Walking point
The commandos taking the lead in the war on terrorism suddenly have some new rules
Seven years after American combat helicopters collided in a fiery crash in the Iranian desert, the Pentagon's elite Special Operations Command was born. Desert One, the failed effort to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, cast a harsh light on the Pentagon's unreadiness to deal with a new kind of enemy. Ever since it was born in 1987, SOCOM, as the headquarters responsible for America's commando units is known, has been developing new weapons and tactics to deal with a wide variety of fast, fleeting foes. So it came as little surprise to anyone familiar with SOCOM's can-do corps of warriors when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced last year that he wanted them to take a lead role in America's global war on terrorism.
The man Rumsfeld turned to was Gen. Bryan "Doug" Brown. In Grenada in 1983 and then again in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Brown, a pilot of the blacked-out, souped-up choppers in the fabled "Night Stalkers" regiment, developed cutting-edge new combat tactics still in use today. Beginning as an enlisted Green Beret, he rose quickly to commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, the SOCOM unit that conducts the Pentagon's most highly classified missions. While his children have taken his place on the front lines (a son-in-law was seriously wounded in Afghanistan), Brown still jumps out of planes with his fellow high-altitude parachutists every chance he gets. In a rare visit to SOCOM headquarters in Tampa, U.S. News was given a detailed briefing on SOCOM's new structure and missions, as Brown prepares to make his special operators the point of the spear in the terrorism war.
New rules. Despite all his efforts, however, Brown and SOCOM have been ensnared in a grinding Pentagon turf war. Several of the powerful four-star officers who lead the Pentagon's five geographic commands have raised questions about SOCOM's new global mandate. The State Department and the CIA have also raised objections, officials say. Thomas O'Connell, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict--and a former comrade in arms of Brown--argues that the U.S. decision-making system must adapt to cope with a wholly new kind of enemy. "We are operating under rules written in the cold war," O'Connell says. "The rules need to be changed because the game has changed."
But refining the new rules is proving to be no easy matter. SOCOM's special operators are multifaceted warriors, trained to apply a mix of discrete force, intelligence, and nonlethal measures. They have performed superbly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have largely operated at the behest of conventional commanders in both places. In countries where the United States is not at war, SOCOM forces have operated under the watchful eyes of ambassadors and CIA station chiefs. Rumsfeld's decision to give SOCOM a wider brief has raised several critical issues. Among them:
Should SOCOM or the geographic combatant commanders be in charge of counterterrorism operations?
Should special operations forces have funding authority to pay local allies for help, as the CIA does?
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