On September 24, as Pete Blaber and his colleagues were stewing in the Delta compound, 300 miles up Interstate 95 Don Rumsfeld was in a packed Pentagon conference room also getting impatient with the military brass.
Less than two weeks previously, in the hours after the September 11 attacks, with smoke still billowing through Pentagon corridors, the defense secretary had moved to the Executive Support Center, a suite of rooms protected against electronic eavesdropping and designed to host the most senior Defense Department officials during a crisis. From there, surrounded by other senior Pentagon officials, he had spoken via videoteleconference with Charlie Holland, head of U.S. Special Operations Command. As SOCOM commander, Holland’s job was to prepare U.S. special operations forces for operations overseas. JSOC fell under SOCOM for administrative purposes, but SOCOM did not command overseas missions conducted by JSOC or any other U.S. special operations forces. JSOC’s operations were run under the auspices of the National Command Authority (the president and defense secretary), with responsibility sometimes delegated to the regional commander-in-chief, who also ran any non-JSOC special operations missions. But Rumsfeld seemed unaware of this distinction, and tasked Holland to come up with a plan to strike back at Al Qaeda. “I don’t want you to wait around for a 100 percent plan,” he told the Air Force general. “This is going to be an iterative plan. Come up here with a 50 percent solution so I can look at it.”
Now Holland was in the Pentagon to answer Rumsfeld. Dozens of senior defense officials and their aides had gathered to hear the SOCOM commander. Thirteen days had passed since Al Qaeda had struck America. The U.S. military, which Rumsfeld commanded, had yet to hit back. The defense secretary was expecting his top special operations officer to specify how that might happen. He was to be bitterly disappointed.
“Holland started out saying, ‘You tasked us to get some possible targets for us to go after Al Qaeda,’ then he talked about Al Qaeda or extremist elements in the tri-border area in South America, in the Philippines, Mauritania, and then some transshipment points off the Somali coast, loading weapons and stuff,” said an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). As Holland spoke, “Rumsfeld was getting sort of excited about the idea of being able to go to Bush and say ‘We’re going to hit these sons of bitches tomorrow night all around the world.’ So then Rumsfeld said, ‘When can we get these guys?… Let’s hit them,’ because what Rumsfeld wanted to do originally was to [get] back at Al Qaeda with a series of blows around the world to show our reach.”
But Rumsfeld’s question didn’t elicit the answer he wanted. “Well, you know, we don’t have the actionable intelligence to go after individual leaders in those areas,” Holland said. “We don’t know who they are or where they are.” His comments “took Rumsfeld by surprise,” the OSD official said.
Another nasty shock was waiting for the secretary. When would the first Special Forces A-teams fly into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan and link up with the Northern Alliance, he asked. “Well, when the CIA gives us clearance,” Holland replied. “That got Rumsfeld’s goat, too,” the OSD official recalled. “Rumsfeld said, ‘You mean we have to get clearance from the CIA to go in there?’ And Holland said, ‘Yeah,’ sort of lamely. And everything sort of fell apart there.”
The meeting began to break up, but there was still time for one more awkward, telling exchange between Holland and Rumsfeld that simultaneously revealed the SOCOM commander’s reluctance to seize the initiative and the defense secretary’s ignorance of special operations. Although he was on his second tour as defense secretary, neither SOCOM, JSOC, nor any of the special mission units had existed during his previous tenure in the mid-1970s. During the course of the meeting it had become clear that Rumsfeld thought Holland had direct command of special operations forces around the world, according to the OSD official. Rumsfeld was wrong, but on the basis of this assumption, he announced a far-reaching decision.
Holland was chatting with another special operations official when Rumsfeld approached the pair. “This is a global fight, and I want you to be the global commander,” he told the general. Holland, a mild-mannered, nonconfrontational officer, wasn’t keen on that idea, which would have required him often to go toe-to-toe with the regional commanders-in-chief. He preferred to work through the theater special operations commands—offices inside the regional commands that reported to the CinCs. Holland also knew he had no real command authority over forces overseas. But the SOCOM commander wasn’t about to correct his boss. Instead, Holland’s response was along the lines of “Yes, I hear you,” not “Yes, I will,” said an OSD official who observed the exchange.
“So Rumsfeld that day learned that we didn’t have actionable intelligence, we needed a global command capable of fighting a global war, and that we relied on the CIA to tell us when to go in,” the official said. Those three lessons would shape much of the defense secretary’s approach in the coming months, the OSD official said. “Rumsfeld had just gotten a sobering look at how tough it was going to be.”1
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Even in those early weeks, it was apparent that the Bush national security team—and Rumsfeld in particular—was envisioning a greatly expanded role for JSOC and its higher headquarters, SOCOM. In his September 20, 2001, address to Congress, the president had declared a global war on terrorists. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he said. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”2
Those words were easily spoken and would reverberate for many years, but the U.S. military machine, the most expensive and powerful ever built, was not designed for such a conflict. Caught tragically off guard by the September 11 attacks, Bush and his advisers were searching for an answer to the problem of how to wage a global conflict against non–nation-state actors. JSOC, a specialized counterterrorist force with boundless self-confidence, a can-do attitude, and peerless operational capability, all suffused with the aura of secrecy, seemed to offer the perfect solution. The Bush team grasped at it desperately.
The day after Bush’s address, Dailey issued updated guidance via video-teleconference. He told his staff to work on “global targeting.” The JSOC commander added that “the president knows more about our organization in the first eight months [of his tenure] than the previous administration knew in the last eight years.”3 The prevailing view was “we’re in business,” said a Delta source. “This is a war and we got the right president.… This is what we came in for. It was very exciting.”
Rumsfeld wanted SOCOM to run the “war on terror” in part because he didn’t trust his regional commanders-in-chief “to adopt a global view of the war,” according to Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.4 The secretary was frustrated with what he perceived as outdated thinking on the part of many of the conventional military leaders. The irony was that in his search for a dynamic and innovative alternative he turned to Holland, whose reputation was that of an officer reluctant to buck the system or threaten the consensus.
Holland had already shot down at least one innovative concept since September 11. JSOC’s forces in the Balkans had learned quickly that “unity of effort” with other government agencies, especially the CIA, was a key to success. The best way to formalize that would have been to create a joint interagency task force, or JIATF (pronounced jie-att-iff), that reported to the defense secretary but included a CIA representative as deputy commander. “That was in almost every AAR [after-action review] that we wrote,” said a Delta operator with much Balkan experience. The JIATF concept would soon become almost synonymous with JSOC, but in September 2001 it was an idea whose time was yet to come. Holland quickly vetoed it. “We came back from [Europe] and our first concept was to make JSOC a JIATF and bring in the interagency,” said a retired special ops officer. “But Holland didn’t want to do that.”
This was in keeping with what sources uniformly described as Holland’s go-along-to-get-along leadership style. At well over six feet tall, the gray-haired pilot with more than 5,000 flight hours—including more than 100 combat missions5—under his belt cut a towering figure as he strolled the corridors of power in the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and his own headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. But those who worked closely with him in the months after September 11 said he appeared more worried about upsetting the other four-stars than eager to assume the mantle of leadership Rumsfeld wanted to bestow upon him. This was particularly true of his relations with the regional commanders-in-chief. Congress had established SOCOM as a headquarters with responsibility only to train and equip special operations forces that the president, the CinCs, and U.S. ambassadors could use for operations. Now Rumsfeld was asking Holland to run a global war. That made the general, who had been appointed to his position by Defense Secretary Bill Cohen at the tail end of the Clinton administration, very uncomfortable.6
Holland was “likable” but not well suited for his present boss, said a senior member of the Joint Staff. “He might have been good for Secretary Cohen, but he was anything but for Secretary Rumsfeld.” A brief exchange during a Pentagon meeting several months after the September 24 briefing exemplified this personality conflict. “I don’t have the authority, Mr. Secretary,” Holland told his boss. “I didn’t hear you ask me for the authority, General,” replied Rumsfeld acidly. “Everybody sort of looked at their feet and said, ‘oh shit,’” said Bob Andrews, the acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, who was in the room.
JSOC chafed under Holland’s conservatism. “We were very aggressive with what we wanted to do, and he was less aggressive,” the retired special operations officer said. JSOC sent director of operations Army Colonel Frank Kearney and Lieutenant Colonel Scotty Miller to the Pentagon to brief Rumsfeld on how SOCOM could take the lead in the “war on terror,” but Holland got ahold of their slides ahead of time and changed the brief’s content. “Holland didn’t like the fact [that the brief] told people how it could be done,” said the retired special operations officer. “Basically he didn’t want to take the lead.”
But the result of Holland’s resistance to turning SOCOM headquarters into a war-fighting command was that that role in effect devolved to JSOC. “General Holland immediately turned to JSOC for everything,” the retired special operations officer said. “The opportunity was there for SOCOM to take over the ‘war on terror’ and they chose not to and chose to turn the combatant command [i.e., SOCOM] into a support function for JSOC,” an OSD source said. Dailey soon became a frequent visitor to Rumsfeld’s office—a rare privilege for a two-star whose headquarters was more than five hours’ drive from the Pentagon.7
As indicated by the briefing Kearney and Miller were set to give Rumsfeld, key personalities at JSOC headquarters took an entirely more expansive and ambitious view than did Holland of the possibilities afforded by the newly declared “global war on terror.” In a classified “vision statement” called JSOC XXI,8 a team led by Delta veteran Lieutenant Colonel Bennet Sacolick and Lieutenant Colonel William C. “Bill” Mayville, respectively chief of current operations and chief of plans and training in the command’s operations directorate, outlined a future for JSOC that entailed “getting out of Fort Bragg, having global resources, global reach, prepositioned forces,” said a special ops officer who was briefed on the document. “It was Sacolick’s vision,” said a JSOC staffer. That vision was of a “holistic approach, instead of all direct action,” the staffer said. “It’s more boundary spanning, problem solving, bringing the interagency together.” But to reach this goal, JSOC required even more resources. “They understood sooner than anyone else that this [war] was not going to go away, and the country needed more than they had to give … and Rumsfeld understood that,” said a special operations officer on the Joint Staff.
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The more Rumsfeld learned about JSOC, the more he was drawn to the command. His first exposure to JSOC was the morning of March 27, 2001, when Dailey, Hall, and a couple of special mission unit senior enlisted personnel had given him and Wolfowitz an introductory briefing on the command in a Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld’s handlers had told the JSOC team they would have only twenty minutes with the secretary, but the meeting stretched to a couple of hours. “He had a bunch of questions and Wolfowitz had a bunch of questions,” said Hall, who added that much of the conversation revolved around the type of people who served in JSOC units. “It turned into a great capabilities brief.”
A few months later, Rumsfeld got a chance to witness some of those capabilities firsthand during a visit to Fort Bragg. On a warm, sunny November 21—the day after Franks had met with Mark Erwin and Gary Berntsen in Bagram—the defense secretary visited the Delta compound to take in a stage-managed JSOC “capabilities exercise”—a demonstration designed to impress visiting dignitaries. Delta operators typically viewed these exercises as “a pain in the ass,” because they robbed the unit of precious training time, according to then Major Tom Greer, whose A1 troop was responsible for the show that day. But this time was different. The nation was at war and the man who signed off on every combat deployment had appeared on Delta’s doorstep. “We wanted to impress the hell out of Rumsfeld,” Greer wrote in his memoir, Kill Bin Laden, which he published under the pen name Dalton Fury. In this respect, the exercise was an unqualified success.
The visit began with Delta operators portraying terrorists “ambushing” the bus carrying Rumsfeld and his party, before more operators—playing themselves—stormed the bus and “rescued” the VIPs. (To Rumsfeld and most of his party, the “ambush” was a complete surprise. In on the secret were the secretary’s bodyguards—to ensure they didn’t pull their weapons and fire real bullets to defend him—and an individual with a heart condition.)
Shadowed by Holland, Doug Brown—now a lieutenant general and head of Army Special Operations Command—and Air Force Brigadier General Greg Trebon, JSOC’s deputy commander and the host for the JSOC portion of the trip, Rumsfeld toured displays and watched a demonstration of “super marksmanship with .50 caliber sniper rifles,” said Andrews, who accompanied Rumsfeld on the trip. “Essentially it was a Delta show,” as Andrews put it, but the other JSOC units got to showcase their abilities. In Team 6’s case, this included a demonstration of the unit’s HALO freefall technique, which the Navy operators regarded as one of their specialties. “These guys put on a parachute infiltration of a single agent into an area, where he skydives out at high altitude, lands, jumps out of his jumpsuit, and has a business suit on and a briefcase and walks down the street,” Andrews said. This impressed Rumsfeld, as did a live-fire hostage rescue scenario in a shoot-house.
The JSOC visit ran long, just like the Pentagon briefing in March, cutting into time set aside for a visit to Army Special Operations Command. The JSOC hosts “liked to cheat … [and] were deliberately taking more time than they were” allotted, another Rumsfeld aide said. But the tactic paid off. About an hour into the trip, Rumsfeld spoke to Greer, the main briefer. “What we really need is small groups of folks, say two to four people, that can go anywhere in the world and execute discreet missions against these people [i.e., Al Qaeda],” he told the Delta officer. In his book, Greer relates how “shocked” he was that Rumsfeld seemed ignorant of the fact that his desired capability had existed in Delta “for many years.” The special operations brass at the exercise quickly reassured Rumsfeld that he already had a force that could do what he had just described.
The visit was a critical inflection point in how Rumsfeld perceived JSOC and its potential role in the forthcoming campaign. “He probably would have stayed there forever if I had let him,” said the second Rumsfeld aide. “I had to finally pry him out of there. But he was very intrigued by the capabilities [and] by the quality of the people that they had doing this stuff.… They got their money’s worth out of the dog-and-pony show.” As Andrews said, “It was enough for him to say, ‘This is where I want to put my money, this is where I want to invest some effort.’”9
But despite—or perhaps because of—his repeated exposure to briefings on the high-end counterterrorism that was JSOC’s forte, Rumsfeld’s understanding of special operations remained superficial and unbalanced. He did not recognize the value of unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense (helping an ally defeat an insurgency), which were the specialties of Special Forces as well as SOCOM’s psychological operations and civil affairs units. To Rumsfeld, the value of special operations lay only in the spooky and lethal activities JSOC exemplified, not in training foreign militaries or standing up local militias.10 “There were some things that Rumsfeld said and did that indicated that we, his staff, had not fully and well explained to him the nature of special operations forces,” said Andrews, a former Special Forces officer. “He didn’t understand and we didn’t try to beat into him an appreciation of counterinsurgency as foreign internal defense, UW [unconventional warfare], the ‘white’ stuff.”
“Rumsfeld … didn’t care about setting up networks, he didn’t care about establishing forward operating bases, he didn’t want to hear all that shit,” said a Special Forces officer who briefed the secretary frequently. “He just wanted a way for bodies to show up.” The result was Rumsfeld’s almost blind faith in JSOC. “He didn’t truly understand us, but he trusted us,” Hall said.
JSOC’s administrative chain of command ran through Holland to Rumsfeld. But the SOCOM commander’s reluctance to take control meant JSOC became “almost an independent military force for Rumsfeld,” said a senior Joint Staff officer. Above Rumsfeld, there was only one more link on the chain of command: the president. For JSOC, therefore, a whole set of circumstances had fallen into place serendipitously: the emergence of a global terrorist threat; a defense secretary frustrated with the conventional military’s business-as-usual mind-set and drawn to what he perceived as the more decisive and innovative approach of special operations forces; and an action-oriented president heavily influenced by a vice president infatuated with covert operations. After years spent honing its skills with the help of steadily climbing budgets, JSOC’s rocket was on the launch pad. The stage was set for liftoff.
* * *
In the late afternoon of October 30, 2001, the Defense Department’s most senior military and civilian officials gathered in Rumsfeld’s conference room for a Joint Staff briefing on how to expand the war against Al Qaeda beyond Afghanistan. The briefers were Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, the Joint Staff’s deputy director for global operations, and Colonel Jeff Schloesser, a former commander of the 160th’s 1st Battalion who had just taken charge of a new Joint Staff planning cell for the “war on terror.”
The briefing quickly bogged down in a debate over the definitions of terms like “defeat” and “destroy.” Rumsfeld, who seemed to exist in a perpetual state of impatient frustration, made clear his dissatisfaction with what he saw as the glacial pace of the military’s efforts to widen the war. “There is no need to wait until after Afghanistan is complete,” he said. “As I’ve said a hundred times already, I would dearly love to attack in another AOR [area of responsibility] now.” The rest of the briefing fell flat and Rumsfeld rose to take a call from the president. “I could have written this briefing myself,” he said as he exited.11
Rumsfeld had gotten his point across. From that point on, “we became much more expansive,” said a Joint Staff source. “At that point I fully understood—and I think so did all the other senior military leaders—what he was trying to get at.” But as the secretary had learned from Holland’s September 24 briefing, there were legal and practical hurdles to overcome before he could dispatch special operators around the globe to attack terrorist targets on a moment’s notice.
Nested in the Joint Staff’s strategic plans and policy directorate, Schloesser and his small staff held a series of video-teleconferences with the regional commanders-in-chief. The upshot of those discussions was the discovery that the military lacked the legal authorities to deploy forces into the countries about which it was most concerned: Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, Georgia, the Philippines, and South America’s tri-border area (where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet). In some cases, particularly Yemen and the Horn of Africa countries, these were places to which the military feared Al Qaeda leaders and their forces might flee as they lost their Afghan sanctuary. “We don’t really understand that Pakistan’s going to become quite the safe haven that it actually proves to be,” said a Joint Staff officer. “Everybody’s thinking that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and everybody else is going to move out and that they’re going to move fairly freely.”
While Pentagon staffers worked feverishly to get special operations forces—which usually meant JSOC elements—the authorities they needed to operate in these countries, the Defense Department issued a series of what the military called “execute orders” allowing the regional commanders-in-chief to take certain steps within their areas of responsibility.
On December 1, Schloesser gave a briefing to Rumsfeld titled “Next Steps in the War on Terrorism” that laid out a series of options for where to take the war next. These included “maritime interdiction operations” (boarding, searching and seizing, or destroying ships) in the Mediterranean and off the Horn of Africa; operations to deny terrorists safe haven in Somalia; missions to disrupt Islamist terrorist logistics in Bosnia and Kosovo; helping the Philippine armed forces defeat the Abu Sayyaf Group; and actions in Yemen and Sudan.
Much of the discussion concerned the Army of Northern Virginia, the intelligence and advance force operations unit. “In all these areas there are some preparatory operations that would have to be done,” said a source who attended the briefing. Much of that work—advance force operations on steroids—was the Army of Northern Virginia’s responsibility.
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Over the course of the next year, the Joint Staff worked on three major interconnected initiatives that combined would go a long way toward empowering JSOC for the campaign ahead: gaining JSOC the (U.S.) legal authority to operate in specific countries; giving the command the authority and the resources to target the Al Qaeda senior leadership; and creating an intra-governmental system to enable “time-sensitive planning” so that if the intelligence community or JSOC located a high-value target, the government could get a decision brief to the president fast enough for him to approve a mission to capture or kill that person before the target moved beyond reach.
All these came together in a document known as the Al Qaeda Senior Leadership Execute Order, or AQSL ExOrd. The ExOrd originated with an order from the Joint Staff’s director of strategic plans and policy, Army Lieutenant General George Casey, to Schloesser to spend the weekend of June 29–30, 2002, developing a plan to capture or kill Al Qaeda’s two top leaders—bin Laden and Zawahiri—and seven other senior figures in the group.
A Joint Staff officer deeply involved in the staff work described the strategy as “cutting off the head of the snake.” During that first year after the September 11 attacks, Schloesser’s planning cell, in concert with the Joint Staff’s operations and intelligence directorates, was “trying to understand how do you defeat an organism or a network,” the officer said. “First of all we said, ‘Hey, we can do it by [eliminating] leadership.’” That approach, so enticing to policymakers because it seemed to offer a neat and relatively cheap solution to the intractable global problem of violent anti-Western Islamism, also perfectly matched JSOC’s skill set, something not lost on Rumsfeld.
On July 1, 2002, the defense secretary sent a memo to Feith, titled “Manhunts.” “How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts?” the memo asked. “We are obviously not well organized at the present time.” The memo reflected a critical moment for Rumsfeld and JSOC, according to Andrews. “Once he fastened on the manhunt thing, he looked at that as the silver bullet against terrorism and he built a unit [JSOC] that can do manhunts,” he said. With Dailey already aware of the secretary’s interest in this approach, Joint Special Operations Command was also rewiring itself for manhunts. When Jim Reese returned from Afghanistan that spring Dailey sent him to Israel to speak to officials there about their experiences with man-hunting, and in particular the years-long effort to track down and kill the Palestinian Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. What JSOC came to realize, according to an officer at the command, was that effective man-hunting required both military capability and legal authorities. “If you have the authorities to do things, and then the capability, look out,” he said. “It’s all about authorities and capability.”
The next several years would prove that a so-called decapitation approach to counterterrorism was no silver bullet, but in the spring and summer of 2002 its limitations were far from clear. “Eventually you’ll find that we got that partly wrong,” the Joint Staff officer said. “We understand that fairly fast, but AQSL has a life of its own.”
The formula was known as “two-plus-seven” but in reality it quickly expanded to “two-plus-seven-plus-thirty,” best envisioned as a series of concentric circles with bin Laden and Zawahiri in the bull’s-eye. The ring around them consisted of seven key Al Qaeda facilitators, surrounded by an outer ring of thirty slightly less senior but still important Al Qaeda operatives. Schloesser’s strategic planning cell and the Joint Staff intelligence directorate maintained the list. As one of the seven was captured or killed, the next in line from the outer thirty would take his place in the diagram. “Eventually, I think essentially almost all of them are captured or killed,” said the Joint Staff officer. “And so they change out.”
The AQSL ExOrd’s birth was labored, involving multiple briefings to Rumsfeld and Bush over the course of the next year. Throughout the process, it was clear that JSOC would have the authority to execute the order, with Holland exercising oversight as the “supported CinC.” Just as Holland had feared, this phrase created friction with his fellow four-stars. “‘Supported CinC’ means he is going to get the support of all the [regional] combatant commanders,” said the Joint Staff officer. For the first time, the SOCOM commander had the power to deploy JSOC forces into a regional commander-in-chief’s area of responsibility without asking for permission. “He can basically say [to the regional combatant commander], ‘We’re coming [and] we need this kind of level of support,’” the Joint Staff officer said. “Most of them did not like that. Franks did not like it at all, was very much against it.”
The CENTCOM boss aired his grievances in summer 2002 when Rumsfeld brought the CinCs back to the States for a conference at the Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. The subject of Holland’s role as the “supported CinC” arose. Pointing at Holland, Rumsfeld told the four-stars that he knew they were all opposed to the change. “I don’t care,” the secretary said, according to a staff officer who observed the conversation. “That’s not my concept of doing business.” “Franks then speaks up, kind of like he’s speaking for everybody else,” the staff officer recalled. The Army general objected strongly to the notion of JSOC operating without his say-so in his area of responsibility. But Rumsfeld brooked no dissent on the issue. “Franks takes a beating,” the staff officer said. “Rumsfeld, if he wasn’t clear enough when he pointed at Holland the first time, he makes it absolutely clear.”
Franks’s opposition was finally quashed on November 13, 2002, during an “off-site” meeting of the senior military leadership in a modern auditorium at Washington, D.C.’s, Fort McNair. Myers, Marine Lieutenant General Pete Pace (the new vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs), the four service chiefs, the regional “combatant commanders” (Rumsfeld had banned the phrase “commander-in-chief” as of October 24), Army Lieutenant General John Abizaid, who was the director of the Joint Staff, and Casey. During a briefing on how Holland’s newfound authorities would increase JSOC’s role, “Franks pushed back pretty hard,” complaining about “the centralization” of special operations forces under SOCOM, said an officer who was present. “He argued forcefully that he needed most of JSOC to fight in the CENTCOM AOR [area of responsibility] fighting CENTCOM targets.” By then, U.S. forces were deployed not only in Afghanistan, but also in small numbers working with Jordanian special operations forces training Yemeni security forces, as well as in Kuwait, preparing for a possible invasion of Iraq. In response, and in what the source said was “a somewhat uncharacteristic move for General Myers,” the chairman “shut him down and basically just said, ‘The president’s decided that we’re doing this,’ and that was that.” (Franks’s objections were ironic, because in the end he got just what he wanted, which was the preponderance of JSOC’s effort committed to his region.)
But Franks and the other regional combatant commanders were by no means the only flag officers digging in their heels when it came to expanding JSOC’s role via the AQSL ExOrd. The Joint Staff, and in particular the intelligence directorate, headed by Rear Admiral Lowell Jacoby, “non-concurred” with its implementation. (Although it might seem odd to outsiders, it is not unusual to have the Joint Staff as a corporate body take issue with products that originated within one of its own directorates.) Wolfowitz also had some legal questions about the ExOrd, and the Joint Staff’s new vice director of operations was dispatched to brief the deputy defense secretary one weekend to persuade him of the ExOrd’s utility. “He sat down that evening with Wolfowitz and went through it, probably page by page, and convinced the depsecdef that it was worthwhile,” said another Joint Staffer. The officer who worked so hard to sway Wolfowitz was a lean, hatchet-faced brigadier general who had spent the early 1990s on the JSOC staff and the later years of the decade commanding the Ranger Regiment. He may not have realized it at the time, but in the new century no officer would benefit from the AQSL ExOrd more than he would. His name was Stan McChrystal.
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Embedded in the AQSL ExOrd was the time-sensitive planning concept, which was the brainchild of the Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group (CTCSG), an organization Myers had established in October 2001 to support JSOC. “Its main purpose was to interface, coordinate, and collaborate with the Joint Staff and the National Command Authority to expedite decision-making,” said a Joint Staff officer who worked closely with it. Working out of trailers at Pope and led by Special Forces Colonel David Schroer, who doubled as JSOC’s director of global long-range plans, the group was “basically an interagency task force built to support JSOC,” said the Joint Staff officer. The group’s chain of command was fuzzy. Holland and Dailey thought Schroer worked for SOCOM, but Rumsfeld was adamant that the CTCSG was an “extension of him and the Joint Staff,” said another officer familiar with the group. Rumsfeld gave Holland no veto over the group’s creation or its recommendations. In other words, in all but name the CTCSG was the joint interagency task force that Holland had tried to block. It became “how JSOC actually pulls itself into Washington, and then how Washington tries to influence JSOC,” said the Joint Staff officer.
By the spring of 2002, despite his admiration for JSOC’s operators, Rumsfeld had become frustrated with the command itself, “because JSOC had a standard way of doing business, and Rumsfeld could not break them of that,” said an officer who attended meetings with the secretary. In particular, Rumsfeld thought it took too long for JSOC elements to deploy in response to fleeting intelligence. But the fault did not lie entirely with JSOC. The military’s planning system, as well as the need to clear such deployments through numerous other government agencies, also served to slow the process to a walking pace. This issue came to a head in a Pentagon meeting attended by senior Defense Department figures and the deputies of other government agencies that had a counterterrorism role. Rumsfeld chided CIA deputy director John McLaughlin for what the secretary perceived as the Agency’s failure to deliver timely intelligence on the location of Al Qaeda targets. But McLaughlin argued that the blame lay with the Pentagon. “It’s because you’re too … slow,” the CIA man told Rumsfeld. “The world is not like that. This isn’t the buildup to D-Day, where you get a little intelligence and more and more and more [before acting]. This is, ‘You get something and you’re either there or you’re not.’” McLaughlin was right. The fastest that the Pentagon could get JSOC combat forces to a regional combatant commander using the military’s expedited planning process was seventy-two hours, and “that was like if everybody was running down the hallway with a big lighter in each hand setting their hair on fire,” said the officer who attended meetings with Rumsfeld. “McLaughlin would just laugh and say, ‘If you think that I’m going to get the nugget [of intelligence] and be able to pass it to you guys and let you have seventy-two hours’ planning to do something, you’re nuts.’” Rumsfeld turned to Schroer then and there and told him to fix the problem.
Within a couple of days Schroer and a handful of subordinates had drafted a process that, by relying on secure video-teleconferences, liaison officers at all the key agencies, having non-JSOC personnel “read in” on the command’s programs, and an alert roster of about 100 personnel across the government, could have a recommendation for the president twelve hours after getting the initial intelligence. The CTCSG’s role in this process extended beyond JSOC, however. Its charter was to come up with a recommended course of action from the entire Defense Department. Sometimes that course of action might be an air strike rather than the deployment of Dailey’s JOC and a Delta squadron. As such, Schroer’s staff included F-18 and B-52 pilots as well as one of the Navy’s most knowledgeable officers on the Tomahawk cruise missile.
JSOC now had the authority to go after Al Qaeda and its allies in about a dozen countries, although the exact rules under which it could do so varied from place to place. The command was soon conducting advance force operations in many of the countries. “It’s a massive increase in JSOC’s authority to do things,” said a Joint Staff officer. “It elevates JSOC to being a critical component of this whole war on terrorism, or, one could argue, the critical component to the war on terrorism,” he said. “From it … in the space of two and a half to three years, JSOC’s resources and staffing and their connections to all the intelligence organizations and all the supporting organizations for intel are magnified several times over.”12
The AQSL ExOrd was the key to giving JSOC the authority to wage a global campaign. “When we got an execute order to go after Al Qaeda senior leaders, that became the document” that codified JSOC’s transformation, a retired special ops officer said.
* * *
For all the effort Schroer’s Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group put into expediting the joint and interagency planning process, there was little point having the president approve a mission within twelve hours of receiving actionable intelligence if JSOC wasn’t able to respond in a timely manner. Events in spring 2002 suggested that the command had yet to internalize the need for greater agility in the post–September 11 world.
Solid intelligence reports out of Iraq’s Kurdish region indicated hundreds of Al Qaeda–linked militants displaced by the U.S. military action in Afghanistan had joined a terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam) in the village of Khurmal. The intelligence further suggested that the hardened fighters in the camp were experimenting with biological and chemical weapons, including ricin. The Pentagon considered a range of air strikes to destroy the camp, but each had drawbacks: cruise missiles might destroy the camp’s buildings and kill terrorists, but they would also kill families believed to be living there and might spread any toxins; a bombing raid would likely destroy the toxins, because of the bombs’ more powerful warheads that burn at hotter temperatures, but would otherwise share the disadvantages of the cruise missile strike. Neither option would give the Bush administration any proof that the terrorists were working on weapons of mass destruction.13 “If you want to be discriminating and you want to bring back evidence, then you have to have boots on the ground,” said a senior Joint Staffer.
So the Joint Chiefs tasked JSOC—through SOCOM—to present options for attacking the camp. JSOC’s response left them sorely disappointed. “What they came back with was a massive large slow option that would have taken a month and a half and [was] completely impractical to the objective,” said the Joint Staffer. JSOC’s proposal involved staging out of Turkey and “involved C-5As, C-141s, the covered aircraft,” he said. “It was huge and took a long time to build up and would have deceived no one.”
For reasons that would remain unclear, in the last week of June, the president decided against an attack, despite the Joint Chiefs’ unanimous support for action. The week after Bush made his decision, Rumsfeld expressed his displeasure with JSOC’s proposed courses of action, which were all “mini-JRXs,” according to a special operator briefed on them. “I’m really disappointed,” Rumsfeld told a special operations officer. “You’ve got to do better than this.… If I wanted a D-Day invasion I could call the 82nd. Why can’t you come up with things that don’t involve six C-17s?”14
While any JSOC mission into Khurmal would have involved risks, the decision to take no action also incurred risk. Among the terrorists who had arrived in Khurmal from Afghanistan—after, in his case, sojourns in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran—was a thuggish Jordanian who had been running a training camp in Herat. Unknown to all in the West but a few analysts who closely tracked militant Islamism, his name—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—would soon echo around the Middle East while his hands dripped with the blood of JSOC operators.15
* * *
Dailey’s preference for large, infrastructure-laden deployments was a contributing factor—but not the only one—behind a widely held view at Bragg, MacDill, and the Pentagon that by summer 2002 the demands of the “war on terror” were straining JSOC to its limits. Although Afghanistan was the only high-profile campaign in which the command was fighting, the AQSL ExOrd and other Pentagon initiatives meant new theaters beckoned in the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and elsewhere. JSOC’s staff numbered about 800, and in November 2001 the Army had given the command another general officer—Brigadier General John Scales, a Vietnam veteran and reservist with no previous JSOC experience—to enable the command and control of multiple deployed task forces. But JSOC still had to keep an alert force at home in the United States for the 0300 counterterrorism and 0400 counter-proliferation missions. And in the background, the possibility of a major war in Iraq loomed closer.16
The command was also the victim of its own success. As Franks’s protests later that year demonstrated, the regional CinCs’ appetites for JSOC’s forces—by reputation the military’s most elite units—were unbounded. Indeed, on July 19, 2002, a Rumsfeld order to CENTCOM stated that Franks could use the JSOC task force in his area of responsibility only for hunting the “two-plus-seven” Al Qaeda targets and neutralizing weapons of mass destruction.17
On August 15, Myers flew down to JSOC for a series of meetings. Brigadier General Eldon Bargewell, a former Delta commander now on the SOCOM staff, came up from MacDill to brief the chairman. Bargewell told Myers there was deep concern at SOCOM that the “war on terror” was pulling resources and attention from two missions in particular: the 0400 counter-proliferation mission and Power Geyser, the code name for JSOC’s—really Team 6’s—domestic mission to protect top government officials when so ordered.18
Team 6 was also providing Hamid Karzai’s security detail in Afghanistan, a topic that came up during an October 10, 2002, Pentagon briefing by Bargewell to Rumsfeld that Holland, Franks, Myers, Pace, and Dailey all attended. A partial solution to the strain JSOC was under could be achieved simply by pulling some JSOC elements out of Task Force 11 (the renamed TF Sword) if higher-priority missions presented themselves, Rumsfeld said. The discussion then turned to JSOC’s 0300 counterterrorism response mission. Despite his previous briefings on JSOC’s mission set, Rumsfeld seemed confused about 0300’s purpose. “Bargewell spent a fair amount of time giving him an explanation,” as well as articulating SOCOM’s view of why a highly classified strategic reconnaissance mission in Indonesia for which Pacific Command had requested JSOC forces was not an appropriate mission for the elite operators, said an officer who was in the room.
Not for the first time, Rumsfeld also inquired after the Army of Northern Virginia, referring to the unit by its latest code name. “Has anyone really got Gray Fox involved in the GWOT?” he asked, using the acronym for the “global war on terror.” “Yes,” Holland replied. “They’ll start next week.”19 The secret unit had, of course, already been heavily involved in Afghanistan, but Rumsfeld was concerned that the unique unit had not been committed to the wider war the United States was now waging around the world. The fact that Holland was replying at all to this question was an indication that things were changing for the unit. Although manned by a mix of special operations and intelligence personnel, the Army of Northern Virginia fell under the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command for administrative purposes and was considered a strategic asset of the U.S. military. But if Rumsfeld and his aides had learned anything during the previous year, it was that the “war on terror” would place a premium on intelligence, particularly signals and human intelligence, the specialties of the Fort Belvoir unit, which had a squadron dedicated to each discipline. Rumsfeld wanted the unit where he felt it could be most effective in the new fight, and that was under SOCOM, where they could work more closely with JSOC. (Up to that point, although the Army of Northern Virginia sometimes supported JSOC missions, it also performed other non-JSOC tasks for the regional commanders-in-chief.)20 The defense secretary had secured an agreement by early fall 2002 from the CIA’s McLaughlin under which small special operations teams could enter countries where the United States was not at war “and work essentially for the chief of station,” said a source in the room when the deal was made. The Army of Northern Virginia’s operatives would be perfect for such missions.
A debate ensued over whether to assign the unit directly to JSOC. Those against such a move argued that the unit needed to be kept focused on strategic targets, rather than the tactical ones that often occupied JSOC. Four courses of action were considered: to keep the unit under Intelligence and Security Command; to move it under the Joint Staff’s direct control; to assign it to SOCOM with SOCOM retaining operational control; and to assign it administratively to SOCOM but with operational control given to JSOC. On December 9, 2002, over the Army’s wishes, Rumsfeld chose the fourth option.21 However, it took the military bureaucracy until 2004 to make the shift.22 As the unit came under JSOC’s control, it gained its own color name: Task Force Orange. Most JSOC personnel soon referred to the unit as “TFO” or “Orange.”
* * *
It was mid-January 2003 and Dave Schroer was standing before Rumsfeld and the senior brass in the Pentagon. A couple of days earlier, Schloesser had told Schroer to prepare a briefing requested by the secretary on the implications for JSOC’s contribution to the “global war on terror” if the United States invaded Iraq, and to recommend how to prosecute the global war if such an invasion occurred. Based on what Schloesser told him, Schroer designed his briefing to answer the question, “Can we do Iraq and continue the GWOT?”
Schroer looked out at a sea of faces that belonged to the most powerful men in the Defense Department: Rumsfeld; Wolfowitz, who had been aggressively advocating a war to topple Saddam Hussein; the Joint Chiefs; the heads of the Joint Staff’s directorates; Doug Brown, now the deputy SOCOM commander; Bargewell; and Air Force Lieutenant General Victor “Gene” Renuart, CENTCOM director of operations, among others. Schroer described how the campaign would look if it proceeded on its current trajectory. He noted that there were about half a dozen “forward operating locations” that special operations forces were already establishing or should be creating soon, in places like the Philippines and the Horn of Africa. In addition, forces were still in Afghanistan, and JSOC needed to keep an alert force ready for the 0300 and 0400 missions, he said.
Then Schroer turned to what would happen if the forces needed to invade and occupy Iraq were removed from that plan. Were that to occur, it would be impossible to sustain the global war, even as “an economy of force,” Schroer told his audience. (“Economy of force” is the U.S. military’s term to refer to the allocation of the minimal force necessary to sustain a secondary effort.) In particular, an invasion of Iraq would result in a critical shortage of special operations helicopters available for the global war, he said. “When you looked at what folks said they needed for Iraq, you were nowhere close,” said a source in the room. “So either you stopped most of the five or six [forward operating locations], or you short-sheeted Iraq.”
As Schroer continued his briefing, he could tell that he wasn’t getting through to the secretary. “I don’t understand, what are you telling me?” Rumsfeld said. Schroer gave him the bottom line: “You can’t do it—you can’t get there from here.” The Counterterrorism Campaign Support Group’s recommendation was “Do not do Iraq now.”
The reaction in the room was “almost comical,” said the source who was there. “There were flag officers looking for places under the table to dive.” Schroer suddenly realized the decision to invade Iraq had already been made, and he was the only person in the room who didn’t know it.23