Transcripts For CSPAN2 Oppose Any Foe 20170604 : vimarsana.c

For those in house we would ask that courtesy that our mobile devices would have been silence or turned off. For those watching online or in the future, youre welcome to send questions or comments simply emailing speaker at heritage. Org and of course we will post todays program on the heritage front page for everyones future reference as well. Meeting our discussion today is daniel and he is our policy analyst in European Affairs and Margaret Thatcher for freedom and it focuses on transatlantic security issues, his writings have been featured in real clear world, foxnews. Com, breitbart. Com and his provided expert analysis in over 100 radio and television appearances. Is also served as a panelist at the transatlantic thing take conference in brussels, belgian and provide a parliamentary evidence United Kingdom house of the Lord Select Committee on the arctic. Prior to joining us on heritage at the Thatcher Center he worked at a nonprofit in washington dc as a policy analyst as well as on the Advisory Board company as a Research Associate and associate director. Please join me in welcoming daniel carmack. Thank you john and thank you this morning. Is available wednesday in washington were honored today to be joined by mark moyar was book oppose any foe the rise of americas special Operations Forces was described by National Review as an invaluable and highly readable overview of special Operations Forces history, not just those who are newly joining its ranks but also for anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces. Our author mark moyar is director of the center for military and diplomatic history here in washington dc and he has served as professor at the Us Marine Corps university and a senior fellow at the joint special Operations University. He has advised the Senior Leadership of several us military commands as well. He holds a ba, summa complot from harvard and a phd from cambridge. In addition to the book that we are talking about today he also wrote a number of other words including building partner nations and ending poverty through Human Capital that i read in grad school, strategic failure how president obama is a drone warfare defense cuts and military amateurism have imperiled america, a question of command counterinsurgency from the civil war to a rack, triumph forsaken the vietnam war, 1965 and phoenix and the birds of prey. With that said, i look forward to your discussion and ill turn it over to you doctor randy carmack. Thanks for that kind introduction. And thanks for inviting me here. Its great to be back at the heritage foundation. I will talk about the book a little bit, i cant cover the whole thing in this presentation but i will hit on some of the highlights and will have some time for questions and answers at the end. Just to provide a little bit of backer, the reason i wrote this book was at the joint special Operations University we started a course on the history of special operations and discovered that there was not a single volume that we could really look to to give the history of the origins of world war ii all the way up to the present. Most of what, i think, special Operations Forces understand about their history is episodic and certain bits of pieces. There hadnt been something to pull it all together. As i was writing this, special operations has become a huge part of our overseas engagement and there is not enough understanding among the policy world about what actually they do. I will start off by with a little bit of intro even in the policy world there is not too many people who understand what the different parts of special Operations Forces are. I want to talk about that for a minute. At the top there you have special Operations Command, us so, and that is the Umbrella Organization for special Operations Forces located in tampa, florida. Ill talk about how that came into existence. Below it are the Component Commands within the special operations world and all of the services have them youll see up there. Theres second from the right there, judge special Operations Command which is comprised of operators from multiple services and will get into how that is important into being. There is a lot of confusion about what special Operations Forces themselves are and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they sound like special forces. Special forces are part of the army so they fall into that bucket on the left. Special Operations Forces is the umbrella term for everything so, if you can remember one thing from this talk, remember special Operations Forces are not the same thing as special forces. So, lets start off talking about world war ii because world war ii provides the impetus for First Special Operations Forces and it also paves the way for future forces. Most of what we see today can trace its roots back to some degree to world war ii. Special operations get going first on the uk side with winston churchill. After the fall of france, the british are faced with another war against germany and churchill, like a lot of rates, does not want to fight another world war one style war where full generation of young men are decimated. He tries to come up with ways to come around that. One thing he does try to get the russians due to a lot of fighting and that worked out pretty well. Then he has a strategy of rating harmony on the periphery with this new Organization Called the commandos. Theyre lightly equipped, part of that is because they left most of their equipment back at dunkirk when they took off and this is a way to be doing something without getting involved in this huge vest on the continent. Once the us comes in, the Roosevelt Administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the uk and one of the first opportunities that comes along is to work with these commandos in an Organization Called the armor rangers is set up under William Orlando darby and they work with the commanders, work with the commandos and one of the First Missions the rangers go on is the rate at the app on the french coast which turns out to be a complete disaster, the germans wiped out most of the Landing Force and as a result of this disaster, the allies move away from this idea of rating on the coast because a it is not working and be you are not doing much to hurt the axis powers by doing this. By the time the rangers are getting up to speed their taking part in the big campaign of the war. First, in north africa and subsequently italy and france. To give you a little bit from italy, they take part in a major landing at sicily and salerno in anzio. Initially, some of their special training comes with amphibious landings but once i get a sure they end up fighting primarily as conventional infantry, not a lot of opportunity to sneak around, the germans as there had been with some of the less capable italian and French Forces they dealt with in north africa. When they get to anzio, an early attempt to move in land, leads to the battle of. [inaudible] on january 30th 1944 were two of the ranger battalions are sent to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a German Division which completely wiped them out. Out of 767 troops only six escape from the disaster. So, this shows pretty clearly that the rangers are not capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment and we will see them mostly get phase out over time. The marine corps side we have the formation of the marine corps raiders in january of 1942. Here, president roosevelt is directly involved in two forms these raiders based on the advice of his son, james, was a junior marine officer who is enamored of this guy Evans Carlson who is shown the other picture and he has these romanticized view of commanders and gorillas running around causing problems for the japanese. The marine corps commandant, when he hears of this crazy idea and says, theres no way we should do this the president take the advice of his son and so, the marine raider battalion is formed. As with the rangers, they have some initial successes but when the war becomes increasingly conventional they endure a number of setbacks including this one in the new Georgia Campaign which again will lead ultimately to phasing out those units. On the navy side, the frog men are created mainly to clear obstacles for amphibious landings after the debacle where the Marine Landing craft iran into obstacles and had their bottoms torn out, these units would go in, set demolitions to break away the chargers and were generally considered successful in doing so. Then we have within world war ii, the oss which is its own special Operations Forces. This is William J Donovan the head of the oss. Hes trying to find out places to put forces a lot of the regional commanders dont want his people there but he does find willing partners in the china, burma, india theater partly because is not a lot of American Forces there so he does organize what is detachment 101 and it was given that number because he didnt want the enemy to know they only had one unit. They partner with the kitchen forces after some trial and error, theres a lot of the initial attempts dont go well and theres not local partners they can work with, people to train them. In detachment 101 they found a leader who is actually capable and they form whats called the american. [inaudible] rangers who Work Together with more conventional units against the japanese and scouting and rating, highly effective force. In europe, the oss forms jed berg units which are small freeman teams that parachute in to the german rear to work with the resistance organizations after dday. Locally, they have a lot of success and, i think, i argue we tend to overestimate their effectiveness on strategic scale, if you look at this chart theres only 222 jet birds go in which is much smaller than the operational groups which is another oss. Both of those are smaller than the 1574 in the british sas. When you think about what really caused trouble for the germans, the resistance is not high on the list. The Deception Campaign that was done to mislead the germans was the most important in terms of a slowing the German Response and Strategic Bombing came in second. While there were some impacts, we tend to overestimate perhaps the strategic impact but theyre still certainly a lot of reverence for the jet birds and we now have a Different Program today. At the end of world war ii, almost all of the special Operations Forces are disbanded. A lot of this has to do with the fact that they didnt turn out as effectively as and hope. Only the frog men to retain some of their strength and thats again, be they were perceived as being especially effective. The book goes into a full chapter on korea which i wont cover in the interest of time but a lot of interesting stuff happens there to include in his formation of the Army Special Forces and ill touch on the kennedy. Because this is the next critical moment. Kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces and, i think, he has a romanticized view of what they can actually accomplish but you will see when he comes then theres 2000 and he orders an increase to 10500. Which seems great but one of the problems you have with the lead units is if you build them up rapidly you cant be so elite. When he comes in 90 of the people who try to qualify fill out but in order to reach the expansion theyre only filling out 30 of the people so you do see a certain degradation of quality. You have, on the navy side, kennedy pushes for the creation of the sea and land teams, seals as we knew them today, which originally started as a Counter Insurgency marine counterinsurgency force. In terms of vietnam, its a mixed record of success and failure. Some of the programs work out pretty well but none are strategically decisive because it does become a conventional war by 1965. The c idg program which is particular program working with local forces is the Largest Program ever done and pretty effective in mobilizing tribes against the enemy. So, what happened next . In the 70s theres a surge of hijacking and terrorism which creates a lot of consternation and as militaries coming out of vietnam and looking for things to do, this is something where it seems there could be a role for special operations to play. So, the first thing that happens in 1974, the rangers are brought back to life as the lead counterterrorism force. Then theres the not as being elite enough so 1977 we have delta force which is an army unit. The most elite army unit and in 1980 we see a Seal Team Six which is that navy attempt to produce an equivalent to delta force. Initially, these are all focused on hostage rescue. The first big mission, operation eagle claw in 1980, delta force is set to rescue the iran hostages. They sent helicopters to a place called desert one in the system and from there to trenton because of mechanical problems and other problems they dont get enough helicopters to get to the mission and have to scratch it and when they try to move theres a crash between the helicopter and aircraft and theres a fire and eight americans are caught in the fire, killed and not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave. Huge setback but it does lead to some reforms that are of great value to special Operations Forces. So, the first one one of the problems identified in eagle claw was that you had an ad hoc command structure and was thrown together late in the day and was not sufficiently coordinated. This will lead to the the joint special Operations Command. Theres also a problem with the aircraft, aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle and they brought together pilots and aircraft that werent familiar to deal with this problem they create that night stalkers, 160th special Operations Aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capability. The next few years this further reform which culminate in the creation of so calm, special Operations Command which is the 1986 which is his result of special operations advocates and supporters in congress pushing for legislation. The first thing that they get is so calm special Operations Command which is a as i mentioned earlier, a four star headquarters in tampa. The second thing they get is asbs which is assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict and this gives special operations a presence inside the pentagon where budgets and other things go on where its useful to have a player at that level. The third thing they get is msp 11, Major Force Program 11 which is a separate funding line that special operators felt they were not getting their fair share of resources and then fourthly, they get a set of Nine Missions that are said to be special Operations Specialties. It seems coming out of this, special operations has finally gotten what they need, they had these great things going for them but it turns out its not quite as rosy as one might hope. By the way, the guy on the right in that picture is not Clark Griswold he has the Clark Griswold haircut but that is senator nunn. Here we go. So, we get to desert storm, 1990, general sports cop is on the left is the commander of Central Command which is one of the regional combatant commands. On the right you have general carl steiner who is the command of so calm and one of the thing general nine did not do is give so calm at Actual Authority over the forces deployed. That Authority Still resides with the original commander, general sports cop. Its up to so calm to make the case to schwarzkopf that these spaces are valuable and so steiner goes to him and pleaded with him to get his forces opportunity to take part in schwarzkopf and not known for particularly liking special Operation Forces ends up giving them not many Important Missions and so calm guys feel like at their stuff on the bench with the court units not getting to do the stuff they were hoping to do. The next seminal event for special operations is 911. Important for all americans but perhaps for no one more im