[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Prior to 9/11, these units were never used even once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives. Putting the units to their intended use proved impossible--even after al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As a result of these and other attacks, operations were planned to capture or kill the ultimate perpetrators, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but each time the missions were blocked. A plethora of self-imposed constraints--I call them showstoppers--kept the counterterrorism units on the shelf.

I first began to learn of this in the summer of 2001, after George W. Bush's election brought a changing of the guard to the Department of Defense. Joining the new team as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense forspecial operations and low-intensity conflict was Bob Andrews, an old hand at the black arts of unconventional warfare....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fyi.

[Pukin Dog]

Excellent report. Thanks for posting it.

[miltonim]

Counterterrorism! bump

[There's millions of'em]

bump

[Archangelsk]

Huge ping. Send to your usual suspects.

[centurion316]

ping

[Cicero]

Excellent and informed analysis.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Great post!

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for writing this.

I find it interesting that the author apparently did not go back to the Days of Jimmy Carter where "We can't fight terrorists in their homes and training grounds became the defacto law of the nation!" It became the mantra of our leftist leaders and the lefty mediots.

Carter deballed our CIA and made sure that his fellow rats in the Senate would never allow the use of SPECOPS personnel to fight the Islamofascist terrorists.

Then, with the help of the NY Slimes, Washington Compost and the left wing mediots, they developed the myth/mantra of how we could never really harm Islamo terrorists. That they were impossible to find, and if found to infiltrate. That is the mantra/myth of liberals across America and the world today re Islamofascist terrorists.

The reality is that if we can find them, we can kill them. Dead terrorist leaders and Islamokazis will never harm another innocent American, Israeli or anyone else. That is the reality that has been pigeoned holed since the days of Carter.

Rummy and GW with our Spec Op warriors are proving that this Mantra of the left is wrong. They identify Islamofascist leaders and either kill them or capture them for a trip to Gitmo.

In summary, the Islamofascist terrorist leaders and their Islamokazis can be found, killed or captured by our Specop teams, when these teams are given the opportunity and good intel.

[mark502inf]

Great report--thanks for posting it.

Excellent insights on some of the reasons we did not act against the terrorists in the 90s. President Bush with Powell & Rumsfeld & Rice have turned that around.

I disagree with the Rumsfeld idea of flinging special ops forces at targets around the world from the Pentagon. We have regional commanders in charge of military ops in every part of the globe. They have the ability of pulling those ops off and doing them in a way that leverages in-place forces and alliances as well as capitalizing on the regional expertise resident in those HQs. Centralized control and attack is what we did when we attacked that aspirin plant in the Sudan. Rumsfeld's idea is the same, but with people this time instead of a missile.

The author cites the Blackhawk down incident--that is in fact a perfect example of what can happen when special ops guys work on their own and something goes wrong. And we had troops near-by that time; imagine how much worse it would have been if the support was not only clueless as to what the special ops guys were up to, but were also thousands of miles away. Unity of Command is a principle of war--regardless if the troops are conventional or specialized.

We're starting to go after these guys like we should--let's do it in the best way and that's to push the authority and resources down as close as we can to the problem.

[FRgal4u]

One word summarize the reason why - Clinton/Democrats -

When has national security the focus for the dems in the Post-JFK era? They pander to special interests like the greens, the peaceniks, the welfare queens, the gays, the abortionists on and on..except the support of our military.

[wildbill]

One partial solution: Get their attention. Fire the Joint Chiefs who don't support the policy directives of the civilian authority.

Set up a new command structure with the SOF forces on a par with and member of the Joint Chiefs.

Never happen, but it is cheering to think about.

[lentulusgracchus]

"Are you out of your mind? You're telling me that our Middle East policy is not important and that it's more important to go clean out terrorists? Don't you understand what's going on in terms of our Middle East policy? You're talking about going after terrorists backed by Iran? You just don't understand."

Methinks I can recognize Madeleine Albright's distinctive mooing even at a distance of 1300 miles and eight years.

What a load of maroons.

[Travis McGee]

Long but crucial document. War college stuff, and if it's not, then the war college is not teaching real world special operations.

[WritableSpace]

Bump!

[Godfollow]

I'll have to print this one off and read it later...

[lentulusgracchus]

Let's suppose, said the former counterterrorism group member, that the president had ordered a covert strike "despite the chairman going on record as opposing it. Now, if the president orders such an operation against the best military advice of his chief military adviser, and it gets screwed up, they will blame the president who has no military experience, who was allegedly a draft dodger."

An excellent, textbook example of why people who haven't had military experience shouldn't sit in the Commander in Chief's chair......and by extension, in favor of as many citizens as possible acquiring military experience, and against women in the White House, since so vanishingly few women have served in the Armed Forces.

Let the chips fall, boys! Here is the proof of the pudding. The smartest schoolboy draft-dodger in America, when it got to gut-check time, didn't have what it took to look his generals in the eye and make the call.

[FreeAtlanta]

When President Clinton began asking about special operations, one former senior official recounted, "those options were discussed, but never got anywhere. The Joint Staff would say, 'That's cowboy Hollywood stuff.' The president was intimidated because these guys come in with all those medals, [and] the White House took the 'stay away from SOF options' advice of the generals."

What the John F'n Kerry! The prez was intimidated! What a leader....not! If Clinton really wanted his paper mandates to go through, he would have fired more generals and re-orged the dead wood. He was risk adverse as much as any of the brass.

[subterfuge]

"--Rumsfeld laments that progress has been slow and the Defense Department has not "yet made truly bold moves" in fighting al Qaeda. "

Interesting, but I scrolled down to the punchline here. I hope this is just a smoke-screen but I doubt it.

[AdmSmith]

Why do you think that the generals are against SOF warfare;

there is an old saying that the generals always fights the last war...

Risk aversion is the name of the game