Demand for Delta Force troops, Green Berets, Navy SEALs ‘outpacing capacity’

We need to be very careful here.  The knee jerk reaction to the "stress on the force" will be to cut back deployments.  While that is necessary and fine for some special operations forces (and we should keep in mind that jointness does not equal sameness even within special operations - Delta, Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers, Civil Affairs and PSYOP forces are not interchangeable despite the bean counters who want to count "SOF Teams" ) for those forces that conduct special warfare there is a need to sustain their deployment tempo not only to support persistent engagement but also to sustain regional expertise.  Furthermore, most soldiers who came into Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and PSYOP did so because they want to deploy and work in foreign countries with indigenous forces.  While the force may be tired form Afghanistan and Iraq, that does not mean that forces conducting special warfare do not want to deploy.  While perhaps counterintuitive to some I think we will face a real morale problem among certain forces if their deployments are scaled back too much in response to the cries of the "stress on the force."

V/R
Dave

Demand for Delta Force troops, Green Berets, Navy SEALs ‘outpacing capacity’

Global demand drains readiness even as U.S. wars wind down

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/11/special-ops-forces-wearing-thin-from-high-demand/?page=all#pagebreak

Firing away: Marines have special operations forces in Afghanistan to train and mentor Afghan National Security Forces. A Pentagon budget review notes significant stress on teams of commandos with multiple tough deployments. (U.S. Marine Corps)

By Rowan Scarborough

-

The Washington Times

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

America’s in-demand global force against terrorists is showing signs of stress and appears to be gliding toward a decline in readiness, says a Pentagon budget overview on special operations forces.

With the end of U.S. military operations in the Iraq War, the thought was that fewer deployments would give some relief to special operations forces after a dozen years of overseas fighting.

But the 2015 budget overview says demand for special operations forces is up, not down.

It talks of “significant stress on the force” and notes that the demand for Delta Force troops, Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other commandos is “outpacing capacity” and has “initiated a downward trend in SOF readiness” this year.

Retired Rear Adm. George Worthington, once the Navy’s top SEAL, said the wear and tear on mind and body, much less equipment, is becoming apparent.

“With guys doing multiple deployments, they’re getting a tough nine to 10 deployments over a 12-year period, the impact on families is going to be noticeable,” Adm. Worthington said. “Anything that can cut down and make the deployments less vigorous in terms of operation tempo is going to be a better thing.

“The stress is, at home, you’ve got to get ready to deploy for another nine months,” he said, adding that the war on terrorism has been the SEALs’ busiest era since the Vietnam War.

“This is Vietnam on steroids,” he said. “If there is any fraying, it’s on replaceable operational equipment. But more than that, it’s the operational tempo on the guys. They’re over there for eight or nine months, and then they come back and then they’ve got to go back.”

The Pentagon says special operations units plan to “reduce select capacity to preserve readiness,” but the Defense Department does not spell out which missions will be scaled back.

Adm. William McRaven, a SEAL by training who is chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, told Congress recently that “the force has continued to fray” and “our suicide rate, unfortunately, has grown here over the past three or four years.”

On Tuesday, Adm. McRaven told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee that demand is so heavy he cannot always say yes to global combatant commanders.

“My job as the supporting commander is to provide them forces,” he testified. “Now, there does come a time when I kind of run out of forces and so I’ve got to work with the [geographic combatant commands] and the services to do the best we can.”

The total number of special operations forces was once planned to reach 72,000, but budget constraints have capped the number at 69,700. The Special Operations Command budget for the next year is $7.7 billion, a 10 percent increase.

The command is taking steps to head off a severe readiness dip in its far-flung troops, who over the past dozen years have conducted counterterrorism training and operations in North and East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Asia. They fought a long war against al Qaeda-sponsored insurgents in Iraq, where commandos perfected the fusion of intelligence collection and direct action to kill scores of terrorist leaders.

Special operations forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and tracked down his chief henchman in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi. In October, Delta Force soldiers in Tripoli, Libya, nabbed Abu Anas al Libi, the reputed mastermind of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa.

“This state of readiness is critical to ensure SOF remains the United States on-call and ready force for global engagements,” the Pentagon assessment says. “The SOF continues to experience and project an increase in global demand outpacing capacity.”

One example: SoCom is facing an explosion in the number of countries that want American commandos to train their forces in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Last year, 63 countries received training from 3,500 personnel. In 2015, the numbers will balloon to 103 countries and 4,500 personnel.

In the secretive world of special operations, the Pentagon offers no details on reduced training or flying hours. But one infamous example of special operations forces being pulled beyond capacity occurred in 2012 in Benghazi, Libya.

(Continued at the link below)

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/11/special-ops-forces-wearing-thin-from-high-demand/?page=all#pagebreak

Budget Uncertainty Could Derail Expansion of US Special Ops Forces

Excerpt;

In a May interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, retired Army Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, SOCOM’s former deputy commander, suggested that SOCOM’s expansion is vulnerable to current budget realities, saying “the force is going to shrink — the general purpose force — therefore, there’s going to be less people to feed the special operations force.”

Kearney also said he worried about the effect on SOCOM if it continues to grow while the services — which provide forces to staff SOCOM — shrink.

“If we go to 72,000,” he asked, “is that sustainable given the service populations?”

Within that 72,000 number how much of the growth is in the big three of SOF: e.g., Special Forces (Green Berets), SEALs, and Rangers? (MARSOC is discussed below.)  I think that there has been no growth in the "operational force" above the numbers of the 2010 QDR (and of course no growth in Special Forces since the 2006 QDR called for growth of 5 additional battalions, the last of which should have become fully mission capable in August of 2013 which illustrates how long it takes to grow the operational force).  I would argue that most of the growth in the 72,000 number is in "enablers" - forces that support SOF but that do not go through any of the SOF training "pipelines" to produce the operational force.  I think we should always be careful when we throw out that 72,000 number.

But LTG Kearney's point is well taken. We are not going to be able to grow the operational force as the services draw down (nor do I think we should grow it).  But those who are "SOF lovers" who think that SOF is a panacea or silver bullet do not, I think, understand the true nature of US SOF in more of bigger is not always better.

V/R
Dave

Budget Uncertainty Could Derail Expansion of US Special Ops Forces

Nov. 4, 2013 - 07:12PM   |  

By PAUL McLEARY and HOPE HODGE SECK   |  

Marine critical skills operations troops train in this undated file photo. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command will continue to build a force of 844 operators; it now has more than 700. (Marine Corps)

• FILED UNDER

• World News
• Americas

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US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, center, meets with Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, head of US Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, during a July visit to MARSOC's Stone Bay complex in North Carolina. / US Marine Corps

Ambitious plans to expand the US military’s elite special operations command are in jeopardy as the Pentagon considers whether to freeze force levels amid widespread budget cuts, Defense News has learned.

As the perceived need has grown for such surgical missions around the world, US Special Operations Command was thought to be immune to the current downsizing sweeping the military. Indeed, plans call for SOCOM to expand from 66,000 personnel today to 72,000 by 2017.

However, the US Marine Corps has announced it won’t be allowed to add more than 800 special operations jobs, which officials there had sought to round out its ranks, according to Capt. Adrian Ambe, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC), headquartered at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Ambe told Marine Corps Times, a sister publication of Defense News, in October that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s office issued guidance last summer freezing all special operations forces at their current manning levels.

Officials at SOCOM said they have not heard of any such directive from Hagel’s office, and policy staffers at the Pentagon said no such orders have been issued.

However, one Pentagon source added that as part of the Future Year Defense Plan for 2015-2019, slowing the planned growth of special operations forces is among the range of options that has been discussed.

The source stressed, however, that no final decision has been made.

A defense official who declined to speak for attribution said: “There are a range of options being considered across the Department of Defense as part of our future years defense planning and the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). As these are both ongoing activities, it would be premature to comment on the details.”

A QDR is undertaken every four years to inform the Pentagon’s decisions about military strategy, and serve as a roadmap for its capabilities and force structure.

Yet faced with the long-term budget cuts known as sequestration, which are eating into all of the services’ personnel accounts, Pentagon and SOCOM officials have stayed largely silent on the impact that those shrinking budgets could have on special operations.

For MARSOC, the freeze will cap end strength at its present authorized size: 2,742 personnel. A Marine spokesman at the Pentagon, Capt. Tyler Balzer, explained that MARSOC will continue to grow until it reaches that number.

Ambe said he did not have a figure for MARSOC’s current size.

Previously, plans called for MARSOC to top out just above 3,600. A year ago, MARSOC rolled out a detailed plan to bulk up its combat service support structure, the enablers who back up critical skills operators by gathering intelligence, for instance, or serving as joint tactical air controllers.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20131104/DEFREG02/311040014/Budget-Uncertainty-Could-Derail-Expansion-US-Special-Ops-Forces?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|World%20News|p

‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’ (Steve Coll Review of "Zero Dark Thirty")

For those who are going to see Zero Dark Thirty this review is certainly a perspective that should be kept in mind.

V/R

Dave

‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading’

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/?pagination=false&printpage=true

Steve Coll

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Zero Dark Thirty 
a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow

It is not unusual for filmmakers to try to inject authenticity into a movie’s first frames by flashing onscreen words such as “based on real events.” Yet the language chosen by the makers of Zero Dark Thirty to preface their film about events leading to the death of Osama bin Laden is distinctively journalistic: “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” As those words fade, “September 11, 2001” appears against a black screen and we hear genuine emergency calls made by victims of al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center. One caller describes flames spreading around her and says that she is “burning up”; she pleads against death and then her voice disappears. Before any actor speaks a single fictional line, then, Zero Dark Thirty makes two choices: it aligns its methods with those of journalists and historians, and it appropriates as drama what remains the most undigested trauma in American national life during the last several decades.

Since Zero Dark Thirty’s release in New York and Los Angeles in December (it opens nationwide on January 11), the film has provoked a split reaction. Critics have celebrated it for its pacing, control, and arresting but complicated depictions of political violence. The New York Film Critics Circle has named the film best picture of 2012, and it has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including one for the best picture of the year. The qualities some critics admire in the film are familiar from The Hurt Locker, the previous collaboration—about an American bomb squad in Iraq—between the scriptwriter, Mark Boal, and the director, Kathryn Bigelow. (The film made Bigelow the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, in 2009, and it also won an Oscar for Best Picture.)

At the same time, a number of journalists and public officials—including three United States senators—have excoriated Zero Dark Thirty. Their main complaint is that the film greatly overstates the role played by torture—or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” in the CIA’s terrifying euphemism—in extracting from al-Qaeda-affiliated detainees information that ultimately led to the discovery of Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011.

“The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques…were the key to finding Bin Laden,” Michael Morrell, the acting CIA director, wrote to agency employees in December. “That impression is false.” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein and the two senior members of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat Carl Levin and Republican John McCain, coauthored a letter calling the movie’s version of recent counterterrorism history “grossly inaccurate.” The senators said the film’s flaws have “the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.”

Boal is a former journalist who conducted interviews with CIA officers, military officers, and White House officials as he prepared to write Zero Dark Thirty. The Obama administration and CIA leaders reportedly authorized at least some of these interviews, apparently in the belief that the public would appreciate the movie that resulted. Boal has said that he conducted other reporting on his own initiative. Boal and Bigelow have offered two main responses to the criticism they have received. One is that as dramatists compressing a complex history into a cinematic narrative, they must be granted a degree of artistic license.

That is unarguable, of course, and yet the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden, and therefore might be, for some, defensible as public policy. Boal and Bigelow—not their critics—first promoted the film as a kind of journalism. Bigelow has called Zero Dark Thirty a “reported film.” Boal told aNew York Times interviewer before the controversy erupted, “I don’t want to play fast and loose with history.”

Boal has said that he believes his script captures “a very complex debate about torture” because it shows some prisoners giving up information under duress, while others dissemble. There is no reason to doubt that Boal and Bigelow intended to depict the role of torture in the search for bin Laden ambiguously. The Hurt Locker was a film of understated complexity drawn out through action, not didactic explication. Yet The Hurt Locker’s story offered a microcosm of war that did not try too hard to address the larger subject of the tragic invasion of Iraq, and so a viewer had no cause to compare the film’s choices to a record of historical fact.

Zero Dark Thirty has the inverse shape: it is an epic history that the filmmakers try to compress into a microcosm, by telling the story of the decade-long bin Laden hunt, which involved many hundreds of CIA officers and military personnel, primarily through the experience of a single analyst, “Maya,” who is played by Jessica Chastain, and who is based on a real-life CIA employee whom Boal reportedly met. In the film, the personal story of Maya’s pursuit of bin Laden—which is original and convincing—is juxtaposed against explosive external events, such as the terrorist attack in London on July 7, 2005, and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2008. As much as the filmmakers’ claims to journalistic method, this narrative approach—the summoning of recent, dramatic public events—invites the viewer into judgment about the film’s reliability.

(Continued at the below link)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/?pagination=false&printpage=true

Special operations growth expected after Iraq and Afghanistan

How much more can SOF grow?  How much more should it grow? Certainly not much beyond the nearly 5000 operational SF Soldiers and 800 operational SEALS and lesser numbers of Special Mission Units, MARSOC Critical Skills Operators, Special Tactics Teams, Combat Controllers and Pararescuemen, Civil Affairs and PSYOP/MISO Soldiers, Rangers and Special Operations aviators.   We should remember that it has teken nearly seven years to increase the size of the Special Forces operational force from 270 Special Forces Operational Detachments-Alpha (ODAs) to 360.  A growth of 90 ODAs was directed in the 2006 QDR and will not be complete until 2013.  While USSOCOM may be projected to have some 70,000 personnel the operational force is unlikely to grow anymore especially as all the services reduce the number of personnel from which to recruit.  The majority of that 70,000 number in USSOCOM must be in enabling and support forces and headquarters but I guess it is fashionable to say that we are going to grow SOF – we should just keep in mind that we have likely reached the limits of growing operational SOF but of course we can always shift enabling and support forces from the services to SOF.

Quote:

"And so that meant continuing to invest, and, in fact, we are growing the special operations forces, actually growing them," Carter said.

V/R
Dave

Published: 09:46 AM, Sun Dec 09, 2012

Special operations growth expected after Iraq and Afghanistan

http://fayobserver.com/articles/2012/12/09/1221933?sac=fo.military

By Henry Cuningham

Military editor

Special operations forces will be among the growth areas in the military even as funding dwindles, the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian leader says.

President Obama "made sure that we didn't eat our seed corn in a budget reduction," Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter said Nov. 29 at Duke University.

"And so that meant continuing to invest, and, in fact, we are growing the special operations forces, actually growing them," Carter said.

Special operations forces, many of which have their headquarters at Fort Bragg, are trained and organized to work in small groups, often in hostile areas on sensitive missions. Their jobs range from hunting terrorists to training foreign militaries in the local language.

The United States will increase its focus on the Asia-Pacific region, continue its attention on the Middle East and cope with terrorist threats in Africa, he said. Priority will be given to alliances and partnerships and holding military exercises around the world, he said.

Carter made his comments as part of the Von der Heyden Fellows Program Endowment Fund Lecture Series.

The U.S. military faces the twin challenges of the national budget crisis and coming up with a strategy as the Iraq-Afghanistan era comes to an end, he said.

Carter and his boss, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, have been warning for months about the danger of automatic across-the-board cuts that will take effect Jan. 1 unless Congress acts to head them off.

"It's not just the amount of dollars, it's the idiotic way that we are required to take those cuts," Carter said. "And, of course, it's idiotic because the intent of sequester was to use the threat of cuts implemented inflexibly, and really mindlessly, to force Congress to enact a compromise deficit reduction plan. That was its intent. It was never intended to be implemented."

Special operations forces will be a key part of "agile, ready, technologically advanced military" in the era after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

Fort Bragg is the home of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command. The headquarters for the Marine Corps' special operations forces is at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base at Jacksonville.

(Continued at the link below)

http://fayobserver.com/articles/2012/12/09/1221933?sac=fo.military