Rangers Step Up in Afghanistan
After Operation Anaconda, in spring 2002, a debate took place at the highest levels of JSOC over whether—and how—it should proceed in Afghanistan. “The debate really was: what is our role here in Afghanistan?” said a senior JSOC officer. “Are we going to position troops forward here always, to be on the prowl and look for Al Qaeda senior leaders?” That approach didn’t make much sense to some at JSOC. “The trail had run cold by 2002, after Tora Bora,” said the officer. “There wasn’t, in many ways … a very clearly defined mission. So do we want to now, with the cold trail, leave the nation’s premier mission forces in these shit holes in Bagram or up in Kabul? And the answer in many cases, [was] no.”
Concerned that its troops’ highly perishable skills would atrophy if they were left with little to do in Afghanistan, JSOC drastically downsized its force there. A small task force headquarters remained in Bagram. As Delta became consumed by the Iraq War, the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater became Team 6’s domain, with a small Ranger element in support. But although the September 11 attacks had been planned there, and the Al Qaeda leaders that had survived the operation to oust the Taliban from power were thought to be hiding just across the border in Pakistan, Afghanistan became a strategic backwater from the point of view of Washington and, therefore, of JSOC. Team 6 kept a squadron headquarters and a troop of operators there. The other operational parts of the JSOC task force consisted of little more than a Ranger platoon, three Task Force Brown Chinook helicopters and two Predator drones. Beyond hunting Al Qaeda, Team 6 operators had one other mission in Afghanistan: providing a personal security detail for Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s new president.1 “Karzai owes his life to their skills,” said the senior JSOC officer.
By early 2004, the task force headquarters was housed in a large set of connecting tents at Bagram. JSOC’s mission in Afghanistan was to hunt senior Al Qaeda figures, who had disappeared from view in the wake of Tora Bora. But task force leaders knew there was little chance of them gaining actionable intelligence at Bagram. “The mind-set was, you’ve got to be active when seeking out intel, and how are we going to be able to find these folks if we’re not going out there and actually looking for them,” said a special operations officer who spent time at Bagram during this period. The Rangers appeared to have little to do there, he said, so the task force “came up with this concept of the Ranger Action Plan, where the Rangers would go through a village and meet with the village elders and kind of go door-to-door and see what was going on.” It was a mission more suited to Special Forces than young, aggressive Rangers, and it didn’t turn up any valuable intelligence, he said.
One Ranger mission on April, 22, 2004, did, however, cost the regiment the life of its most famous member and threaten the careers of several officers in his chain of command. On that date 2nd Ranger Battalion sent a mounted patrol through Khost province that resulted in a confusing firefight in which Corporal Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire.2 Tillman had walked away from a successful career as a player with the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army and join the Rangers, together with his brother Kevin. Although the Tillmans assiduously avoided the limelight after enlisting, their story had attracted a lot of favorable publicity for the Army, and in particular, to the Ranger Regiment. Even though some Rangers on the patrol knew immediately3 that he had been killed by friendly fire, in a series of mistakes that spawned a controversy that continued for years after Tillman’s death, the Rangers and JSOC reported that he had been killed by the enemy. That official line persisted long after the truth was known, with the Pentagon finally notifying Tillman’s family on May 28 that he died at the hands of his fellow Rangers. It seemed as if the incident might derail the career of Stan McChrystal, but he was cleared of any wrongdoing.
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During the war’s early years, special mission unit (SMU) operators emplaced disguised listening devices and cameras along the Pakistan border in an attempt to sniff out bin Laden and Zawahiri. “The SMUs didn’t like doing that sort of work,” said a senior JSOC officer. “They were difficult to put in, they were risky.” They were also ineffective. “Nothing was ever actioned on those devices,” he said, adding that their value declined even further as Predators and other ISR aircraft became more readily available.
Around 2005, JSOC also began contributing small numbers of Team 6 operators and, eventually, Ranger noncommissioned officers to form Omega teams with CIA Ground Branch officers. These were combined CIA-JSOC teams that trained and commanded the Agency’s Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams—Afghan units that reported to the CIA, not to the Afghan government. In many cases they were the same Afghans that the CIA and Special Forces had recruited in late 2001 and early 2002 to chase the Taliban and hunt Al Qaeda. Originally known as the Afghan Combat Applications Group (a play on Delta’s 1990s cover name, “Combat Applications Group”), the unit began life at a brick factory on the outskirts of Kabul, which was significantly expanded in 2003 and later housed a secret CIA prison.
The group soon numbered several hundred fighters. As it grew, and the Agency realized the importance of agents in the provinces who could blend in, the CIA divided the group into regionally and ethnically homogenous subunits. The Agency put these “pursuit teams” at its bases in Asadabad, Jalalabad, Khost, Shkin, and Kandahar, among others. At each location the CIA had a chief of base, Ground Branch operatives, and independent contractors (often former U.S. special operations personnel) training and leading the pursuit teams. The Agency gave each pursuit team a different name: the team at Jalalabad was known as the Mustangs, while the Asadabad team was the Mohawks. The Omega teams at each location were numbered: Omega 10, Omega 20, Omega 30, and so on. “We always sent at least two Blue shooters to each one of those, each deployment,” said a senior Team 6 source. Team 6 operators were welcome on the Omega teams in part because they were all qualified to call in close air support.
Some pursuit teams grew very large (the team at Khost numbered 1,500), but for the most part they and their Agency handlers focused on minor insurgent and criminal kingpins in the areas around their bases. The CIA’s ambition to have the teams conduct missions in Pakistan ran into problems because the Afghans lacked basic military skills.4
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During the decade’s middle years, one of JSOC’s two one-star deputy commanders was usually in Bagram. The one-star had formal command of the JSOC forces in-country, but his day-to-day job was to deal with the other Coalition flag officers. Tactical command of the Afghanistan task force alternated between Team 6 and the Ranger Regiment, with either the commander or deputy commander of one of those units in Bagram at all times. But no matter which colonel or Navy captain was running the show, there wasn’t much going on. Operators called those years “the dark times,” said a senior Team 6 operator. “We’d do a [ninety-day] deployment and you might get one mission.” By late 2005, it was clear something had to change. The Afghanistan task force was an all but forgotten offshoot of JSOC. During the daily operations and intelligence video-teleconferences that McChrystal held to bind his global network together, the Iraq task force leaders would get up and walk away when it came time for the Afghanistan task force leaders to brief, so limited were the latter’s operations. “We were truly the B team,” said a senior Team 6 officer.
What changed was a massive expansion of the target set that the task force was allowed to pursue.
Since arriving in Afghanistan in late 2001, JSOC forces had focused exclusively on Al Qaeda targets. That meant that even if solid intelligence linked an individual to the Taliban, the JSOC task force was forbidden from launching a mission against that person. “If there was no link [to Al Qaeda] there, we weren’t doing it, period,” said a senior Team 6 operator. “No matter how hard we fought for it: ‘Hey this guy’s a financier for the Taliban’; ‘It doesn’t matter, we’re only here for Al Qaeda because this is the national mission force.’” This approach, along with the priority JSOC gave to Iraq, “basically took the pressure off the insurgency and let them build a strong base,” the operator said.
McChrystal finally directed his task force in Bagram to go after Taliban targets as well. Having focused exclusively on Al Qaeda, it took the task force a little time to get smart on the Taliban, but once it had done so, its operational tempo increased dramatically, to an average of three missions a night. “It was a very ripe target set,” said a senior Team 6 source.
By the time the task force turned its attention to the Taliban, the guerrillas “were very well established” and confident enough to move in large formations, said another senior Team 6 operator. But sometimes the Taliban were overconfident. Such was the case during Operation Niland II, a battle in late summer 2006 near Kandahar. A Predator had picked up a long line of fighters moving from one village to another. “It is a full serpentine column of dudes moving out, and they’re moving at a good clip,” recalled an operator. A troop from Team 6’s Blue Squadron geared up and, together with a Ranger platoon, flew from Bagram to Camp Gecko in Kandahar (Mullah Omar’s old compound now used by the CIA and Special Forces), where they continued to study the Predator feed, waiting for the order to launch. When the Taliban column halted at a compound, the SEALs and Rangers stood down, because they didn’t want to take the collateral damage risks that an assault on a compound holding more than 100 people would incur. Back in Bagram, Captain Scott Moore, the deputy Team 6 commander who was running the Afghanistan task force, decided to use Air Force A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft to strike the column as it moved through a valley. “As soon as they get back on the road and they clear the compound, they roll the A-10s in to strike,” the operator said. But the jets missed their targets. The Taliban fighters scattered. Moore sent in the ground force, while continuing to pound the militants with air strikes. By now an AC-130 gunship was overhead, firing at the insurgents with its 105mm howitzer and 20mm cannon. The Rangers set up a blocking position at one end of the valley while about twenty or twenty-five SEALs swept through from the other end.
The result was a massacre. By battle’s end, the task force estimated that 120 Taliban lay dead (most killed by air strikes), with the Rangers and SEALs having taken no casualties. But Moore was worried about the implications of reporting such a high number of enemy dead. “We can’t say 120, the Pentagon will freak,” he told his operations officer, a Ranger, who passed a lower number—eighty—up the chain of command.5
Even with authorization to target the Taliban, the task force never reached the operational tempo of its Iraq counterpart, for several reasons. One was the rural nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, and the size of the area in which the Taliban operated, which prevented quick turnarounds of the sort possible when striking several targets in the same Baghdad or Fallujah neighborhood. At McChrystal’s direction, the task force established more outstations to lengthen its reach. Despite this, virtually every mission required a helicopter assault, which in turn required helicopters, for which demand exceeded supply in Afghanistan. Another factor was the shortage of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) aircraft.6 “The big one was ISR,” a senior Team 6 source said. “We [didn’t] have the support there to build those networks, to go after the little guy to work our way up the ladder.” A third factor hampering the task force was what the Team 6 source described as “a certain degree of talent management” on JSOC’s part when it came to which staffers it deployed to which theater. During the middle of the decade, “the cream of the crop’s going to go to Iraq,” he said.
Nonetheless, the task force mapped out the various Taliban groups that were sowing chaos in eastern and southern Afghanistan’s Pashtun provinces. “We knew those networks very well, so it was very network-centric targeting,” a senior Team 6 source said. At about the same time that Captain Brian Losey turned over command of Team 6 to Scott Moore in 2007, McChrystal decided to put Team 6 in charge of Afghanistan indefinitely, with the Ranger Regiment leadership running Task Force 17’s operations against Quds Force and Shi’ite militia targets in Iraq. McChrystal also leaned on his task force in Bagram to ramp up their operational tempo. “The one thing I learned from McChrystal was if you can’t get quality, get quantity of missions,” said a senior Team 6 source. “‘Even if you can’t find the guy you’re going after, continue to pressure the network,’” McChrystal would tell subordinates, he said. “Which meant, if you’re not going out, you’re wrong.” The task force duly complied with McChrystal’s directive. In 2008, it hit 550 targets, killing about 1,000 people.7
As was also the case in Iraq, such a high operational tempo, when combined with the pressure to launch raids based on incomplete intelligence, resulted in the task force assaulting a lot of targets where no insurgents were to be found. Even when successful, JSOC’s raids created problems for the conventional units in whose areas of operations the missions were conducted. The task force would arrive in the night, assault or bomb a target, and leave. The next morning the townspeople would wake up to see a smoking pile of rubble where a house used to be, and turn their anger on the local “landowning” conventional Army or Marine commander. This in turn led to friction between the conventional military and the JSOC task force. “Sometimes our actions were counterproductive,” McChrystal later acknowledged.8
Despite the vastly increased target set, Afghanistan’s immense scale still hampered the task force, which was largely based at Bagram. Most operations required long helicopter flights to and from the objective, limiting the number of missions possible per night. In 2007, McChrystal told the task force to solve the problem by making more bases. So the task force built itself two new compounds: one at the Coalition’s massive base at Kandahar airfield, and one at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika province, between Kandahar and Bagram. McChrystal also deployed another Ranger platoon to Afghanistan.9
Team 6 used its years in Afghanistan to hone its tactics, which “had evolved over the years into being as sneaky as we could, so we could keep the element of surprise until the very last second,” said Matt Bissonnette, the Team 6 operator writing under the pen name Mark Owen. He noted that Team 6 had given up “flying to the X”—i.e., landing right at the objective—in Afghanistan. “We were more comfortable being dropped off and patrolling to the compound.” Contrary to the unit’s reputation among some in the military as shoot-’em-up cowboys, Team 6 also learned early to creep into buildings and catch their targets off guard whenever possible.10
It helped that Team 6 had conducted nonstop rotations to Afghanistan—and particularly its eastern provinces—since late 2001. “They are the only tier that more or less has been in the same region for a decade,” said a Ranger officer in 2012. “And so those [operators] … have a phenomenal understanding of that terrain, a phenomenal understanding of risk mitigation in terms of mission planning, maneuvering in those mountains, and so they have become very effective out east.”
But Team 6’s domination of the Afghanistan task force was ending. By late 2009, McRaven had tweaked the McChrystal-era arrangement that placed each special mission unit in charge of a combat theater or another portion of the globe. In doing so, he would write another chapter in the storied history of the 75th Ranger Regiment.
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No JSOC unit evolved more during the post–September 11 period than the Ranger Regiment, which went from being simply the muscle behind the special mission units’ scalpel to an organization that assaulted the same set of targets as those units. As part of this evolution, the Regimental Reconnaissance Detachment was expanded to become the Regimental Reconnaissance Company, and took on many of the same characteristics and advance force operations–type missions as Delta’s G Squadron and its Team 6 counterpart, Black Squadron. In fact, the regiment created reconnaissance platoons in the Ranger battalions because JSOC kept calling the regimental-level reconnaissance unit away for special missions, mostly in Afghanistan. The changes were reflected in the regiment’s abandonment of its signature “high and tight” hairstyle in favor of the regular Army’s grooming standards during Colonel Craig Nixon’s tenure as regimental commander between 2003 and 2005. (The rules for the Reconnaissance Detachment were even looser. Its members were allowed civilian-style haircuts and to grow beards—what the Army calls “relaxed grooming standards.”)11
The fact that McChrystal, a former Ranger Regiment commander, was running JSOC was no doubt a factor in the elevation of the Rangers. But so was the wealth of combat experience that the unit had built up during the first years after September 11. When McChrystal put a Ranger battalion commander in charge of Task Force North in Iraq, it was the first time Delta operators had worked under a Ranger officer at the battalion/squadron level. Then he put the regimental commander at the head of Task Force 17, the first time that the Rangers had been in charge of a task force at the colonel/Navy captain level. But stymied by politics, 17 was always the secondary task force in Iraq. In the summer of 2009, however, having taken command of JSOC from McChrystal the previous year, Bill McRaven went one better, putting the Rangers in charge of a theater: Afghanistan.
Several factors underpinned McRaven’s decision, which he had been planning since the winter of 2008–2009, according to JSOC officers. The Taliban were clearly resurgent, leading to a perceived need for more strike forces in Afghanistan. McRaven could find those additional strike forces most easily in the Ranger Regiment, which had several times more shooters than either Delta or Team 6. The impending drawdown in Iraq also meant that more Ranger companies were available to deploy to Afghanistan. The admiral also told subordinates that with the conventional Army surging forces into Afghanistan, it made sense to put a Ranger officer in command of the JSOC task force. Rangers are, after all, infantrymen. McRaven figured that a Ranger officer would already know many of the Army battalion, brigade, and division commanders deploying to Afghanistan, enabling greater coordination between the two forces.
McRaven’s idea was to shift the Ranger Regiment commander, Colonel Richard Clarke, from Iraq, where he had been running Task Force 17, to Bagram, and to replace Clarke with the SEAL captain who commanded Naval Special Warfare Group 2, the “white” SEAL organization that had been contributing platoons to Task Force 17. Meanwhile, McRaven planned to put the Team 6 commander in charge of JSOC’s operations in the Horn of Africa and Yemen.12
By mid-2009, the Ranger Regiment was in command of JSOC forces in Afghanistan, which now included: a Team 6 squadron minus (i.e., a squadron command cell, but less than a full squadron’s worth of operators) in the east; a Delta squadron minus in the north (which was just setting up at Mazar-i-Sharif); and a Ranger battalion in the south. More importantly, in the eyes of junior leaders, Ranger platoons were doing the same sort of missions as Delta or Team 6 troops. While no Ranger officer would make the case that a Ranger infantryman had the same level of individual training or skills as a special mission unit operator, “on the ground in we had the same job,” said a Ranger officer. “That’s where Regiment changed. We went from kind of the stepchild to [where], at least in Afghanistan, we were equal.”
The United States’ Iraq War was winding down, and that freed up units and other assets for JSOC’s Afghanistan task force. No longer was Afghanistan the sideshow for the U.S. military in general and JSOC in particular. It was now the main effort. But there was a sense, particularly among Ranger officers, that compared with the conventional U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the task force now had so many resources that it had to show results. “Ranger platoons had more helicopters than friggin’ infantry brigades had,” noted a Ranger officer.
In August 2009, Erik Kurilla became the regimental commander and, therefore, the overall task force commander in Bagram. (When Kurilla was not physically present, the deputy regimental commander, Colonel Christopher Vanek, would run the task force.) Just as he did in Mosul as the Task Force North commander, Kurilla was keen to raise JSOC’s operational tempo even higher. But doing that required the regional task forces to “lower the threshold” for targeting, said a Ranger officer. “You couldn’t just go after very senior, high-level guys,” he said. “You had to go after everybody that was a potential target.… So any type of IED cell … that we could target, we would target.” However, this decision caused the FBI to pull its agents from strike forces in Afghanistan. “They were there for Al Qaeda,” not the rank-and-file Taliban, the officer said.
The different regional task forces—and therefore the different units around which they were organized—had target sets that were almost unique to them. Team 6’s strike forces in the east focused on foreign fighters; in the north, Delta concentrated on what were code-named the “Lexington” targets, which were primarily Al Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan; the Ranger-run Task Forces South and Central targeted the Haqqani Network and other Taliban groups. (There was always one Ranger battalion deployed to Afghanistan. Its commander ran Task Force South, based at Kandahar airfield, while the executive officer oversaw Task Force Central at Forward Operating Base Salerno, in Khost, which is actually in eastern Afghanistan.) For a while, Delta also had a troop functioning as a vehicle interdiction strike force in Kandahar, reporting to the Ranger battalion commander. “They were absolutely laying it down, to the tune of ten to twenty-five EKIA [enemy killed in action] per op,” said a Ranger officer.
The Marines were the “landowning” conventional force in Helmand province, which stretches almost 300 miles from the Pakistan border to central Afghanistan. The Corps targeted the senior Afghan insurgents who lived year-round in Afghanistan, while the Rangers would target the leaders who went back and forth across the Pakistan border. Although the Rangers in the south had Strykers and, later, more heavily armored Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected, or MRAP, vehicles in the south, they rarely used them because of the distances they had to cover and the threat of roadside bombs. Instead they relied on helicopter assaults almost exclusively. “We were completely dependent on helicopters,” said a Ranger officer. “More helicopters equaled more missions.”
But JSOC found targeting in the south more difficult than in the rest of Afghanistan, and much more challenging than it had been in Iraq. Southern Afghanistan lacked a robust cell phone infrastructure, and the Taliban soon got wise to how JSOC used the networks that did exist for targeting. Taliban leaders removed the batteries from their cell and satellite phones at the end of the day, and forced cell phone providers to shut down their entire networks at night, reducing to almost nothing the signals available for the task force to zero in on. “It was hard,” said a Ranger officer. South of Kandahar there were no cell phone networks anyway. As a result, signals intelligence was “limited at best,” a Ranger source said. However, senior insurgents in the south did use satellite phones, which the National Security Agency collected on, he added. (As in Iraq, the Rangers went to some lengths on raids to hide the importance of phones to the targeting process, for instance by using words like “handset” and “selector” instead of “phone” when talking to each other while searching a house. “If I have the ability to lead them to believe they were turned in by an informant, then I’m going to do that,” the Ranger source said.)
The signals intelligence challenges served to raise the value of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, particularly those with imagery capabilities. The strike forces would zero in on their targets’ phone signals during the day. Once they had located the individuals, they would follow them using a combination of Predators and manned aircraft flown by military pilots and contractors. “You had to be very, very effective during the day, or you didn’t go out at night,” said a Ranger source. Squad leaders—staff sergeants whose traditional job was to control seven or eight infantrymen—were now spending their days in the operations center, on the phone with pilots flying the Predators (remotely) and other ISR aircraft.
The JSOC task force headquarters in Bagram distributed the ISR aircraft among the regional task force commanders, who in turn decided how to allocate those resources between their different strike forces. Colonel Mark Odom, the Ranger battalion commander in Kandahar during the 2009–2010 timeframe, used two criteria: what were his operational priorities, and which strike forces were getting out and doing missions. “If we could get another mission, another statistic, then he would give us [the assets],” said a Ranger. “It was all about generating the optempo.”
How much of that operational tempo was driven by military necessity, and how much by a desire just to post numbers for the sake of the statistics, became “a very controversial question across Task Force, because Red [i.e., the Rangers] ran it,” said a Ranger source, alluding to the view commonly held by Team 6 and, particularly, Delta, that the Rangers often failed to exercise tactical patience. For instance, while the Ranger chain of command would want to launch a mission as soon as ISR aircraft had located someone exhibiting a suspicious pattern of life, such as visiting a mosque and then a compound associated with the Taliban, “a Green officer would develop it, say ‘Let’s see where the guy goes the next three nights,’” the Ranger source said.
“There was a lot of pressure,” the Ranger source said. The battalion commander would ask, “Why aren’t you executing this target? Are you sure it’s not good enough?” If the strike force commander replied, “Sir, we have no fidelity on this target,” the battalion commander would be insistent. “I don’t care, you’re going,” he’d say. As a result, the Ranger source said, in early 2010 “every strike force is going out almost every night.” Pressure from above meant that the Rangers hit a lot more “empty holes”—objectives where there were no Taliban present. As the operational tempo increased, “the percentage of jackpot went down,” meaning the percentage of raids that netted their targets declined to where as many as 30 percent of the Kandahar strike force’s raids came up empty, a figure that rose to 40 or 50 percent for the strike forces in outlying areas, a Ranger officer said. Ranger commanders at the task force level “knew they were kicking in tons of doors that they shouldn’t,” but other than handing out cash to homeowners whose property they had damaged, they evinced little concern. “Red doesn’t care,” said a Ranger source. “Odom wants results, and if that means we’re going to kick in the wrong guy’s door, so be it.”
Others in the JSOC community were convinced that this approach created more enemies than it removed from the battlefield. “We will lose because of it,” said a senior Team 6 source. But a Ranger officer stationed in southern Afghanistan saw it differently. Odom felt “a moral obligation” to use the considerable assets at his disposal to help the conventional forces bogged down in a grinding counterinsurgency campaign, noting that Delta and the Rangers have closer links to the conventional Army than other JSOC units do. “Every frickin’ Green and Red guy was in the regular Army, so we know how hard it is,” the Ranger officer said. “We feel like we have to help them. We can’t just sit by and be like, ‘Oh, that target’s not good enough for us.’”
“What the Rangers would do is target what the conventional Army landowning brigades wanted them to go after,” agreed a senior Team 6 officer. Those targets were typically lower-level homemade bomb networks, rather than the senior leadership that the JSOC task force should have been targeting, he argued. The Rangers’ efforts “to make friends across Afghanistan in the Army way” allowed the enemy to regroup, he said.
The Rangers had a harder time making friends with the Marines. There were “massive arguments” between Task Force South and the Marine headquarters in Helmand, according to a Ranger officer. “They wouldn’t give us the airspace that we needed to bring in AC-130s or A-10s,” he said, referring to the task force’s fixed wing gunships and the conventional Air Force’s close air support aircraft, respectively.
In 2007, the Ranger Regiment added a fourth company to each Ranger battalion, at least partly in response to McChrystal’s desire to have three more Ranger strike forces in-country. Each Ranger company had three platoons, which became strike forces in Afghanistan. Prior to 2007, a Ranger battalion had three companies, meaning it could field nine strike forces. By adding a fourth company, each battalion could bring twelve strike forces to Afghanistan. In contrast, Team 6 and Delta rarely had more than two troops each (with each troop functioning as a strike force) in Afghanistan at any one time.
A Ranger platoon was almost twice the size of a Delta or Team 6 troop, which gave it more firepower and more flexibility as a strike force. With attachments like dog handlers, snipers, mortars, a tactical psychological operations team, a combat camera unit, and an explosive ordnance detachment, a Ranger strike force would number about sixty or sixty-five personnel. Support and administrative personnel meant a Ranger outstation would have about 100 people in it.
In the spring of 2010, Kurilla decided to capitalize on the amount of firepower a Ranger strike force could bring to bear by keeping two 2nd Battalion platoons in-country for an extra two months. He combined the two platoons into Team Darby, named for Brigadier General William Darby, who was influential in the establishment of the first Ranger battalions during World War II. Kurilla had big plans for Team Darby, which was part of a larger JSOC surge that arrived in summer 2010, in concert with the conventional buildup in the country. Delta deployed an entire squadron, with a troop at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika, a troop in Kunduz in the north, and a troop that roamed where the action was. Team 6 remained steady with a troop in Jalalabad and another in Logar. The Rangers added a company headquarters and two platoons. “This was Kurilla’s big plan,” said a Ranger officer. “Kurilla was going to have extra Rangers the whole time. The regular Army was surging, so Kurilla was going to surge.”
Team Darby was renamed Team Merrill, a 120-soldier force named after Brigadier General Frank Merrill, who led a long-range jungle penetration force in Burma in World War II. Team Merrill’s mission was very different from that of the single platoon-size strike forces into which the rest of the Rangers in Afghanistan were organized. “The idea is we’re going to do movement to contact, we’re going to do clearing operations,” said a Ranger who fought in Team Merrill. “We’re not going to do single human targets. We’re going to go to the very, very worst places and we’re going to clear those areas.”
Team Merrill conducted operations in Kandahar province’s Arghandab, Zhari, and Panjwai districts, and the Khost-Gardez pass in eastern Afghanistan. Unlike other strike forces, the team would spend up to a week figuring out which areas to hit, and then launch a night raid. But the fights in which it found itself were so big that the team was usually still in combat at daybreak, which would lead to an even bigger fight during the day. Initially, the team did not come supplied for such lengthy battles and had to rely on airdrops. During one such daylight resupply in Zhari, the Taliban shot down a Task Force Brown Chinook, albeit with no fatalities. (The task force was able to repair the helicopter and fly it away.)
Kurilla quickly made Team Merrill his main effort in Afghanistan. “They [were] the biggest show in town,” said a Ranger officer. In addition to two Ranger platoons, Team Merrill included a radio intercept unit from regiment headquarters. “They’re not as special as the Orange guys, but same idea,” said a Ranger, adding that the unit “had all the boxes for intercepting” the Taliban’s handheld Icom VHF radios, “so this all becomes about VHF traffic.”
The size of the firefights into which Team Merrill was getting during daylight hours got Kurilla thinking. “This is when the lightbulb goes off in Kurilla’s head—if we stay out during the day, we get into an even bigger fight, meaning we went from killing five guys to killing fifty guys,” a Ranger said. So instead of being dragged reluctantly into daylight fights, Team Merrill planned for them.
The missions evolved from both platoons clearing an area, to one platoon air-assaulting in to do the clearing while the other established a command post in a compound. It would spend all night turning it into a strongpoint, knocking holes for firing ports in the walls, digging a trench for the mortars, and setting out Claymore mines. The compounds were family houses. At first the Rangers let the families stay in them, but it soon became clear that was too dangerous for the civilians, as the house became a magnet for Taliban fire. Thereafter, the Rangers would “give them a bunch of money and boot them out, because their place is going to get destroyed,” a Merrill veteran said. “It turns into World War II.” The payoff to a subsistence farmer for getting kicked out of his home with his family and then having that home destroyed was usually “a couple of thousand” dollars, the Merrill veteran said.
Team Merrill began encountering Iraq-style house bombs—entire homes rigged to explode—in the Taliban strongholds in which they fought. When Rangers discovered such booby traps, they got very “kinetic” as the military would say, very fast. “You go up to one building and it’s booby-trapped and we back away and we level everything,” said a Ranger officer. “We’re dropping bombs and firing HIMARS [High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System] at a rate that’s ridiculous. In Arghandab on multiple nights we leveled villages. Empty villages, but we leveled villages.”
The Rangers on Team Merrill did not feel bound by even JSOC’s rules of engagement, which were looser than those that governed conventional units. “The rules go out of the window with Merrill,” recounted a Ranger source. “When the sun comes up, when the fighting starts, if there’s a male outside, we’re going to kill him.… We would hear intercepts on the VHF radios and we couldn’t triangulate it, but we’d be like, ‘Well, it sounds like those guys over there,’ and then we would just kill them. We were in massive fights, so it’s not like we were murdering out of vengeance. It was more like we were in a fight and the enemy looked like the friendlies.”
After tough fighting in Kandahar province during late summer 2010, Team Merrill conducted a series of operations in Helmand. “The Taliban in Helmand are organized and effective fighters,” using mortars, RPGs, and recoilless rifles, said a Ranger who fought there. The Rangers listened to intercepted radio calls as Taliban observers adjusted mortar fire on U.S. positions. “These guys were not playing,” he said.
Team Merrill had a variety of ways to kill Taliban, the most lethal of which flew. “We had everything,” said a Ranger. “At night, Little Birds, AC-130, A-10s.” During the day, the Rangers could call on Apache attack helicopters and A-10s, as well as larger bombers. But these fights took a toll on the Rangers too. In a “massive fight” called Operation Matthews in Helmand on October 1, 1st Battalion suffered more than a dozen wounded and lost Sergeant First Class Lance Vogeler, who was on his twelfth combat deployment, to Taliban fire. “On that day we dropped fifty bombs,” said a Ranger. “We emptied two B-1 bombers.”
As winter bore down, Team Merrill moved north to conduct operations in Kunduz province to support the Delta task force based in Mazar-i-Sharif. By now, JSOC’s regional task forces were competing for the team to operate in their areas, because it brought so many ISR and close air support aircraft with it. “They did some pretty amazing missions—the tough, difficult fights,” said a senior officer in the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the official name of the Coalition military effort in Afghanistan. “They went right into the most remote places where these guys were hanging out and really stirred things up.”
But the team’s mounting losses meant some Rangers became very conflicted about its operations. “For a Ranger, it’s good and bad,” said a Merrill veteran. “This is the highlight of what a Ranger wants to do. He wants to get in these massive fights, kill as many people as he can kill, destroy as much as he can destroy, but at the same time, we start to take serious casualties.”
At least twenty Rangers were killed in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. Scores more were seriously wounded. By late 2011, the Afghanistan task force, now run by Colonel Mark Odom, had abandoned the Team Merrill concept. “They lost a bunch of guys, and that was it,” said a Ranger officer. “It stopped.”
In 2011 the operational tempo issue also reared its head again, creating what a Ranger officer called “a toxic relationship” between the Delta troop at Sharana and the Ranger-led Task Force Central headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost. Again the cause was the more aggressive approach taken by the Rangers, when compared with some special mission unit strike forces, who thought the Rangers were not exercising enough tactical patience. Of JSOC’s fourteen strike forces in Afghanistan at the time, ten were Ranger platoons, while two were Delta troops and two were Team 6 troops. However, only at Sharana was a special mission unit troop working directly for a Ranger officer, in this case 2nd Battalion’s executive officer. The Delta troop commander finally became so resistant to the Ranger chain of command’s insistence that his operators mount raid after raid that he all but stopped his troop from doing any operations. As a result, a platoon from 2nd Battalion’s A Company was moved to Sharana “to hit Green’s targets for them,” a Ranger source said. When it came time for the next rotation of units, Delta declined to send another troop to Sharana. The replacement troop went to Kunduz instead, giving Delta two troops in the north.
“The optempo thing becomes ridiculous,” said a Ranger officer. The strike forces were conducting a raid a night, which was very low compared with the height of the Iraq War, but a lot for Afghanistan. “Red goes too far,” said the officer. “Green gets really, really pissed off. They don’t believe that going out every night is valuable, because you’re kicking in people’s doors that aren’t bad.… One out of every two missions resulted in grabbing the wrong guy.”
Organizational egos were also a factor. “Green was running it [in Iraq], Green was winning,” said the Ranger officer. “In Afghanistan, Green was marginalized. Green came in at the end and got Task Force North. They got the least amount of ISR, they got the least amount of [close air support]. Out of all four [regional JSOC task forces], they were the least important. Green I don’t think was used to being the least important.”13
Delta’s presence in Afghanistan increased as its Iraq commitments subsided, allowing it to put a squadron headquarters at the airfield in Mazar-i-Sharif. Its task was to prevent Al Qaeda establishing a sanctuary in northern Afghanistan. The German army provided the Coalition’s main conventional force in northern Afghanistan, but the U.S. military held out little hope that the Germans could take care of business. “The Germans weren’t going to do it, obviously, or didn’t have the means,” said the senior ISAF staff officer. “Our guys obviously did.”
Delta’s area of operations extended east to Kunar province, targeting the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, among other groups, said a Special Forces officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan.
The unit tried to repeat the success of its Mohawk human intelligence program in Iraq, but quickly discovered that Afghanistan was not nearly as conducive an environment in which to establish a spy network. “It doesn’t work in Afghanistan,” said a task force officer. “They tried it. The Mohawk program works because you can get a local Iraqi to go into any [city like] Mosul, Baghdad, and he’ll fit in. But if I took my recruited Afghan source and sent him into Sangin [in Helmand], they would know in a fucking heartbeat that this guy didn’t belong, and then he would die.”
* * *
In June 2009, Stan McChrystal received his fourth star and took charge of the International Security Assistance Force. He had been in the job a year when a Rolling Stone magazine article that quoted his staff speaking in disparaging terms about officials in the administration of President Barack Obama forced his resignation. (Obama, a Democrat, succeeded George W. Bush as president in January 2009, but the change in administration did little to change the White House’s reliance on JSOC.) McChrystal was replaced by David Petraeus, whose command lasted until July 2011. During the tenures of each general in Kabul, the twin issues of JSOC’s night raids and civilian casualties gained a prominence that they hadn’t before. “In ’01, ’02, ’03, the occasional night raid might generate some local [protest] but in those days, the American presence was generally considered to be a good thing [by the Afghans],” said an Army civilian who made numerous visits to Afghanistan in the years after the September 11 attacks. However, with the passage of time, “you had less tolerance among the Afghans for any of that,” as the population tired of the corruption in the Karzai government, which Afghans associated with the United States.
In rural Afghan society, even more so than in many other cultures, having foreign, non-Muslim troops force their way into homes was seen as a grave violation of dignity. In particular, it was an offense against the concept of purdah, in which women are kept segregated from men who are not family members. In the later years of the war, JSOC forces were virtually the only Coalition military units conducting night raids, in part because they operated under rules of engagement for Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States’ post–September 11 war against Al Qaeda. The conventional U.S. military operated under ISAF rules of engagement, which were much more limiting, requiring an extensive approval process for any night raid. “Our rules were totally different,” said a Ranger officer. “That’s key. And that’s [why] Task Force was able to do this at such a higher level, because we didn’t have the bureaucracy or the approval authority [issue]. We could get a target that morning and execute it that night.”
As ISAF commanders, McChrystal and Petraeus each adhered to counterinsurgency doctrine that held that victory required separating insurgents from the civilian population so that civilians could be protected and insurgents targeted. This was devilishly difficult in Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribal belt, where the insurgents sprang from the local population. It also placed the senior military leaders on the horns of a dilemma. They knew that more than any other Coalition force, it was JSOC that was taking the fight to the Taliban. (The ISAF press office regularly issued press releases about Coalition operations, without detailing the units involved. The vast majority of those that involved offensive action against the Taliban were JSOC operations.)14 But McChrystal and Petraeus also knew that night raids had become a political sore spot for Karzai and were hugely unpopular with the population, particularly when JSOC made mistakes and killed civilians, threatening the Coalition’s ability to remain in Afghanistan.
A series of high-profile episodes in 2010 and 2011 brought this issue to the fore. In the most notorious and controversial incident, on February 12, 2010, Rangers conducted a night raid on a compound in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The raid was based on mistaken intelligence that insurgents in the compound were preparing for a suicide bomb operation. But rather than insurgents, the compound belonged to a local police detective, Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, who was hosting a party to celebrate the naming of his newborn son. Daoud had been through numerous U.S. training programs and was, essentially, an American ally. He wasn’t even Pashtun, the ethnicity from which the Taliban is drawn almost exclusively. But when Daoud and his fifteen-year-old son went outside to see who was in their yard at 3:30 A.M., they were shot. In a chaotic scene, the shooting continued, and within moments seven Afghans lay dead or dying, including two pregnant women.
The surviving family members later accused the JSOC troops of trying to hide evidence of what had happened by digging bullets from the women’s bodies with knives. ISAF headquarters put out a series of erroneous reports that said that the men killed had been insurgents and that the women were victims of “honor killings” by the “insurgents.” The ISAF reports also sought to damage the reputation of Jerome Starkey, a Kabul reporter for The Times of London, who had started to uncover the deception. The affair came to a bizarre conclusion when, in an extraordinary scene, McRaven himself, accompanied by a large retinue of U.S. and Afghan troops, showed up at the family’s home in Gardez with a sheep he was ready to sacrifice in a ritualistic apology. The family invited Starkey and photographer, Jeremy Kelly, to witness the event. Their reporting documented JSOC’s involvement.
Several years later, exactly why the JSOC forces raided the compound remained unclear, as the commands involved had failed to release any records of the event.15 But the incident and others in which civilians were killed by air strikes called in by forces on the ground, resulted in a number of changes. Among these was that JSOC forces were required to do a “call-out” before assaulting a target at night, meaning that they had to surround a compound and then give anyone inside an opportunity to surrender. This was tremendously unpopular with the strike forces,16 who felt it gave insurgents a chance to destroy phones and other material that could help the task force map the Taliban network and lead to other targets. “You’re really ceding the upper hand to the enemy,” said a senior Team 6 operator, who added that Team 6 strike forces sometimes ignored the call-out requirement. “If we were sure the bad guy was in there, we weren’t going to do a call-out,” he said. “We weren’t giving him an opportunity to destroy evidence or anything else. We were doing an assault.”
Another requirement, which predated the Gardez massacre, was that JSOC would work with Afghan special operations forces on every mission. The Afghan force, recruited from the Afghan Commando units trained by U.S. Special Forces, was called simply the Afghan Partner Unit, or APU. In 2009, the Bagram headquarters insisted that every mission include at least five APU soldiers. By late 2010, that number had increased to seven. Views of the APUs’ usefulness varied among strike forces. A Ranger officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan commented that APU troops were “very tough, much tougher than the Iraqi military.” But JSOC was too focused on training the APU troops to clear buildings, he said. If the United States wanted to leave behind a special operations force capable of hunting down Taliban after an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, it should have concentrated instead on training the APU on human intelligence skills, as the U.S. military’s departure would deprive the APU of the signals and imagery intelligence assets that drove so many JSOC raids. “We should be focusing them on developing a source network, because that’s going to be their only lifeline,” he said.
Another Ranger said his strike force only brought along APU soldiers “for show” so that the task force and, ultimately, ISAF press releases, could boast that each raid had been “Afghan-led.” The strike force would place a Ranger in charge of the Afghan troops on each mission. The Afghans rarely took part in the fighting. “They would just sit in a corner or hide in a room,” the Ranger said. However, he said, that was not the message transmitted up the chain of command: “Was it reported like that on the radio? No, but the higher-ups, as long as I reported it right, they were cool with that.… I would always say, ‘APU conducting call-out.’ They would radio back, ‘Okay, good.’ Were the APU conducting the call-out? No. ‘APU entering the compound.’ Were the APU entering the compound? No.”
The Ranger acknowledged that other Ranger platoons and Delta troops made more of an effort to get their assigned Afghans involved, but he said Rangers in general were resistant to training and mentoring Afghan forces, which he viewed as a job for Special Forces. “They were a means to an end,” he said of the APU. “They helped us get out the door.”
The view from the top of the chain of command looked very different. In a March 7, 2012, appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, McRaven, who by then had received his fourth star and been made head of U.S. Special Operations Command, defended night raids as “an essential tool for our special operations forces.” But, since the previous summer, “we have really Afghanized our night raid approach,” he added. “The Afghans are in the lead on all our night raids,” McRaven continued. “They are the ones that do the call-outs, asking people to come out of the compounds, they are the first ones through the door, they are the ones that do all of the sensitive site exploitation.”
The civilian casualty, or “civcas,” episodes put Petraeus in a difficult position. He was a strong advocate for JSOC, having seen and benefited from the command’s effectiveness as the Coalition commander in Iraq. But he also knew Hamid Karzai’s patience was wearing thin. “He would just take ass-whipping after ass-whipping when he’d go to talk to Karzai about the civcas stuff,” said a senior member of Petraeus’s staff. “It was stuff that didn’t seem like it needed to happen, if you will. They didn’t have to whack these guys.” A senior JSOC officer would brief Petraeus every week on the command’s activities, and the command’s liaisons, who sat a thirty-second walk from his office, spoke with him every day—a validation of McChrystal’s insistence on placing talented liaisons in every headquarters that mattered to JSOC. “He spoke their language,” said the senior member of Petraeus’s staff. “He was very comfortable around those guys.… He was a big supporter of what they did, but … he was just as hard on them too. When they fucked something up he made them atone for their sins.”
The task force committed one of its more egregious “sins” on October 8, 2010, when it tried to rescue British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who had been abducted on September 26. Intelligence traced her location to a compound about 7,000 feet up a mountainside in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Two years previously, the task force had conducted a successful hostage rescue of an American engineer kidnapped in central Afghanistan. In that episode, dubbed Operation Prometheus, Team 6 operators had landed about three miles from the kidnappers’ hideout and patrolled through heavy snow to sneak up on and shoot both guards and rescue the engineer.17
The Norgrove mission fell to a troop from Team 6’s Silver Squadron, the unit’s newest assault squadron. As part of the significant expansion of JSOC, Delta and Team 6 were each directed to create a fourth line squadron, notwithstanding the fact that they found it hard to fill their three existing squadrons. Over the course of a couple of years, Team 6 built Silver Squadron by running an additional assessment and selection course, then adding a fourth team to each of the three existing assault squadrons, slowly filling the fourth troop with operators and then moving the three additional troops into the new squadron.18 The troop that conducted the mission was, with one or two exceptions, filled with seasoned operators and commanded by “a very experienced guy,” according to a senior Team 6 operator.
Unlike the operation to rescue the engineer, the geography of the area did not allow for the rescue force to land at an offset location and move on foot to the objective. Instead, it would have to fly straight to the target. The 160th’s 4th Battalion flew the mission with Chinooks. There was nowhere to land, so the operators fast-roped down to the ground.19
A manned ISR aircraft overhead gave the SEALs second-by-second updates of what it saw. The aircraft reported a figure moving in the bushes. But what the observers in the plane had missed was that the man they’d spotted was dragging Norgrove behind him. On the ground, two SEALs reacted to the new information in different ways. Neither realized that the hostage was in the bushes. The aircraft’s last report was that she was in the building. “It all comes down to decision making in that moment,” said a senior Team 6 operator. A team leader who had climbed onto the roof saw the kidnapper and fired. At the same moment, another SEAL threw a grenade at the movement in the bushes. The team leader’s shot almost certainly killed the kidnapper, but the grenade killed Norgrove. At the time, however, almost nobody on the objective or watching in the operations centers realized that a grenade had caused the explosion.
It took a few seconds for the awful news to reach Bagram. At first the SEALs reported “Jackpot,” meaning they’d found Norgrove. “You hear ‘Jackpot!’ Everybody’s like, ‘Yes!’ in the whole room,” said a source who was in the operations center. The next words cut the celebrations cruelly short: “… administering CPR at this time.” The atmosphere in the operations center deflated. “You just knew something went wrong,” said the source.
At first nobody fully understood the truth about what killed Norgrove. Because the operators had been briefed that the kidnappers might be wearing suicide vests, the team leader who fired at the man dragging Norgrove thought that his bullet must have detonated such a vest on the kidnapper, causing the explosion. Even the operator who threw the grenade and his shooting buddy on the team, who was the only other person who knew about the grenade, didn’t realize that the grenade had killed Norgrove, in large part because the team leader was so convinced that the kidnapper he’d shot had somehow blown up and that Norgrove had died in that explosion. When the troop returned from the objective to Jalalabad, the grenade thrower and his shooting buddy kept their mouths shut during the mission debrief. This meant that the story told to the British government, Norgrove’s parents, and the news media was that a suicide vest explosion killed Norgrove. Shortly after the JSOC task force had put out this official version of events, the operator who threw the grenade finally informed his team leader that he had thrown a fragmentation grenade. “That’s when it hit the team leader that, ‘Okay, I didn’t just shoot a dude that had a vest on, my own teammate threw a grenade,’” said a Team 6 source. The team leader was “horrified,” according to a senior Team 6 operator, but rather than report what he knew immediately, he retreated to his living quarters for about another forty hours. “He didn’t [report it] because he doesn’t want to damage the reputation of the command,” said the senior operator. “And throughout the whole next day he’s chewing on it.”
Meanwhile, Kurilla, JSOC’s Afghanistan task force commander, had been poring over the video of the mission and realized that someone had thrown a grenade. “Once you see the video, it’s unmistakable,” said a Team 6 source. He called the squadron commander and command master chief up to Bagram and showed them the video. They returned to Jalalabad and called in the team leader. He had already decided to tell what he knew, but it was too late. The wheels of investigation had begun to turn.
Norgrove’s death in a U.S. mission was already front page news in the United Kingdom and the United States, and a major embarrassment for Petraeus, who was about to travel to the U.K. for a visit planned in advance of the rescue effort. The general called Norgrove’s parents and British prime minister David Cameron in the wake of the failure. Kurilla and others from JSOC had briefed Petraeus in the immediate aftermath of the mission. “That day there was just a steady stream of those guys coming in and out,” said the senior Petraeus staffer. The revelation that it was a Team 6 operator that had inadvertently killed Norgrove only exacerbated the awkwardness and the anger. “There was some tension in there,” said the senior staffer. “They had a great chance to save this lady and we ended up whacking her.… People were a little pissed … that the story didn’t come out right the first time” with regard to how Norgrove was killed, the staffer said. “When it turned out that it was one of our guys, it was just ‘Holy shit.’ That was definitely a low time for JSOC because they’d built up some equity pulling off missions and then this was a low point for them.”
The failure of the Norgrove operation was enormously painful and frustrating for the task force, the members of which knew that they had been one unnecessary mistake away from one of the most difficult, daring hostage rescues in U.S. history. It was “a very gutsy operation,” said a Team 6 operator. “There’s not another force that could have done it.” But it also prompted some introspection in Team 6.
The operator who had thrown the grenade was on his first Team 6 deployment, and had previously been warned about throwing grenades on missions, said a senior Team 6 operator. “They counseled him but didn’t do anything,” he said. “They probably should have moved him on.” But there were other factors behind the mission failure. Silver Squadron did no hostage rescue training during its pre-deployment workup, the senior Team 6 operator said. Instead, the team focused on “combat clearance” techniques. “[In] hostage rescue clearance, there is no scenario—no scenario—where you grab a grenade,” the operator said. The same was not true for combat clearance. “So you’ve got a brand-new guy that made it through selection, gets to the squadron, and doesn’t do any hostage rescue training beforehand. So he goes on deployment and he performs as trained.” The senior Team 6 operator called into question the decision to use Silver Squadron for the mission: “If you haven’t trained to it in six months, you don’t do it.”
Those who suffered most from the events on the objective were Norgrove herself, of course, and her loved ones. But there were costs on the military side as well. The operator who threw the grenade, his shooting buddy, and the team leader who covered it up were moved out of the unit. For the latter two, this expulsion was temporary. Each returned to Team 6. For the operator who threw the grenade, the exclusion was permanent. “To this day, the guy that threw the grenade, he’s a wreck,” said a senior Team 6 operator several years later. Team 6’s reputation had also suffered. “This is a big failure for the command,” said the senior operator. Within seven months, however, the unit would have a chance to redeem itself.20