Transcripts For CSPAN2 Oppose Any Foe 20170610 : vimarsana.c

The future youre welcome to send questions or comments. Simply email speaker heritage. Org and of course well post todays program on the heritage front page for everyones future reference as well. Leading our discussion today is daniel kochis. Daniel is our policy analyst at the Margaret Thatcher center for free and pretty focused on transatlantic security issues. His writings have been featured in real clear world foxnews. Com breitbart. Com and he has provided expert analysis for 100 radio and Television Appearances he has also served as a panelist at the transatlantic think tank conference in brussels belgium and provided parliamentary into the house of Lords Select Committee on the arctic. Prior to joining us here at heritage in the Thatcher Center he worked for a nonprofit in washington d. C. Is a policy analyst as well as on the Advisory Board company as a Research Associate in the associate director. Please join me in welcoming daniel kochis. [applause] thank you john and good morning everybody. This beautiful wednesday in washington. We are honored today to be joined by mark moyar whose book oppose any foe the rise of americas special Operations Forces was described by National Review as an valuable and highly readable overview of special Operations Forces history not just for those who are newly joining its ranks but for anyone who seeks to know more about the glamorous and little understood forces. Mark moyar as director for the diplomatic in washington d. C. He has served as professor at the u. S. Marine Corps University and a senior fellow at the joint special Operations University. He has advised the Senior Leadership of several military commands as well. He has a b. A. s chromosome lot and the b. A. From cambridge. In addition to the book we are talking about today he has written a number of other works including building partner relations and partners are capital which i read in grad school. How president obama strong warfare and a question of command civil war to iraq triumph forsaken the vietnam war 1954 to 1965 and phoenix in the birth of prey counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and get him and without i look forward to your discussion and i will turn it over to you. [applause] thank you very much daniel for that kind introduction and thank you john for inviting me here to be back at the heritage foundation. Im going to talk about this book a little bit. I cant cover the whole thing in this presentation but im going to hit on some of the highlights and we will have some time for questions and answers at the end i would like to provide a little bit of background and the reason i wrote this book was it was as a joint special Operations University we started a course on the history of special operations and discovered there was not a single volume that we could look to to give you the history from the origins of world war ii all the way up to the present and most of what special Operations Forces understand our certain pieces. As i was writing this special operations have become a future part of our overseas engagement and there is not enough understanding of the policy world but what actually they do. Im going to start off with a little bit of intro. Even in the policy world there are not too many people who i think understand what the different parts of special Operations Forces are so im going to talk about that for a minute. At the top u. S. Special Operations Command, or u. S. Socom and that is the umbrella organizations for special Operations Forces located in tampa and i will talk about how that came into existence. The loader of the Component Commands in the special operations role and all the services they are and theres a jsoc second from the right joint special Operations Command which is comprised of multiple services and we will get into how that came into being. Theres also a lot of confusion about what special Operations Forces themselves are at a lot of this has to do with the fact that they have special forces. Special forces are part of the army so they fall into the bucket on the left. The special Operations Forces is the umbrella term for everything so if you can remember one thing from this talk remembers that special Operations Forces are not the same as special operations. Im going to start off talking about world war ii because world were provides the key impetus for First Special Operations Forces and also paved the way for future forces. Most of what we see today, you can trace its roots back to some degree to world war ii. Special operations get going first in the uk side with Winston Churchill but after the fall of france the british are faced with another war against germany and churchill like a lot of brits did not want to fight another world war i style war were a whole generation of manner decimated so he tries away to get around it. He has a strategy of raiding germany on the periphery with a new Organization Called the commando. Part of that is because they left their equipment behind. This is the way to be doing something without a huge slugfest on the continent. Once the u. S. Comes in the Roosevelt Administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the uk and one of the first opportunities to work with these commandos and an Organization Called the army rangers a setup under William Orlando darby. They work with commandos and they are training with the commandos and one of the First Missions that the rangers go on on the french coast turns out to be a complete disaster. The germans wipe out most of the landing force. The result of this disaster the allies move away from this idea of raiding on the coasts. Not working out well and you are not doing much to hurt the access of powers by doing this. By the time the rangers are getting up to speed they are going to take part in the big campaigns of the war first in north africa and subsequently italy and france. In italy they take part in the major landings in sicily and salerno and antiaum. Initially some of their special training comes in handy but once they get ashore they end up fighting primarily with conventional infantry. Theres not a lot of opportunity to sneak around germans as some of the less capable italian and French Forces they dealt with in north africa. When they get to anzio they are part of an early attempt to move into which leads to the battle on january 30, 1944 were two of the ranger battalions are sent to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a German Division which completely wipe them out. Out of 767 troops only six of them escaped from that disaster. So this shows. Clearly that the rangers are not really capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment and so we will see them mostly get phased out over time. On the marine corps side we have the formation of the marine corps raiders in january of 1942 and hear president roosevelt is directly involved and he forms these raiders based on the advice of his son james who is a junior marine officer who is enamored of this guy who was shown in the other picture with mao tsetung. He has commandos and guerrillas running around. The marine corps commandant when he hears this thinks its a crazy idea and says theres no way we should do this. A president takes the advice of his son so the marine raiders battalions are formed and as the rangers they have initial successes but when the war becomes increasingly conventional they endure a number of setbacks including the Georgia Campaign which again will be ultimately phasing out those units. On the navy side the frog men are created mainly to clear obstacles for amphibious landings after the debacle where Marine Landing craft ran into obstacles and had their bottom store now. These units would go in and send demolitions to break away the charges and were generally considered successful in doing so. Then we also have in world war ii the oss has its own special Operations Forces and william j. Donovan the head of the oss. He is trying to find places to put forces. A lot of the regional commanders dont want is people they are but he does find willing partners in the theater partly because the error not a lot of American Forces there so he organizes what is called detachment 101 and it was given that number because they didnt want the enemy to know that they only had one unit. They partner with the coach and forces after some trial and error. A lot of their initial attempts dont go well and there arent local partners they can work with. In detachment 101 does find it consistent leader who is and they form the coach in rangers who Work Together with more conventional rangers and a highly effective force. In europe the oss formed units which were small threeman teams that parachute in to work with the resistance organizations after dday. Locally they have a lot of stuff. I think i argue we tend to overestimate their effectiveness on the strategic scale. If you look at this chart their are only 222 that go in. Much smaller than the operational groups which is another os entity in both of those are smaller than the 1574 british sas. When you think about what caused trouble for the germans, resistance is not high on the list. It was the campaign done to mislead the germans with the most important terms of slowing German Response and Strategic Bombing came in second. While there was some impact i think we tend to overestimate the strategic impact that they are is still a lot of reverence for the jet urgently now have a program today. At the end of world war ii almost all of the special Operations Forces are disbanded and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they didnt turn out as effectively as they had hoped. Was only the frog men who retain some of their strength and thats big as they were perceived as being especially effective. The book goes into, has a whole chapter on korea which im not going to cover in the interest of time but a lot of interesting stuff happens including the formation of the Army Special Forces. Im going to touch on the kennedy period because thats the critical moment. Kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. He is a romanticized view of how much they can actually accomplish. When he comes then he orders an increase of 10,500, which seems great but one of the problems you have is you start to build him up rapidly and you cant be quite so he leads. When he comes in, 90 of people who tried to qualify failed out. In order to reach the expansion they are only retaining 30 of the people so you see a certain degradation of quality. You have on the navy side kennedy pushes for the creation of the sea air and land team or seals as we know them today which started out as a counterinsurgency. Bahrain counterinsurgency force. In terms of vietnam its a mixed record of success and failure. Some of the programs work every well. It does become a conventional war by 1965. Its effective in mobilizing tribes against the enemy. In the 70s there is a surge in hijacking and terrorism. Which creates a lot of consternation and as the military is coming out of vietnam its something where it seems like it could be a role in special operations to play. The first thing that happens in 1974 the rangers are brought back to life. They are seen as not elite enough so 1977 we have delta force which is an army unit most of the army unit and a 1980 we see s. E. A. L. Team six which is the navys 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 sent to rescue the iran hostages. They send helicopters and they are supposed to move from there to tehran and mechanical problems and other problems they dont get enough helicopters there. There was a fire and eight americans are caught and they are not able to retrieve their bodies when they have to leave. It was a huge setback but it does lead to reforms that are of great value to special Operations Forces. The first one, one of the problems identified in eagle claw you have been ad hoc command structure that was thrown together late in the day and not sufficiently coordinated so this would lead to the court nation of jsoc, joint special Operations Command. There is also a problem with the aircraft and aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle. They brought together pilots and aircraft. To deal with this problem date create the nightstalkers, the 160th operation aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capability. The next few years theres further Reform Efforts which culminate in the creation of socom, special Operations Command with the nun one amendment in 1986 and their supporters sing congress pushing for legislation. The first thing they get a socom special Operations Command which as i mentioned earlier of war start headquarters in tampa. The second thing they get his assistant secretary of defense for special operations and conflict in this gives special operations a presence inside the pentagon where its useful to have a player at that level. The first thing they give is mfp 11 commission force program 11 which is a separate funding line and special operators who thought they were getting their share resources. Fourthly they get a Nine Missions that are said to be special operations specialties. It seems special operations have finally got what they needed and got all 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 kind of has the Clark Griswold haircut but that is actually senator nun. Here we go. So we get to desert storm 1990. General schwarzkopf is on the left. Hes the commander of Central Command which is one of the regional combatant commands. On the right you have general carl steiner who is the commander of socom. One of the things nunn colin didnt do was give forces so that authority resides with the regional commander and this case general schwarzkopf. Its up to socom to make the case to schwarzkopf that these tours as our valuable. He goes to schwarzkopf and pleads with him to give this forces the opportunity to take part in the operation. Schwarzkopf not known for particularly liking special Operations Forces ends up not giving the many important issues so the socom guys feel stuck on the bench with support units not getting to do a lot of the cool stuff they were hoping to do. The next event for special operations is 9 11. Important for all americans but perhaps no more important and special Operations Forces. We have shortly after the attack president bush is trying to figure out a way to get back so he sends in the cia and Army Special Forces to work with the Northern Alliance rebel Group Fighting the taliban. Some of the special forces would go in on horseback and right in with the Northern Alliance people. The americans actually are not at all prepared for afghanistan. They have a special operators on a mission who are all fluent in arabic and french because they thought theyd be going on middle east missions. They have one skill that turns out to be really crucial and thats the ability to guide precision munitions so they help the Northern Alliance quickly overcome the taliban resistance. They chased al qaeda out and this is seen i think rightly the single most strategically Important Role that special Operations Forces has played. Not too long thereafter we got another regime takedown in iraq and initially there was some talk that we were going to use something similar to afghanistan, very soft heavy force of elite units moving around blowing things up with laser precisionguided missiles but they figure out its actually not a resistance movement. So they largely did a conventional coming from the southeast from kuwait. It does play a role in diversionary operations. In the west they set up a tank unit that is designed to make it look like theyre a lot more tanks coming and in the north saddam had move some of his forces to the west and north enhance away from baghdad so works out pretty well for some here too. As we all know the difficult part in iraq and afghanistan was not taking the regime down by figuring out what happened afterwards. In the immediate aftermath of iraq they saw chaos and theres arise of insurgency that is fueled by saddam husseins baath party. Socom special operations are called in to do