The Crisis Response Force
June 2014
Throughout the first half of 2014, the operational demand in America’s ongoing war on terror was still focused mainly on the special operations mission in Afghanistan. There, as we continued to weed out remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda networks, special operations JTACs were at the forefront of the mission as most of the hunting and killing was done by way of the very airstrikes we controlled.
Earlier that summer I was getting ready for my unit’s standard deployment cycle—another infil back to Afghanistan. I was set to attach to a Special Forces team in the ongoing Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission assisting and accompanying the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) against the insurgency in Afghanistan. But in the weeks leading up to the deployment, the threat of ISIS in Iraq seemed to explode overnight. We began receiving constant intelligence updates about the alarming activity of this new, offshoot terrorist cell.
Still, it didn’t seem as if anything was going to come of it, not as far as U.S. military action was concerned. As far as we saw it, the intel updates were simply to keep us aware of a developing situation in a country we’d long pulled out of. We kept our focus on the upcoming mission to Afghanistan.
I always tried to relax the last few days before a deployment. I’d strive in earnest to put aside the anxiety of the impending time away and all that could go wrong, and just try to be in the moment with my family. But that wasn’t going to happen. A couple of days before we were set to head out, I got a call from my operations chief.
“The mission’s changed for a few of you guys, Wes,” he started. “You’re not going to Afghanistan…that’s all I can say here. Show tomorrow morning same time as briefed and you’ll get all the info.” Before hanging up he quickly added, “Oh, and make sure you pack plenty of civilian clothes instead.”
I was enticed. It was the very thing I’d become a special operator for—a last minute tasking to some exotic locale for a mission vital to national security.
The next morning I got the brief. The locale wasn’t quite as “exotic” as I’d hoped, but it was definitely a high-profile mission. We were to push into Baghdad to reinforce the special operations CRF tasked by President Obama to respond to the ISIS threat.
The CRF would comprise the first combat troops to hit Iraq since the withdrawal in 2011. Its mission: to defend the Baghdad International Airport and U.S. Embassy from ISIS assault.1 One of our Combat Control JTACs was already on his way into the Iraqi capital attached to the advance forces of the CRF. As we received our new orders, a handful more of us were soon to follow.
We were told that the CRF’s primary mission was strictly to safeguard the airport and the embassy. President Obama maintained he had no plan for re-initiation of combat operations in Iraq, and he’d authorized only a small force for the mission. He emplaced a “boots on the ground” (BOG) cap of 300.2 That meant a maximum of 300 U.S. military personnel were authorized to enter Iraq, to include any support elements. The CRF would make up the bulk of that number.
We all wondered why the arbitrary number of 300 was picked. The going joke was that someone in the administration had been inspired by the contemporary movie 300—depicting a small force of 300 Spartans battling the huge Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae. Even so, we knew it would never turn out the same for us. We were the American military, after all—unstoppable.
The initial manning of the CRF was comprised of a couple of Special Forces teams with one of our CCT JTACs attached. Soon, a couple of SEAL Task Units infilled and along with them a Navy F/A-18 pilot as the task force fires officer. “Vern” was a JTAC-qualified fighter pilot with a lot of experience killing the enemy from the cockpit at the behest of ground JTACs like me. The two of us would become good friends.
Six more Special Forces teams later inserted as reinforcements with our SOF TACP and Combat Control JTACs attached. A host of personnel specializing in intelligence, targeting, communications, and other aspects necessary to enable a special operations task force were also dispatched. On the conventional force side, a small contingent of Marines was sent to reinforce the embassy while a handful of conventional Army soldiers went to BIAP to assist with ground security so that the Special Forces ODAs (Operational Detachment Alphas) could concentrate solely on their mission.
Soon after, even more special operations teams along with a larger contingent of conventional forces would mass in Kuwait in anticipation of a lift of the BOG cap and initiation of full ground combat operations in Iraq. (An anticipation that would never quite materialize as hoped.)
As for me, I soon found that I’d been tasked with a different mission entirely—one that did not initially involve going into Baghdad. I was to make my way to the Kingdom of Bahrain and integrate into the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council (JSOTF-GCC) as the senior JTAC and joint firepower expert for the command overseeing the CRF.
Two of my good friends at the unit and fellow SOF TACPs, Jeremy and Adam, were simultaneously dispatched as JTAC liaisons to the Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) headquarters in Tampa, Florida. I’d be at the conduit between SOCCENT and the task force in Baghdad.
The JSOTF-GCC was a Naval Special Warfare (NSW) task force—NSW being the command element of the Navy SEALs. Historically, the task force’s mission was largely diplomatic in nature. It had the main objective of nourishing friendly cooperation among a “council” of Arabian Gulf nations that were willing to assist in the mutually-agreed-upon goal to bring more stability to the region.
The NSW task force in Bahrain found itself thrust out of the shadows and into the military limelight as the lead operational command element in charge of the special operations response force sent to secure Baghdad. I was given the daunting task of embedding with and leveraging the task force to establish the command, control, and communication infrastructure needed to enable close air support to our special operations forces on the ground.
While the other JTACs on my team made their way to Baghdad, I went my own way to Bahrain. A tiny island nation nestled in the Arabian Gulf, east of Saudi Arabia and north of Qatar, Bahrain was about the most humid place I’d ever been. That was saying a lot since I’d spent half my career in the south and southwestern United States and had tramped through the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bahrain’s hot desert temperatures combined with the extreme moisture brought by encircling Arabian Gulf waters made the climate that time of year besieging. I could literally drink the air.
On hitting the ground, a Navy lieutenant from the task force picked me up and drove me through the capital of Manama as we made our way to the task force headquarters. My first impression of Bahrain was of an intriguing blend of West and Middle East. I took in a bustling, modern city—one full of people who looked so much like those I’d long painted in my mind as the enemy.
The task force was in an unassuming compound on a port at the far end of a secured but run-down Bahraini Navy annex. The entrance to the annex was nearly hidden among city blocks packed with slums and industrial businesses. U.S. Navy patrol ships docked off the port near the compound.
I was escorted into the task force building for a meet-and-greet of the chain of command. The secured operations center was manned by a skeleton crew, mostly of Navy and Marine special operators and support. At the time, the task force’s staff had no air support or indirect firepower experts—mostly because their mission didn’t typically necessitate the use of that arm of the military. I was to be that expert, to build relationships and advocate at the command level for exactly what our guys would need in Baghdad.
In the following days I was welcomed with open arms by the staff. The “Skipper” (the task force commander and an O-6 in the Navy) was a jovial and kind-spoken SEAL commander. He was a prior SEAL Team officer and a highly experienced leader who I’d come to find hawkishly perceptive. He and I got along really well from the start. The captain gave me full latitude to bring whatever I had to the table in order to help our new mission in Baghdad.
My mission soon proved difficult for many reasons. For one, I was used to the Army Special Forces world and was comfortable in it. The SEALs—and the Navy in general—were a different animal altogether. They talked, thought, planned, and executed entirely differently than I was used to. For two, although the commander was extremely competent and much of the staff had previous experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the task force was truly ill-equipped to run the CRF mission in Baghdad.
They’d been given responsibility for oversight of too many missions throughout the Arabian Gulf. For example, while the Iraq crisis was occurring, the Houthi uprising in Yemen was also stirring3—and so the small task force headquarters was scrambling to simultaneously gin up contingency plans for military efforts in Yemen while still trying to command and support our budding mission against ISIS in Iraq. From my perspective, that often left the command and control of the mission in Baghdad lacking.
Compounding the difficulty was the state of the mission in Iraq during the first weeks of U.S. boots on the ground. Iraq was no longer a combat zone as it had been through the first decade of the century. Gone were the days of dozens of combat aircraft “stacked” overhead at any given time waiting for a call from a JTAC on the ground to drop ordnance onto enemy positions. Iraq was then a diplomatic mission, fully turned over to the State Department since the U.S. withdrawal back in 2011. Any semblance of military tactical infrastructure had since been lost.
Really, I had never been handed such a challenging mission. As a JTAC, I was used to being farmed out and on my own figuring out how best to accomplish a given mission with a given team. Still, my objective with the task force in Bahrain was a tall order. I had no idea what I would end up doing to help the effort—or how I would end up doing it.
I set my mind to figuring out exactly how I could most effectively support our guys in Iraq. I had to ensure they had everything they needed from a fires and close air support standpoint. Identifying the main problem sets was easy—getting to the solutions, on the other hand, was the challenging part.
1 Nash Jenkins, “The First U.S. Special Forces Have Arrived in Baghdad,” Time, June 25, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, http://time.com/2920342/first-us-special-forces-arrive-iraq-baghdad/.
2 Barbara Starr and Tom Cohen, “Obama says ‘small number’ of military advisers going to Iraq,” CNN, June 19, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/19/politics/us-iraq/index.html.
3 “Yemen profile – Timeline,” BBC, November 5, 2018, accessed January 27, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14704951.