The Command

Chapter 7

When You See the Word National, You Know It Is Important

The Command has no published organizational chart—at least, not one that we’ve seen. So here’s a good guess at what it might look like. Like any other military unit, it is divided into staffs. Because it is “joint,” staff designations have a “J” prefix. J-1 is the manpower branch, which recruits, hires, and trains the next generation of JSOC warriors and analysts; J-2 is responsible for intelligence and information operations; J-3 is operations, the central hub of activity; J-4 is logistics and transportation; J-5 is strategic plans and policy; J-6 handles signals and communication; J-7 is JSOC’s training and exercise directorate; J-8 deals with acquisitions and budgeting. The Office of the Commander is a three-star general billet based at Pope Army Airfield, adjacent to Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, an army Ranger, is the current commander of JSOC. Beneath him are two assistant commanding generals (ACGs) and two deputy commanding generals (DCGs). The ACGs are responsible for operations and intelligence; the DCGs are dual-hatted as commanders of the numbered Joint Task Forces that operate around the world. The Defense Cover Program protects the identities of the DCGs and the ACGs, although we found open-source references to three of the four. (One is Brigadier General Marshall Webb, whose impassive face was made famous by Pete Souza’s photograph of the White House Situation Room during Neptune’s Spear.) One ACG provides line command to JSOC’s three operating divisions, each of which is managed by a civilian director. One division includes the National Missions Force, a title that was suggested by a Pentagon consultant to give people an unclassified way to refer to the elite special missions units not assigned to geographic areas of operations. (If there is an echo of the fictional Impossible Missions Force, it’s not quite accidental.)

Another division is responsible for Force Mobility—how JSOC moves its personnel from A to B. The third operational division tends to the logistics and the back end of the Command’s combatant-command deployments.

The Tier One forces, as previously noted, consist of the Combat Applications Group (CAG), more widely known as the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU), or SEAL Team Six.

Each special missions unit (SMU) has a commander and a deputy commander; two captains for the SEALs and two colonels for Delta. There are now four operational CAG squadrons (A, B, C, and D), four operational DEVGRU squadrons (Blue, Red, Gold, and Silver), and one training squadron per SMU. The squadrons break down into troops and detachments. Each is supported internally by explosive ordnance disposal specialists, intelligence analysts, communications and logistics noncommissioned officers, and other personnel who are not considered to be “operators” (or, more specifically, graduates of the Operators Training Course—what popular culture would consider the “shooters”) but are vital to the mission. There is an unacknowledged CAG squadron and a secret DEVGRU squadron (known as DEVGRU Black), each of which performs exceptionally sensitive reconnaissance missions, such as cross-border, high-value target hunts in Pakistan. These units are smaller than the other squadrons. As of 2011, JSOC has about 4,000 personnel; we don’t know for sure, but we think that about 300 are members of DEVGRU and 450 are Delta operators. The average operator has more than seven years’ worth of experience in his unit, a number diminishing as elite soldiers on near-constant deployments retire in greater numbers.

The 75th Ranger Regiment, headquartered at Ft. Benning, Georgia, belongs to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command but details infantrymen to JSOC on a regular basis. (Both General Votel and General Stanley McChrystal commanded the 75th at some point in their respective careers.) The same goes for the Nightstalkers of 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), or SOAR, based out of Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. For discrete missions, the U.S. Air Force 427th Special Operations Squadron provides Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) assets, as well as nontraditional aircraft. For JSOC, a nontraditional aircraft would be a passenger jet, which, to civilians, is quite traditional. Although it officially belongs to the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command, the 427th also operates special worldwide crisis response aircraft for the State Department and the CIA.

Other SMUs reporting to the ACG for operations include:

The Joint Communications Unit, a worldwide, all-weather, transportable communications brigade supporting JSOC operations globally. It often incorporates elements of the Air Force 25th Intelligence Squadron, which conducts offensive cyber attacks and exploitation. The 25th is divided into five squadrons, one of which is stationed in Afghanistan and another in Iraq.
The 24th Special Tactics Squadron of the U.S. Air Force is a Tier Two SMU. Based at Pope, it provides combat air controllers (essentially, air traffic controllers with commando training) and pararescue airmen (for quick reaction rescue missions) for CAG and DEVGRU operations.
The Aviation Tactics and Evaluation Group (AVTEG) consists of three battalions that supply all types of aircraft and highly trained pilots for sensitive JSOC missions. Along with SOAR, it moves JSOC forces around the world. AVTEG is a clandestine air force of sorts within JSOC, and its pilots and analysts determine what JSOC and its units might need and, from a strategic level, figure out how to get it to them. (AVTEG pilots tested the stealth helicopters later used in the bin Laden raid, for example.) AVTEG, as well as SOAR, also flies highly sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft.
The Technical Applications Program Office (TAPO), based in Ft. Eustis, Virginia, incorporates the modern-day equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) SEASPRAY unit, which helped the agency obtain, exploit, and spoof foreign aircraft and technology. TAPO itself is unclassified, but most of its work is budgeted in secret. (In military J-8 speak, TAPO has “streamlined acquisition procedures to rapidly procure and integrate non-developmental item equipment and systems for Army Special Operations Aviation.”) Quite often, its platforms work so well that they become standardized for entire branches of the military.1 TAPO is one of several program offices that primarily support JSOC operations. Another is the Ground Applications Program Office, based out of Ft. Belvoir, which manages the most sensitive acquisition and development projects in the Command. (There is a subordinate contracting office to each—the Ground Applications Contracting Office for the Ground Applications Program Office, and Technical Applications Contracting Office for TAPO.) They report directly to the Office of the Commander and support the technology that JSOC uses in the field, which includes aviation platforms such as “Liberty Blue,” an advanced signals collection package bolted onto jet aircraft; “Chainshot,” a specialized navy EP-3 Orion intelligence, surveillance, and collection plane; the Command’s numerous tracking, tagging, and location programs; and other projects that would fill a library of Tom Clancy novels.
GAPO supports both fixed and temporary JSOC bases around the world. (One is located in a major European airport.) JSOC’s office of congressional affairs also reports directly to the Office of the Commander. Recruitment is handled by the SMUs themselves, as well as by an administrative directorate reporting directly to the assistant commanding general for operations.

Another flying unit at Pope, the 66th Air Operations Squadron, provides cargo and transport planes, such as C-130s for JSOC operations. An air force memorandum from 2000 suggests that AVTEG and the 66th are uniquely permitted to conduct bare base ops and training with forward air refueling, eschewing much of the normal bureaucratic process before doing so. Although much has changed in the decade since, it certainly suggests a legacy of secret operations.2 (Otherwise reasonable military regulations are often an obstacle to JSOC’s unique mission. As a job posting for AVTEG’s top intelligence coordinator states: “Guidelines such as Executive Orders and DOD, DIA, DCI, USSOCOM, and military service directives exist, but judgment and ingenuity in interpreting the intent of these guides is required. Incumbent must be fully knowledgeable of highly specialized SOF doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. May be required to make major or novel adaptations to existing guides in order to accomplish the organizational mission.”)

The deputy commanding general for the Intelligence and Operational Security Directorate (ISOD) oversees JSOC’s expanding intelligence empire. In late 2008, Admiral William McRaven stood up the JSOC Intelligence Brigade, a six-hundred-person intelligence analysis detachment that serves the entire command. It analyzes all source intelligence from satellites, drones, CIA cables, State Department cables, the National Security Agency, and foreign intelligence services and produces analytical products to support JSOC commanders and field soldiers. It has divisions for interrogations, planning, and intelligence support.

There is a separate information operations division within the IOSD, that plans and executes JSOC’s Military Information Support Operations (MISO, formerly known as psychological operations, or PSYOP). The same office includes a liaison element with the Defense Program Activity Office, which conducts offensive information operations campaigns against terrorists and other sensitive targets. There are five fixed global JSOC command posts—now called Joint Reconnaissance Task Forces—that perform command and control functions for ongoing operations. And then there is the classified Joint Interagency Task Force–National Capital Region, which fuses and disseminates intelligence relating to the external evolution of terrorist networks.

A number of secretive and advanced units have been op-conned (or, assigned) to JSOC since 2003. How they directly interact with the command is unclear, but they spend most of their time helping JSOC with its special missions. These units report directly to the Office of the Commander and his chief of staff. They include a unit known by the abbreviation BI, consisting solely of highly trained female intelligence collectors and interrogators operating undercover; the Army Compartmented Element, a semisecret U.S. Army unit; the new Naval Cyber Warfare Development Group, which works with the 25th Intelligence Squadron on cyber attacks; and the National Assessment Group (NAG), which evaluates technology and aircraft for SOCOM and JSOC use. An unclassified Department of Defense budget document credits the NAG with “providing low cost, responsive, evaluations of National Level programs belonging to Department of Defense.” (A bit of bureaucratese translation here: any time you see a reference to a “national” program, you’re dealing with one of three subjects: continuity of government, nuclear weapons, or JSOC.)

The Special Operations Program Activity, run by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, has provided Technical Exploitation Units for assault team use. A large aircraft acquisition program known as the Technical Development Activity has been absorbed by the Command’s Center for Force Mobility.

JSOC’s plans and policy department (J-5) includes a fifty-person Strategic and Operational Plans Division, which is further subdivided into a strategic plans branch, a futures and concepts branch, an operational plans branch, and a special plans division (which formulates JSOC’s nuclear, biological, and chemical response procedures, along with its Hard and Deeply Buried Target breach planning team, which figures out how to penetrate underground nuclear bunkers). This division also runs a secret JSOC WMD (weapons of mass destruction) chemical lab and proving ground. It has a branch at the National Security Test Site in Nevada—Area 51. (That famous site has long been a testing site for cutting-edge technology, including flying vehicles, but none are otherworldly).

More operational planning for JSOC takes place at SOCOM headquarters in Tampa under the J-5 directorate of its Center for Special Operations, which develops plans for JSOC theater campaigns and coordinates JSOC activities with the rest of the military and intelligence community.

Notes

1. U.S. Army Technical Applications Program Office, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/casestudies/tapo/.

2. See Air Force Instruction 11-235, http://www.af.mil/shared/media/epubs/AFI11-235.pdf.