Please silence your mobile devices. We will post todays program on the homepage for everyones future reference. Leading our discussion is daniel, policy analyst they focuses on transatlantic Security Issues he provides expert analysis and radio and television appearances. Prior to joining us at heritage and the Thatcher Center he worked at a nonprofit washington, d. C. As a policy analyst and on the Advisory Board company has associate and associate director. [applause] thank you everybody. Were honored today to be joined by mark moyar whose book was describe a National Review as a valuable and highly readable overview of special operations history. For anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces. Marcus director here at washington d. C. He served as professor at the marine corps university. His advise the Senior Leadership of several military commands as well. He holds a ba from harvard and a phd from cambridge. His or another works including aid for elites, building partner nations and i believe i read that in grad school. Strategic failure how drone warfare has imperiled america. Try out for sagan, in phoenix and the birth of prey. With that, i look for discussion. [applause] thank you for the kind introduction. Thank you john for inviting me here. I went to talk about the book, cannot cover the whole thing in the presentation get to the highlights and will get time for question and answer at the end. The reason i wrote the book is that was started a course on the history of special operations. We discover there is not a single volume we can look to to give you history from world war ii all the way up to the present. Most within understand is there certain bits and pieces but nothing to pull it all together. Special operations have become a huge part of overseas engagement. Theres not enough understanding among the policy world about what they do. Let us start with some intro. Not many people understand what the different parts are. If special Operations Command, thats the Umbrella Organization located in tampa. Below are the Component Commands then all the services have them then thats comprised of operators to multiple services. Well get to how thats important. There is confusion about what special operations themselves are. Special forces are part of the army, special Operations Forces is the umbrella term for everything. Special Operation Forces are not the same as special forces. Well talk about world war ii because that provides the impetus for special forces. It also paves the way for other special operations get going first on the u. K. Side with churchill. The british are faced with a war against germany. The churchill does not want to fight another world war i style or. He tries to come up with ways to get around it. He tries to get the russians to do fighting then wanted to read germany on the periphery with the new Organization Called the commandos. This is a way to do something without getting involved in a flood fest. Once the u. S. Comes in the Roosevelt Administration decides it wants to get more involved with the u. K. One of the first opportunities is an organization set up under derby. One of the First Missions they go on is the raid on the french coast which turns out to be a disaster. As a result the allies move away from rating on the coast. Theyre not doing much to hurt the powers. By the time theyre getting up to speed theyre going to take part on the big campaigns. In italy they take part in the major landings. Initially some training comes in handy. Once they get a sure thing of conventional infantry. When they get verifiable time to move in my maidservant a battle on january 30 of 1944. Two of the range of battalions are said to take the time. They run into a German Division which wipes them out. Only six of the troops escape from the disaster. This shows clearly the rangers are not capable of fighting this conventional war based on equipment. On the marine corps side we have the formation of the marine corps raiders in january of 1942. Roosevelt is directly involved. He forms these based on the advice of his son. Carlson is shown in another picture and is his view of commandos and gorillas running around. When the hero of the say say we should not do this in the president take the advice of his son the rangers have some initial successes. When the war becomes conventional they have setbacks though it ultimately to phasing out the units. On the navy side there created for amphibious landings. These units would go and i were generally considered successful in doing so. Then we have the oss, the head of is trying to find places to put forces. Many commanders dont want them there. But he does find partners probably because theres not a lot of forces there. They didnt want the enemy to know that the only had one unit. So they partner with forces after some trial and error any of their initial attempts to go well. The highly effective force. In europe the oss forces units in the german area. Locally they have success. We tend to overestimate their effectiveness on a strategic scale. Theres only 222 that go in which is much smaller theyre both smaller than the british we need to figure out what causes trouble is not high on the list of the campaign done to mislead the germans which was most important in terms of slowing the german response. Whether some impact we over impact the strategic impact. But theres reverence to that. Tend world war ii must all of these forces are disbanded. Thats because theyre perceived as being effective. Theres a chapter on korea which im not going to cover. But interesting stuff happens there too. Kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. He is a romanticized view of what they can accomplish. When he comes in theres 2000 and he orders an increase of 10500. One of the problems you have is if you start to build up the elite units rapidly you cant be so elite. In order to reach the expansion theyre only feeling out 30 of people. So theres a degradation of quality. On the navy side kennedy pushes for the creation of the ceos as we do in terms of vietnam its a mix record of success and failure. Some of the programs work out well. None are decisive because it does become a conventional war. The program working with local forces is the largest theyve ever done and effective in mobilizing tribes against the enemy. In the 70s theres a surgeon hijacking and terrorism. That creates consternation as the militaries, not vietnam it seems there could be a role for special operations to play. The first big event happens the rangers are pop brought back to life. Then they are not elite enough and we have delta force. Thats an army unit in a 1980 we have Seal Team Six which is the navys attempt to produce an equivalent to delta force. Initially these are focused on hostage rescue. The First Mission in 1980 delta force is sent to rescue iran hostages. They send to helicopters but because of mechanical problems they dont get enough helicopters there to complete the mission. When they try to move theres a crash between a helicopter and an aircraft. A fire, eight americans are caught in the fire and not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave. It leads to some reforms that are of great value. One problem identified is that you had an ad hoc command structure thrown together late in the day and not sufficiently coordinated. This will lead to joint Operations Command. Theres a problem with aircraft the failure is pivotal and they brought together pilots and aircraft that were not familiar. So they create the Night Stalkers to give them a dedicated air capability. The next two years theres further efforts which culminates in the special Operations Command. Thats the result of special operations advocate their supporters in congress should for legislation. So they get a four star headquarters in tampa. The second thing is assistant secretary of defense for operations low intensity conflict. This gives special operations a presence in the pentagon were other things go on and its useful to have a player at that level. Third thing they can is a Major Force Program 11 which is a special funding line. And then they get a set of Nine Missions said to be special operations. This keeps career to have what they need and have great things going for them. Its not quite as rosy as one might hope. The guy on the right is not clark griswold. Sexually senator nunn. We get together 1990. General schwarzkopf is on the left. Is a regional combat command. Then general steiner who is the commander so cant. He did not give him Actual Authority over the forces. That still resides with the commander. So theyre making the case that these are valuable. He pleads with him to give his forces the opportunity to take part. Schwarzkopf is not known for liking special Operation Forces does not give them many important missions. So the guys feel stuck on the bench with support units and not been able to do the cool stuff they were hoping to do. The next event is 9 11. Important for all americans but no more important than americas special Operation Forces. Shortly after the attack president bush is trying to figure out how to get back at the taliban. He sends in the cia and Army Special Forces to work with the northern alliance. Theres some special forces who go on horseback. The americans are not prepared for afghanistan. The special operators are fluent in arabic and french because they thought theyre going to be doing middle east missions. But they have a skill, the ability to guide precision emissions. They quickly overcome the taliban resistance. They were the chase al qaeda out. This is seen as the most strategically Important Role of special Operation Forces have played. Not long after we had another machine to take down in iraq. Initially some talk that will use something similar to afghanistan. They figure theres not a big resistance movement. It comes mainly from the southeast from kuwait. But it does play a role in diversionary operations. In the west they set up a tank unit to make it look like theres more tanks coming. Then they force them to move more the forces away from as we know, the difficult part is not taken the regime down, but figuring out what happened afterwards. There is chaos in a rising insurgency field by saddam husseins party. Special operations are coming to do man hunting and find saddam and his son. They eventually track them down. Here saddam after his capture. Initially there sated this strike is going to put a lid on the uncertainty that it will fall apart now that saddam is gone. Others are ready and willing to take the charge. Then we find ourselves in a prolonged insurgency campaign. The we have a general coming in and test for 714 is one that he sets up in iraq at the time, is not particularly active. They thought elite forces should not be doing daily operations. They decide we cannot do that in the cruel ways to ramp up the operation and does so effectively. There are only ten operations a month when he comes in 2004. Goes up to 302,006. This is made possible through advances in technology. A lot of people think at this scale we can in fact destroy the insurgency. On the white soft side white socket is those that are not part of j sock. Special forces and navy seals. They also decide to do this ra raid, go out and haul down bad guys in the middle of the night. Its a move away from their more traditional role of working with local populations. It will come under fire in the community for taking them away from it. So we think of as Counter Insurgency is mainly done by conventional forces. Over time theres better collaboration between special operations and other forces. Initially there are running around doing things by themselves thinking it would when the war than the commander said to go in and clean up the mess. Over time they learn to work together. And what they day could be mutually reinforcing. You had a division of labor was special operators would go in and do the killing of the leadership targets while conventional targets to do more population security. Its true that combination that you suppress. There we move our military center of gravity to afghanistan. Special operations continuing to do the targeted missions but they also decide its time to do more traditional working with missions. They come up with Village Stability Operations were the soft units live in villages and work with local police were locally recruited policeman intended to secure their villages and keep the taliban now. I ran a separate study on this. It is relatively effective it depended a lot on the local afghans. Never on a scale big enough to tilt the scale. It was not done in enough villages. Then bin laden gets killed by navy seals. Seems to be gratifying for americans to get rid of him. Turns out it didnt quite work as strategically as we had hoped. There is a backlash in pakistan for violations of the airspace which results in special operators getting kicked out in areas where there is insurgents. They shut down our drone base. Al qaeda continues on. Bin laden had produced enough the tenets that the organization can survive. It promotes for a time the administration to count the positive aspects that we can win strategically with these raids. This lead to the light footprint strategy. We pull out conventional forces in both cases the results were catastrophic. We saw the rise of isis and loss of territory we help taken libya and yemen are emphasis on Surgical Strike results in the with you taking over wiping out our intelligence apparatus. Last used slide stone of cool pictures. Four of the policy conclusions. I put them at the end so youre awake for the rest of the presentation. Theres some of the takeaways from the book. We have a new administration that does not have a good understanding of this. The first of the four main issues the book covers is the question of president ial leadership. The first when they make is that president s oftentimes are very interested but dont know very much. When they dont know much they oftentimes expect the wrong thing. Other president s have come without that interest. In our world the situations where this may be the only option. Theyre fine suddenly hear something that may be able to help them. President s can lose interest quickly especially if they have Unrealistic Expectations and then they find things did not work out as planned. Somalia was one of one. The other point is the opportunity to do things, you can hide what youre doing more easily. So Lyndon Johnson of vietnam use them to hit the enemy quietly. It was Election Year and he did not want vietnam to attract too much attention. Its something we need to be careful of. Second the roles and missions of special Operation Forces in the burka traces how the land of doing things they were not prepared for. They still need to show that there relevant to the policymakers. Baby to keep reinventing themselves. When we get to worse theres new things that need to be done. Counterinsurgency is a more controversial area in terms of what they can and should be doing. People say its a thing of the past but we find as a nation oftentimes fighting wars we didnt plan on. A lot of the counterinsurgency capabilities see what to be used in supporting insurgencies which is something were doing now. And then the question of Capacity Building is something they will continue to do. The third theme is effectiveness. Controversy about how effective especially when it gets to the strategic level its easy to tell whether you can capture target but when he gets a strategy theres more leeway from subjective interpretation. One point i would make is the local actors play a huge role. We sometimes think americans are the ones that will decide things but its dependent on local people. If you dont have strong allies to begin with you will get far. You also need to think about what are the costs to your conventional when you move resources and that their porn is strategic impact will be limited by scale. You cannot produce enough special operation to have this impact on their own. We keep saying and theres a tendency to think special operation can be strategically effective. Think that we usually try to reach too far. Then the relationship between the forces and conventional forces. Part of this is human nature, when you have one organization touted as being special and it goes around pulling people up from various places you will create resentment. Its not just a matter of jealousy. Theres a valid argument that if you pull these forces out and pull your talents out of one part of the organization the rest of the organization will suffer. You will not have the leaders you might need. So that is something worth bearing in mind when i think about the way forward. Conventional forces may not be in high demand now. But theres a chance we may need them for something. We need to take a longterm approach. This continues to be the time to expand. Were now at 70000. We need to be careful. We have diluted our talent pools it is not a wise idea to move it further. Soft and conventional forces are most effective when they work in tandem together. This depends on leadership on both sides. This one of the points i hope to get across in the book. Thank you for your attention. Thank you so much for that thorough discussion. It will take q a now. State your name and institutional affiliations. Unless the first question. You talked about president clinton getting disenchanted with special operations after somalia. A region that is becoming hotter currently, was the role of special operations in the balkans . In the late 90s . They are called upon to work with communities in the balkans tried to maintain the peace. And some of the targeted rates but there is not much kill