We are faced with some tough choices ahead and, as any executive with vision in a large established company can tell you, pushing for any lasting major deviation from “the way we always do it” can be tougher than the actual tasks. This is just as true – perhaps more true – of vertically configured military organizations.
This goes well beyond the classic inter-service rivalries that we are familiar with. Army vs. Navy vs. Air Force is more a battle for position of pride and the funding that comes with it, of course, especially in relatively peaceful times. It is rather a more fundamental difference in the operational mindset and therefore the range of acceptable approaches to a given set of military situations.
Since its inception during World War II, our unconventional warfare capacity has been considered by the conventionally thinking, well-established mainline leaders of all of the services with contempt and a lack of appreciation for the specialized tool it is. First seen as a bastard stepchild, under pressure from President Kennedy it was grudgingly allowed to join the recognized ranks of Army units. Shortly thereafter, all the services wanted one of these bright new shiny toys for their very own. But throughout, the appropriate use of this tool was misunderstood or ignored as it operates in a fundamentally different way from what was already understood as useful.
The tales of misuse are legion within all of the service’s special operations communities, but the bottom line is that we have invested a substantial amount of capital and too often discarded the potentially important gains it could have brought us. But as with any operational tool, it has its inherent limitations and its optimal applications.
This bias is not a new one within military communities across the world, and many examples, embedded within bloody failures, can be seen throughout history. Take for example the misuse of the newly developed, and then unconventional, airborne units in the Second World War’s Operation Market Garden. aimed at attacking Germany through the lowlands of the Netherlands and Belgium.
The British under Montgomery gave their lightly armed airborne force the most distant and arguably the critical objective of the operation, but did not see it as necessary to drop them close enough to achieve tactical surprise – critical for them to succeed – then did not reinforce them with troops and the anti-tank weapons required, while the armored relief column stopped for rest and a spot of tea. And so it was that the invasion of Germany had to wait, tens of thousands more were maimed or killed and Stalin achieved his solid political domination of Eastern Europe.
While there surely were other shortcomings in the assumptions underpinning that plan and its execution, misunderstanding the capacity of the unconventional airborne forces was a fatal mistake of historical consequence that took another half century of bloody external and internal strife to correct.
In the failed attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran, the misunderstanding of the application of unconventional operational capabilities, inter-service rivalry and, by then, habitual micro-management reached its zenith, again serving up grim, long-term consequences.
In the first Gulf War, conventional thinking once again assigned unconventional units to tasks less than consistent with their capacities, although without their aid, Gen. Schwarzkopf’s “Hail Mary” stratagem of sweeping armored encirclement would have failed, bogged down in the seemingly impassable desert sands. For it was our special operations units that found the way through so his tanks could roll in unexpectedly and end that war in such a spectacular fashion. That we ignorantly fumbled the military-political follow-up is why we are back at it again. “Insufficiently ruthless” is a descriptive term that seems to apply perfectly.
In Iraq, today, we have a very limited array of choices from a conventional military perspective with a problematic political aftermath due to the adept strategizing of Saddam. But these conventional tactics are not the only tool we can employ to neutralize most of the inherent advantages.
At a stroke, we can change the conflict from one of foreign invasion to one of aiding a popular rebellion. Using images the Iraqi people themselves obtain can make the paradigm of a successful Middle Eastern revolution, driven by its citizens, a concrete reality – something every tyrant in that region and across the globe fears even more than us. In short, this can change the map of the world.
The costs in terms of money are minimal. The costs in terms of establishing a free nation with citizens who have earned the pride of accomplishment are acceptable. The predictable and potential political benefits are myriad and far reaching. We have built an understanding of how to use our unconventional assets, what we lack is the will to employ them effectively for now is a time, that in historical terms, seldom presents itself.
Institutional conceptual bias and willful ignorance has already been, and will continue to be, extremely expensive. We need to make well-considered choices that will contribute to our enduring vision and abandon prejudice with respect to the applicability of the fullest range of all the expensive tools we have long strived to build.
De Oppresso Liber! (To free the oppressed)
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Tom Marzullo is a former Special Forces soldier and a veteran of submarine special operations. He resides in Colorado.
