In the very early hours of January 25, 2012, the back ramp of an MC-130 Combat Talon opened about 20,000 feet above Somalia. The Blue Squadron operators shuffled forward, rigged for a HAHO jump, and dove out into the moonless night sky. “High altitude, pitch black, out into nothing,” a Team 6 source said. They were on a mission that would not garner as many headlines as the bin Laden raid, but which was arguably more tactically challenging. It would showcase the advances Team 6 had made over the previous decade.
The SEALs were on a rescue mission. Three months earlier to the day, Somali pirates had kidnapped American aid worker Jessica Buchanan, thirty-two, and her sixty-year-old Danish colleague, Poul Hagen Thisted, after they had given a workshop on land mines in Galkayo, a city about 350 miles northeast of Mogadishu. (Despite the maritime connotations of the word “pirate,” Somali pirates were just as happy to kidnap their victims on land as at sea.) The pirates took the pair to their camp in Hiimo Gaabo, south of Galkayo. Meanwhile, JSOC developed options to free them. Because Somalia fell under Team 6’s purview, the Navy unit got the mission, which fell to Blue Squadron, which had the Trident at the time.
JSOC soon figured out where the pirates were holding Buchanan and Thisted and positioned drones overhead, so they were able to track the hostages’ movements and daily routines. As negotiations with the kidnappers dragged on—the pirates rejected a $1.5 million ransom offer—U.S. officials became concerned that a urinary tract infection was putting Buchanan’s life at risk. President Obama, who had been keeping a close eye on the crisis, authorized JSOC to attempt a rescue mission.
The operators who exited the back of the Combat Talon realized in midair that they couldn’t make it to their primary drop zone. “There was so much fog they had to go to an alternate drop zone,” said a Team 6 source. For the experienced freefall jumpers this was no great obstacle. Using microphones and earpieces fitted to their helmets, they were able to discuss the change in plans while in midair, and still managed to land far enough away from the camp that the pirates never heard or saw them. The SEALs then moved on foot to the camp so stealthily that the nine kidnappers guarding the hostages had no idea they were under attack until it was far too late. A couple of pirates managed to get some harmless shots off before the SEALs were on top of them, killing all nine with ruthless efficiency as two operators sprinted through the gunfight to cover the hostages with their bodies. Grabbing the hostages, they moved on foot for several minutes to a pickup zone. There Task Force Brown helicopters landed in swirling dust and flew them to Galkayo’s airport, where a Combat Talon waited to fly them to Djibouti.1
The rescue of Buchanan and Thisted exemplified some of the capabilities and skills JSOC and Team 6 had been perfecting since—and in some cases before—September 11. The positioning of drones over the camp was a testament to the belief of Stan McChrystal and Mike Flynn in the power of the “Unblinking Eye.” That President Obama felt comfortable enough to give the go-ahead for the mission was a function of the confidence he had in JSOC, a confidence that was the product of hard work successive JSOC commanders had done building relationships with the White House over two administrations. The perfectly executed freefall jump was a direct result of the time and energy Team 6 had invested in preparing for such missions. “That [mission] would not have been as successful as it was had we not done that profile hundreds and hundreds of times already,” said a Team 6 source. The decision to land at an offset location (the “Y”), as opposed to jumping directly onto the objective (the “X”), was based on hard lessons learned from a decade of trial and error in combat. The operators’ ability to creep up undetected to the camp—also highlighted during Team 6’s October 2010 rescue of the kidnapped American engineer in Afghanistan—was also a skill honed over countless previous missions. The appearance of the Task Force Brown helicopters many hundreds of miles from a friendly air base was a testament to the 160th’s vaunted ability to fly its helicopters to wherever the mission demanded “plus or minus thirty seconds” anywhere on the globe. According to one special operations source, the operation to retrieve Buchanan and Thisted became “the gold standard” of hostage rescues within JSOC.
* * *
As the twenty-first century stretched toward the middle of its second decade, JSOC had firmly established itself at the top of not only the U.S. military food chain, but also, arguably, the interagency hierarchy inside the Washington Beltway.
To achieve that, successive JSOC commanders had leveraged an organization that McChrystal originally established in 2004 with a more limited mandate. That organization began life as the Joint Reconnaissance and Targeting Force, or JRTF, and was the brainchild of then Colonel Mike Nagata, according to a veteran of the organization. (Other sources credit a slightly wider array of individuals.) The purpose was to achieve a level of synergy among the burgeoning reconnaissance elements of the different JSOC units. At the time, Delta, Team 6, and the Rangers each had units dedicated to deep reconnaissance and advance force operations, and each was growing in size: Delta was expanding Operational Support Troop into what became G Squadron; Team 6 was nurturing Black Squadron from humble beginnings into what would become the unit’s largest formation; and the Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment was taking on a broader range of missions and growing into a company designed along the same lines as a Delta reconnaissance troop. All of these reconnaissance units had missions that overlapped with each other and with those of Orange, which saw itself as the premier outfit when it came to clandestine intelligence gathering operations.
Concerned that the units were starting to replicate each other’s capabilities, McChrystal originally wanted to pool the reconnaissance assets so they would support all his units. However, relieving the special mission unit and Ranger commanders of their own reconnaissance elements would have been a tough sell, so instead McChrystal and the unit commanders agreed to establish a small task force—the JRTF—whose function would be to plan and, perhaps, command and control, reconnaissance operations that supported JSOC missions. JRTF was “supposed to be the [organization] that tied together [and] synchronized reconnaissance efforts worldwide outside of Iraq and Afghanistan,” said a special operations source familiar with its birth. The task force’s staff was to be drawn from each of JSOC’s major ground units, with the idea that when a potential reconnaissance challenge presented itself, each unit would have a representative in the JRTF who could explain what unique capabilities his or her unit could bring to solving the problem. The task force started small, with barely a dozen members. The JRTF was based at Fort Belvoir, collocated with Orange, because McChrystal thought it needed to be close to one of the special mission units, and Colonel Konrad Trautman, Orange’s commander at the time, argued that his unit was the most logical choice. When JRTF officially stood up in the late spring of 2004, Trautman became dual-hatted as commander of both JRTF and Orange. The organization took the place of the advance force operations cell in JSOC headquarters. However, friction soon developed between the JRTF staff and Orange, whose personnel derided their new neighbor as “Junior Task Force.”
By the end of 2008, JRTF had outgrown its Fort Belvoir quarters and had moved into an office building in Arlington, Virginia. In keeping with McChrystal’s vision of a networked force, JRTF had also begun to exchange liaisons with the major government agencies whose work might have a bearing on JSOC’s missions. It had taken on the roles of JSOC’s original JIATF’s East and West, at Bagram and Balad respectively, which each closed down. “The premise was [that before JRTF] there was no organization holistically looking at the GWOT [global war on terror] as a whole, as it were, the targets outside the major combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan,” a JRTF source said. “What does the rest of the structure, of the enemy order of battle, look like?” JRTF did not have an action arm, but its growing staff would travel abroad, meet with representatives of other U.S. government agencies, as well as foreign governments, “and facilitate operations outside Iraq and Afghanistan,” the source said. As the organization increasingly focused on this work with other government departments, it acquired a bulky new name: the Joint Interagency Task Force-National Capital Region, or JIATF-NCR.
The JIATF-NCR commander was a colonel or Navy captain who reported to the JSOC commander. He did not have the authority to task operational units in the field. Instead, if he wanted surveillance of a certain target, for instance, he made a recommendation to that effect to the JSOC commander. The organization, whose staff had grown exponentially, also took up data mining. “You’ve got an entire floor of the building which is nothing but computers,” said a U.S. Special Operations Command staff officer who visited the organization. The staff officer described a demonstration the JIATF-NCR staff gave visitors: “Mohammed So-and-So gets on a plane … and you get all his travel documents immediately, up there on the screen … now they give you the manifest of every flight he took … over the last six months … you get the complete manifest of all five flights, and you find out five other guys were all on the same five flights … and then you cross-reference them … and somehow you find out that three of the five are from the same village in Yemen, two or more were in prison together.… It’s multiple agencies feeding [it] and I was fascinated that we [Special Operations Command and JSOC] were in the lead, because 80 percent of what they were putting up there was domestic stuff.” (A JSOC staffer credited a program called TRADEWIND with giving JIATF-NCR the ability to call up somebody’s travel records immediately.)
A veteran of the organization said it had achieved some major targeting successes, starting with some of the Predator strikes in Yemen. However, the Special Operations Command staff officer said, the organization did not exist just to give JSOC targeting data. “If the FBI can pick up a guy landing at Dulles Airport, they do that as well,” the officer said. Indeed, by late 2014 JIATF-NCR’s mission had evolved away from targeting, and it existed largely to gain concurrence among other government agencies for specific missions.2
JSOC had overhauled its headquarters’ intelligence infrastructure to address the weaknesses that hobbled it in the aftermath of September 11. In late 2008 McRaven had established the JSOC Intelligence Brigade (JIB), a 600-person unit based at Fort Bragg and commanded by a colonel or a Navy captain. Originally conceived by McChrystal to allow the JSOC intelligence director to focus “up and out,” while the JIB commander focused “down and in,” in the words of a JSOC staff officer, the JIB included a full complement of collection, analysis, and dissemination capabilities, including airborne and ground collection platforms, as well as analysts, interrogators, and other specialists in signals, imagery, and human intelligence and counterintelligence. The JSOC director of intelligence remained the command’s senior intelligence officer, but his job was to advise the JSOC commander on intelligence missions that the JIB commander executed with his panoply of intelligence capabilities.3 “You need a commander to be responsible for training, maintaining, commanding and controlling those kinds of assets,” said a former senior JSOC officer. “Staff guys can’t do that.”
“The JIB formalized a lot of talent,” said a Team 6 officer. “It enabled [them] to get a lot more bodies and to do a lot more formal training in a more consistent manner.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of the U.S. military’s departure from Iraq, JSOC and its component units embraced a role that would increasingly see them working closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies in countries in which the United States was not officially at war. As a result, JSOC continued to expand its espionage capabilities, which were already threatening the CIA’s traditional turf. (By 2008, the military had surpassed the Agency’s ability to place case officers under nonofficial cover abroad, according to Ishmael Jones, the pen name of a retired CIA nonofficial cover case officer.) For example, in 2014 Orange was largely focused on a global mission to counter what JSOC called the Iranian Threat Network, which included the Quds Force as well as organizations that often acted as Iranian surrogates, such as Hezbollah. And although thousands of JSOC personnel remained busy in Afghanistan, by 2014 Team 6 and Delta had only one troop each in the country. Operations elsewhere indicated the way ahead. In particular, the two missions that occurred two hours and 3,000 miles apart on October 5, 2013: Delta’s dawn seizure of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Anas al-Libi, from outside his home in Tripoli, and a failed attempt by Team 6 in Baraawe, Somalia, to capture Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, otherwise known as Ikrimah, a senior al-Shabaab figure believed to be behind the September 21 attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall that killed at least sixty-seven people.
The Delta mission, in the capital of a country—Libya—with a weak central government, was smooth, professional, and bloodless. After entering Libya over the beach with Team 6’s help, the operators snatched Libi—wanted for his suspected role in Al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings, and because intelligence indicated that he was setting up a new Al Qaeda cell in Tripoli—by using two vans to block his car as he returned home from dawn prayers. The operators yanked Libi from his vehicle and sped off with him within sixty seconds. The use of vans with darkened windows suggested that Delta had advance force operations personnel in-country preparing for the mission before the rest of the operators arrived, while the timing of the snatch indicated extensive surveillance of the target to establish his pattern of life.
Team 6 operators almost pulled off an equally impressive tactical feat that morning in Somalia, when they came ashore before dawn and crept toward Ikrimah’s house. They had nearly succeeded in entering the building unnoticed when a guard emerged to smoke a cigarette, wandered back inside, and then returned with an assault rifle and began firing. There were enough SEALs to storm the house, but, after the squadron commander on the scene told the task force headquarters in Djibouti that doing so would likely result in the deaths of women and children, the SEALs decided to abort the mission. They withdrew to their boats on the beach and left.4
Delta’s low-visibility campaign in Libya continued, and on June 15, 2014, the unit again hit the headlines when it seized Islamist militia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala, a ringleader of the September 11, 2012, attack on Benghazi’s U.S. consulate. The raid had been a long time in the planning.
JSOC had had a presence in Libya—called Team Libya—since the Arab Spring uprising against Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Team Libya was part of Task Force 27, which was led by Delta and operated in the Middle East and North and West Africa.5 When Islamist militiamen overran the Benghazi consulate and attacked a nearby CIA outpost, killing Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, two Delta operators—one of whom was a Marine—were part of a seven-person team sent from Tripoli that night to mount a rescue mission for the State Department and CIA personnel who had taken refuge in the CIA facility about a mile from the burning consulate. Both operators received high awards for their role in getting the Americans to safety: the Distinguished Service Cross for the Army operator, Master Sergeant David R. Halbruner; and its Navy equivalent, the Navy Cross, for his Marine colleague (whose name was not publicized). “Throughout the operation, Master Sergeant Halbruner continually exposed himself to fire as he shepherded unarmed civilians to safety and treated the critically wounded,” reads the citation for Halbruner’s award. “His calm demeanor, professionalism and courage [were] an inspiration to all and contributed directly to the success of the mission.”6
Within hours of the attack, JSOC had determined the identities of the leaders, who were linked to the Ansar al-Sharia militia group. Delta dispatched a team to Libya to hunt them, and by Friday, September 14, three days after the attack, JSOC was briefing U.S. Special Operations Command that it was tracking the militia leaders responsible for the attack, had photographs of them (which were included in the briefing), and information that they had been calling an Islamist figure in jail in Iraq. “They knew who was in command and control of it, they knew it all,” said a SOCOM staffer. “I remember them specifically saying the guys on the ground were talking to a guy in prison in Iraq.”
From then on, JSOC kept a fix on the militia leaders, information that the command included as one of its handful of top priorities in its weekly Friday briefings to SOCOM. “They were giving the Friday update: ‘Hey, we’ve got a positive ID on X, we know his location is Y, last seen at so-and-so,’” the staffer said. But as to why JSOC didn’t launch a mission against Abu Khattala or his associates earlier, the staffer said: “I don’t think they ever got permission to.”7 That account was borne out by an October 29, 2013, CNN report that “U.S. special operations forces” were ready to grab Abu Khattala within a day or two of seizing Libi, but the White House never gave the okay, in part due to worries that another raid so soon after the Libi mission might destabilize Libya, leading to the downfall of the weak government in Tripoli, and in part to a desire to gather enough evidence to prosecute Abu Khattala in criminal court.
But the delays gave Delta the time to build a mock-up of Abu Khattala’s compound at Fort Bragg, allowing them to rehearse the snatch repeatedly. Meanwhile, JSOC kept Abu Khattala under close watch, establishing his daily routine. When the two dozen Delta operators—supported by a couple of FBI agents—struck, they did so with guile, tricking their way into Abu Khattala’s compound and seizing him without firing a shot. Delta quickly took him to the New York, a Navy ship waiting offshore, where he was interrogated before being brought to the United States to face trial.8
* * *
These sorts of missions placed a premium on exactly the capabilities that McChrystal initially sought to harness with the Joint Reconnaissance and Targeting Force: advance force operations, low-visibility urban reconnaissance, and undercover espionage missions. By 2014 JSOC had replaced the term “advance force operations” with “clandestine,” as the former implied the possibility of a follow-on force, which was not always politically acceptable. But the concept remained very much in vogue, so much so that the AFO-type squadrons in the special mission units (Black Squadron in Team 6, G Squadron in Delta) were now regarded as the most prestigious squadrons to command. No wonder that in 2014, there was talk of doing away with Team 6’s newest assault squadron, Silver, which had been established at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no rumors of anything but more growth for Black Squadron. Indeed, the story of Team 6’s advanced reconnaissance organization exemplifies the trend toward ever more low-visibility and covert capabilities in JSOC. The squadron didn’t even exist until the turn of the century, but by 2014 had become Team 6’s largest squadron, with between 150 and 200 personnel. “It was a baby team but now it’s a monster,” said a Team 6 officer. (During the same period Team 6 had grown from no more than 500 personnel to more than 1,500, of whom only about 300 were SEALs, with the rest consisting of roughly 800 other uniformed Navy personnel and about 400 civilians who together provided administration, intelligence, logistics, communications, and other support.)
As was the case for the assault squadrons, Black’s commanding officer was a SEAL commander (the equivalent Navy rank to a lieutenant colonel in the other services), and the squadron had a SEAL operator command master chief. But in 2014 the commander’s deputy was a retired Army Special Forces colonel with a great deal of experience in reconnaissance and advance force operations. The vast majority of the squadron’s personnel were not SEALs, but other Navy personnel and civilians, including experts in merchant shipping. While the squadron did not have its own fleet, it was capable of using civilian ships to mount operations, and could take advantage of what a JSOC staffer described as Team 6’s “natural connection” with the Maritime Branch of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. A small number of Black Squadron operators lived abroad under long-term cover.9 “Their skill sets have exploded over time,” said the JSOC staffer, who said the increasingly significant role Black Squadron had assumed as a clandestine organization “absolutely” represented a threat to Orange. Delta’s efforts to develop a signals intelligence capability compounded that threat, the staffer added. “If they’re developing that capability, what’s left for [Orange] to do?” he said. “You can’t say.” Both Black Squadron and its Delta equivalent, G Squadron, began doing substantial covered work around 2009.10 But Team 6’s maritime bent gave the unit certain advantages, argued a Team 6 source. “What maritime low-level or AFO capability gives you is dwell time,” he said. “You have a reason to go in there [to a target location] and stay there for days, weeks, or months. So if you have a maritime company, it comes in from the sea, then it offloads something that goes overland for miles and miles and you can turn a maritime shipping company into a logistics company that goes everywhere.”
“If you can conceive of doing it, we’re likely doing it,” said a Team 6 operator. “It’s the things you can’t conceive of that we’re also likely doing.”
* * *
The challenge of conducting low-visibility operations in countries in which the United States was not at war was on Joe Votel’s mind May 21, 2014, when the JSOC commander made a rare public appearance—and even rarer public remarks—at a special operations conference in Tampa. JSOC developed the “find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze” process in Iraq and Afghanistan, war zones in which the command enjoyed access to “large bases” and “solid infrastructure,” he noted. The organization’s challenge, he said, is “how do we take that great methodology we refined over the last twelve or thirteen years and apply it to areas outside of declared theaters of armed conflict” in which operators must minimize their “footprint.”
When it came to the “find” and “fix” parts of the equation, “a key piece for us” would be figuring out how to maintain the same “level of situational awareness” in austere, remote locations that JSOC enjoyed in mature, built-up combat theaters, Votel said. In Iraq and Afghanistan, JSOC relied heavily on ISR aircraft to build a detailed picture of enemy activity. But that advantage may not be available in other theaters, and JSOC would need technological workarounds, he said. “In some cases we will not be able to operate aerial platforms because the host nation will not allow us to do that,” he said. “So we’ve got to continue to look at long-range, high-fidelity tactical sensors that allow us to see and understand what is happening.”
Minimizing civilian casualties when it was time to strike was particularly important in countries that were not declared combat zones, according to Votel. “We have to continue to improve our ‘finish’ capability—whether it’s a lethal finish, or whether it’s a nonlethal finish, or whether it’s enabling someone else—to be as precise as we possibly can,” he said.
Votel also highlighted the continuing priority JSOC placed on counter-proliferation, particularly on preventing “the nightmare scenario” of Islamist terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. “We do see violent extremist organizations and others continue to exert a desire to acquire these types of weapons,” he said. “So our ability to detect and neutralize them effectively will be a key piece for our country,” he told the audience of defense contractors and special operations personnel. “We will only have very limited opportunities to get that right, when the situation is presented to us,” he said.
One country Votel highlighted as a place the United States had to be “very, very concerned” about weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands was Syria, where what began as a peaceful uprising against Bashar Assad as part of the Arab Spring movement in 2011 had evolved by 2014 into a multiparty civil war that pitted Assad’s military, reinforced by Quds Force and Hezbollah, against rebel forces that were divided between two Sunni Islamist factions and a more moderate group supported by the West. The JSOC commander went on to express his worry that terrorists could use Syria and other unstable countries as safe havens in which to train, but in the case of Syria he wanted to “avoid specific operational details.”11 While his reluctance to open up on the topic was to be expected, Votel had a particular reason to be circumspect: his force was at that moment rehearsing a life-or-death mission deep into rebel-held Syria.
* * *
In the early hours of July 3, 2014, two Black Hawks full of Delta operators crossed the border from Jordan into Syria, flying fast across the desert. Their destination was a compound outside the town of Raqqa, on the north bank of the Euphrates in north-central Syria. It was there, U.S. intelligence analysts believed, that a group calling itself the Islamic State—one of the two Islamist factions waging war in Syria—was holding several Western hostages, including at least two Americans: journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The intelligence came from several sources: FBI interviews with two European men that the Islamic State had held as hostages before releasing them, probably as a result of ransoms paid; satellite imagery of a building near Raqqa that matched the descriptions given by the Europeans; and information supplied by Israel.
This was not JSOC’s first raid into Syria. But unlike the October 2008 mission to kill Abu Ghadiya, which involved a few minutes’ flight across the Iraqi border, this operation involved penetrating 200 miles into Syrian airspace. For that reason, JSOC had chosen to use the latest version of the stealth Black Hawks that flew the bin Laden raid. That mission famously left one of the two such aircraft then in existence burned to a crisp in bin Laden’s backyard. But since May 2011 more of the airframes had been constructed, and the program had expanded so that the 160th now kept a unit of about forty personnel under a lieutenant colonel at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where the stealth helicopters were housed.
As the use of the specialized airframes suggested, JSOC had spared little expense to prepare for the operation. The task force had been training for weeks on a replica of the compound they were going to assault. There had been “eyes on the target” for at least a week prior to D-day, reporting what they saw in short, encrypted messages. When the helicopters neared the compound, they were filmed by at least one armed drone overhead.
The Black Hawks touched down and the operators swarmed off, as they had so many times over the previous thirteen years. Moving with their trademark efficiency they swept through the compound, killing about as many as a dozen militants in a firefight that ignited a blaze that would eventually consume the facility. (A helicopter pilot shot in the leg was the mission’s only U.S. casualty.) There was little doubt that they were at the location where the Europeans had been held—the internal layout matched the former hostages’ descriptions. But to the operators’ dismay, they found no sign of the hostages. The militants had moved them to a new location. After spending thirty to forty minutes on the ground, the operators reboarded the helicopters and flew away empty-handed. They were back in Jordan by dawn.12
* * *
The full cost of the failure to free the hostages in Raqqa would be revealed in horrific fashion in August and early September, when the Islamic State released videos two weeks apart depicting an English-accented militant beheading Foley and Sotloff. The media storm that erupted alerted much of the American public to a menace that had been building for several months, as the Islamic State metastasized from a force focused mostly on fighting the Syrian regime to one that overran much of Sunni Iraq in the first half of 2014. By August, the Islamic State controlled a swath of territory that encompassed eastern Syria and huge chunks of western and northern Iraq. The group, which changed names several times, was the organizational descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, but its growth can be traced back to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ascending to the leadership of the group in May 2010, and the withdrawal of U.S. forces—including JSOC—from Iraq by the end of the following year. Baghdadi proved himself a charismatic and effective leader who revitalized the organization and expanded its ambitions. In 2012 and 2013 the group emerged as the dominant resistance outfit in Syria, in the process breaking with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri because of the latter’s support for the al-Nusra Front over the Islamic State.
Then, in 2014, having established a secure rear area in eastern Syria, Baghdadi’s forces stormed back into Iraq, stunning many Western observers as they swept across the country, whose armed forces put up little effective resistance. On June 29, Baghdadi declared himself head of an Islamic caliphate, a clear challenge to Zawahiri for leadership of the global Islamist movement. For JSOC, it was a bitter experience. The list of Iraqi cities the Islamic State had taken by the end of the summer was a roll call of places where the JSOC task force had engaged in hard, vicious fights to dislodge Saddam Hussein’s forces and then to eviscerate Al Qaeda in Iraq: Haditha, where the Rangers withstood a fearsome artillery barrage to take a vital dam during the 2003 invasion; Tikrit, where Task Force Wolverine and Team Tank fought it out with the Fedayeen; Fallujah, where Don Hollenbaugh had earned his Distinguished Service Cross by holding off an insurgent assault single-handedly in April 2004; Rawa, where Doug Taylor’s Delta troop had impersonated farmhands to snare Ghassan Amin in April 2005; Al Qaim, where Delta operators Steven Langmack, Bob Horrigan, and Michael McNulty had died in the bloody spring of 2005; and Mosul, where the Rangers killed Abu Khalaf in a perfectly executed assault in 2008.
In response to the Islamic State’s expansion, which soon threatened Iraqi Kurdistan, the United States deployed a Delta-led task force to the region. Split between Irbil, where it was headquartered, and a town in southeastern Turkey, its missions included working with the Peshmerga and manning a targeting center that identified and tracked Islamic State fighters for JSOC’s fleet of Predator and Reaper drones to kill. On September 10, 2014, President Obama spoke to the nation about his administration’s plans to counter the Islamic State. He was at pains to emphasize that his strategy did not “involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil,” but he also compared the approach he intended to take to the campaigns waged in Yemen and Somalia, in which case there appeared to be plenty of work ahead for JSOC. (Much of this work would likely fall under authorities granted by Section 1208 of the defense budget, which provided money for U.S. special operations forces to support regular and irregular local forces that were facilitating U.S. counterterrorism missions. What that meant in practice was that by Obama’s second term, JSOC forces, including the premier direct action operators of Delta and Team 6, were increasingly likely to be found training and directing foreign forces, rather than conducting the direct action missions themselves. In addition to Delta’s work with the Peshmerga, other examples included Team 6’s work with indigenous security forces in Somalia’s breakaway Puntland region, African Union troops in Somalia proper, and Yemen’s counterterrorism force.)13
But the rise of the Islamic State also held lessons about the limits of JSOC’s utility. Through the efforts of countless operators and analysts, and the force of personality of leaders like McChrystal, Flynn, and McRaven, among others, in the years since September 11 JSOC had made itself the go-to force for the National Command Authority for a range of missions far broader than was ever envisioned when the command was established in 1980. But no matter how brilliant the plan, or how accurate the shooters, an elite raiding and intelligence force like JSOC can conduct tactical missions that achieve strategic effects, but it cannot hold ground. It will always rely on the combination of speed, surprise, and violence of action that was the original Delta mantra. In many ways McChrystal, Flynn, McRaven, and their subordinates had designed and built the perfect hammer for the National Command Authority. The risk was that as a result, successive administrations would continue to view too many national security problems as nails.
* * *
On July 29, 2014, JSOC underwent its fourth change of command since September 11, 2001, when Lieutenant General Tony Thomas succeeded Joe Votel, who in turn received his fourth star and replaced McRaven as head of U.S. Special Operations Command.14 (Votel’s new position continued the stranglehold that JSOC alumni had on the top position in U.S. special operations. No career Special Forces officer had ever held the job, despite the fact that there were more Special Forces soldiers than any other type of special operations personnel in the military, a fact that spoke volumes about how the Pentagon weighted the perceived, tangible benefits of direct action against the more patient approach of indirect action that Special Forces embodied.) Thomas’s thirty-three-year career appeared to have prepared him perfectly for command of JSOC: he had spent more than two thirds of it in the Rangers, Delta, or on the JSOC staff.15 (His five years at Delta meant Thomas was the first JSOC commander in eighteen years to have spent any portion of his career as an operator in the unit.)
A little over four weeks after Thomas took command, JSOC-controlled manned and unmanned aircraft took to the skies just south of Mogadishu. (The drones might have been Reapers flying from Arba Minch in southern Ethiopia, which JSOC began using in 2011.) Intelligence indicated that a truck in a three-vehicle convoy headed to a facility just south of Mogadishu on September 1 was carrying Ahmed Abdi Godane, the overall leader of al-Shabaab. It had been Godane who formally allied al-Shabaab with Al Qaeda and who had authorized the attack on the Westgate Mall. The aircraft fired a series of Hellfire missiles and other precision-guided munitions, destroying two of the vehicles, but it took several days to confirm the identities of those killed. Meanwhile, Somali and Western experts predicted the group would have difficulties replacing Godane, as he had ruthlessly eliminated any obvious successors and done away with the council that had appointed him. On September 5, the Pentagon announced that Godane had died in the attack.16
The hammer had hit the nail. Tony Thomas was off to a good start.