The Special Ops Era, 10 Years Later: How Mavericks Reinvented the Military

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Roberto Schmidt / AFP / Getty Images

U.S. Army Infantry Rangers detain two Iraqi men inside a government building in Baquba, Iraq, in April 2003

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The May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, which followed McRaven's promotion by three weeks, was the crowning achievement of JSOC to date. But the high-profile mission has brought more fame and attention to these units than they ever wanted. Despite the huge dividends that JSOC's methods have paid over the past few years, the risks are huge as well. The persistence of nighttime raids has strained relations with the Afghan government, which says that the raids often kill innocent civilians and that the U.S. is not held accountable for its mistakes. As McChrystal told Washington Post reporters, "Sometimes our actions were counterproductive. We would say, 'We need to go in and kill this guy,' but just the effects of our kinetic action did something negative and [regular Army forces] were left to clean up the mess." Yet the proven success of what JSOC calls its "unblinking eye" and willingness to hunt terrorists wherever they are will be a cornerstone of American security policy for the foreseeable future. As virtually the entire U.S. military is facing budget cuts, and several sacred cows are being examined, no one is talking about touching JSOC's $1 billion budget or the ranks of 4,000 service members and civilians now under its command. McChrystal and McRaven owe their rise to one, perhaps surprising, person and his vision for the future of U.S. military forces: Donald Rumsfeld. When he arrived at the Pentagon in early 2001 as President Bush's Defense Secretary, a number of prominent generals and civilian policy thinkers were already agitating for change. The U.S. military was, they charged, too big, too slow, and too focused on preparing for a World War III in which massive infantry and armor battles would rage across entire continents. This mindset persisted even though the Soviet Union had disintegrated nearly a decade earlier and China was still decades away from being able to muster that kind of strength. The military, reformers contended, was woefully ill-equipped to fight the small, tenacious terrorist groups who wore no uniforms and held no territory.

Rumsfeld, who had long subscribed to this belief, now had the power to launch some of the most sweeping changes the U.S. military had ever seen. He pushed Pentagon brass to make the U.S. military lighter, smaller, more agile, and more technologically sophisticated. He completed an initiative begun in the 2000s to make the U.S. Army's primary deployment unit not the division (comprising anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 troops) but the brigade (typically 3,000 to 4,000). This type of modular, quick-pivot organization would make it easier to send troops anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, with less logistical and material support.

In Rumsfeld's grand plan, special ops held a particularly privileged position. Despite their being lionized in movies and pop culture, special ops had never held a lofty position in the Pentagon's pecking order. Mainstream generals may have tolerated them, but their unconventional ways were unnerving to most top commanders, and few bothered to really understand the commandos they called "snake eaters," let alone figure out how best to use them. They operated by night, they worked alone, and they acted like renegades, which is inimical to some of the bedrock virtues that most military men hold dear.

To Rumsfeld, special ops exuded the very qualities with which he wanted to infuse the entire military. After 9/11, his views on this point only hardened. In a world where terrorists lurk in the cave warrens of Afghanistan and the crowded streets of Sanaa, Yemen, Rumsfeld believed, handfuls of fast-moving men could seek and destroy pinpointed targets more effectively than could thousands of conventional troops. In late 2001, as the Bush administration prepared for a counterattack against al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that gave it safe harbor in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld got to take his theories out for a test drive. There, a small contingent of several hundred U.S. special ops troops and CIA operatives allied with local tribal militias relied on healthy doses of cash and precision air strikes to dislodge the Taliban from power in just a few months. It was initially a dramatic success, but the number of U.S. troops deployed to control the country reached 100,000 in 2011.

Order a copy of Special Ops at time.com/specialops.
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