We never said, "You're going from here, and you'll end up over here. "Only, "You start here and go in that direction." Then they'd march until they met somebody else, who'd send them on another leg of the journey.

People who can't deal with ambiguous situations will fall out when they're out there alone and confused in the country, particularly when we've got them under physical stress.

We didn't harass them, the way they do at places like Jump School. We didn't have to. Sure, one morning we gave them push-ups and things like that, just to show them, "yes, we can do that to you if we want to. But that's not how we're going to do it. We're going to tell you what we want you to do and then see if you attempt to do it."

At the end of the course, we had a thirty-mile forced march, and that pretty well tested them out. We had people who quit just doing that — both officers and NCOs.

Some men we flunked. Some of them could do everything we asked for physically, but we took them, out for psychological reasons. Some men were loners and could not handle the stress of operating in a team.

We were looking for solid men of character and integrity, motivated for all the right reasons — men of maturity and sound judgment, with the inner strength to do whatever was required under all conditions and circumstances, and who did not have to be "stroked" to do their best.

It worked. We truly began to get the very best men. On top of that, we'd begun indoctrinating them into Special Forces right up front. They were paying a price to be in Special Forces. They'd made a real investment, and it was going to mean something to them. The result was that we were able to fill our slots with quality replacements, who were soon recognized by the Army by receiving promotions faster than their peers in the conventional Army did.

Next, we rebuilt and upgraded our training facilities at Camp MacKall (adjacent to Fort Bragg), where we did the Q Course and some of the other courses. During World War II, the Army had trained nearly all of their airborne units there, but everything was left over from then — Navy Quonset huts, an old mess hall, and a latrine. We needed a new sewage and water system, new buildings, and new training facilities; and General Thurman made sure we got all this when he was TRADOC commander.

As for integrating an awareness of special operations into the service schools, such as the infantry school at Benning or the armor school at Knox, and at the advanced courses at Leavenworth or the War College, not as much has been done there. I don't see in their curriculum any focus on Special Forces, Civil Affairs, PSYOPs, and Special Operations Aviation and how they can be integrated on the battlefield. That was a major failure we set about to correct, and which still needs work.

We've got to put an advanced training and education slice into all those schools. We've got to make sure those folks are being taught an appreciation of SF, because sitting in those audiences are future CINCs, senior staff officers, senior planners, and senior subordinate commanders for the CINC — and they need to know what we can do.

We've done a lot to make Special Forces even more professional. Now the Army has to learn how to use then? most effectively.

CARL STINER-BETWEEN THE WARS

Meanwhile, Carl Stiner was progressing through several key assignments: a tour with Army headquarters in Washington; a battalion command with the 82nd Airborne Division, where he was also division operations officer; study at the Army War College, and a Masters degree in public administration; a tour in Saudi Arabia, as the assistant project manager for training and modernizing the Saudi National Guard-a Special Forces — type assignment; brigade command at Fort Benning, Georgia; and in 1979, he and twenty-two other handpicked officers were sent to Saudi Arabia and Yemen to help the Saudis put out the civil war between North and South Yemen — another SF-type assignment.

After returning from Yemen, he was again assigned to the Pentagon to work for General Edward G. "Shy" Meyer, the Army Chief of Staff.

On a Thursday afternoon toward the end of February 1980, General Meyer called Stiner into his office. "When you come in tomorrow, Carl," he said, "I think you better wear your Class A uniform. And, oh, by the way, you better bring Sue in that afternoon. There's going to be a special ceremony."

"What kind of ceremony?" Stiner asked.

"I am going to promote you to Brigadier General," the General answered, "and you are going to be assigned as the Chief of Staff of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, MacDill AFB, Florida."

The RDJTF was created by President Jimmy Carter in response to a perceived slight against the Saudis and other friendly Arabs. All major nations except the Arabs had a standing U.S. unified command to look out for their security interests. "Why not us?" the Arabs had told Carter. Two years later, the RDJTF became the United States Central Command, and assumed responsibility for U.S. security interests in Southwest Asia.

The next day, Stiner, wearing his Greens, brought Sue in for the 3:00 P.M. ceremony.

When it was over, Meyer told Stiner to report the next day — Saturday — to Lieutenant General P. X. Kelley, who was to be the commander of the not-yet-activated RDJTF.

At that meeting, Kelley told Stiner to leave for MacDill on Monday, write the activation order on the way down, and publish it when he got there. This would activate the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, effective March 1, 1980.

When Stiner showed up at MacDill, he was met by a total staff of four enlisted personnel, but over the next couple of months, these were augmented by 244 handpicked men — mainly officers from all the services. Stiner remained there until May 1982, during which time he and the staff formed and trained the most effective joint command in existence, and wrote and exercised three major war plans for Southwest Asia (one variant became the foundation for Operation DESERT STORM seventeen years later).

In June 1982, he was reassigned to the 82nd Airborne Division as the Assistant Division Commander for Operations, now working for Major General James J. Lindsay In August 1983, a call came for him to report the following day to General Jack Vessey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had another deployment.

This time, Lebanon.