Why Special Forces were not used to fight al Qaeda before 9-11
Richard H. Shultz Jr., Weekly Standard:
"SINCE 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly declared that the United States is in a new kind of war, one requiring new military forces to hunt down and capture or kill terrorists. In fact, for some years, the Department of Defense has gone to the trouble of selecting and training an array of Special Operations Forces, whose forte is precisely this. One president after another has invested resources to hone lethal "special mission units" for offensive--that is, preemptive--counterterrorism strikes, with the result that these units are the best of their kind in the world. While their activities are highly classified, two of them--the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team 6--have become the stuff of novels and movies.
"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.
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"1. Terrorism as Crime...'If you declare terrorism a criminal activity, you take from Defense any statutory authority to be the leader in responding,' a long-serving department official agreed. Whenever the White House proposed using SOF against terrorists, it found itself facing 'a band of lawyers at Justice defending their turf.' They would assert, said this old hand at special operations, that the Pentagon lacked authority to use force--and 'lawyers in the Defense Department would concur. They argued that we have no statutory authority because this is essentially a criminal matter.' (This is what the Dems want to go back to.)
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"2. Not a Clear and Present Danger or War...Since terrorism had been classified as crime, few Pentagon officials were willing to call it a clear and present danger to the United States--much less grounds for war. Any attempt to describe terrorism in those terms ran into a stone wall.
...
"Even after bin Laden declared war on America in a 1998 fatwa, and bombed U.S. embassies to show his followers that he meant business in exhorting them to 'abide by Allah's order by killing Americans . . . anywhere, anytime, and wherever possible,' the Pentagon still resisted calling terrorism war. It wasn't alone. A CIA assessment of the fatwa acknowledged that if a government had issued such a decree, one would have had to consider it a declaration of war, but in al Qaeda's case it was only propaganda.
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"3. The Somalia Syndrome...
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"4. No Legal Authority...
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"5. Risk Aversion...During Clinton's first term, someone would always find something wrong with a proposed operation, lamented General Downing....
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"6. Pariah Cowboys...
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"7. Intimidation of Civilians...During the 1990s, the 'best military advice,' when it came to counterterrorism, was always wary of the use of force. Both risk-aversion and a deep-seated distrust of SOF traceable all the way back to World War II informed the military counsel offered to top decision makers....
...
"8. Big Footprints...One original Delta Force member traced this problem back to Desert One. 'We took some bad lessons from that,' he said. '. . . One was that we needed more. That maybe it would have been successful if we'd had more helicopters. That more is better. And now we add too many bells and whistles. We make our footprint too large. We price ourselves out of the market.'
...
"9. No Actionable Intelligence...In effect, to turn the need for 'actionable intelligence' into a showstopper, all you have to do is define the target narrowly. That makes the intelligence requirements nearly impossible to satisfy. Broaden the picture, and the challenge of actionable intelligence became more manageable."
Worth the read.
Richard H. Shultz Jr., Weekly Standard:
"SINCE 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly declared that the United States is in a new kind of war, one requiring new military forces to hunt down and capture or kill terrorists. In fact, for some years, the Department of Defense has gone to the trouble of selecting and training an array of Special Operations Forces, whose forte is precisely this. One president after another has invested resources to hone lethal "special mission units" for offensive--that is, preemptive--counterterrorism strikes, with the result that these units are the best of their kind in the world. While their activities are highly classified, two of them--the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team 6--have become the stuff of novels and movies.
"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.
...
"1. Terrorism as Crime...'If you declare terrorism a criminal activity, you take from Defense any statutory authority to be the leader in responding,' a long-serving department official agreed. Whenever the White House proposed using SOF against terrorists, it found itself facing 'a band of lawyers at Justice defending their turf.' They would assert, said this old hand at special operations, that the Pentagon lacked authority to use force--and 'lawyers in the Defense Department would concur. They argued that we have no statutory authority because this is essentially a criminal matter.' (This is what the Dems want to go back to.)
...
"2. Not a Clear and Present Danger or War...Since terrorism had been classified as crime, few Pentagon officials were willing to call it a clear and present danger to the United States--much less grounds for war. Any attempt to describe terrorism in those terms ran into a stone wall.
...
"Even after bin Laden declared war on America in a 1998 fatwa, and bombed U.S. embassies to show his followers that he meant business in exhorting them to 'abide by Allah's order by killing Americans . . . anywhere, anytime, and wherever possible,' the Pentagon still resisted calling terrorism war. It wasn't alone. A CIA assessment of the fatwa acknowledged that if a government had issued such a decree, one would have had to consider it a declaration of war, but in al Qaeda's case it was only propaganda.
...
"3. The Somalia Syndrome...
...
"4. No Legal Authority...
...
"5. Risk Aversion...During Clinton's first term, someone would always find something wrong with a proposed operation, lamented General Downing....
...
"6. Pariah Cowboys...
...
"7. Intimidation of Civilians...During the 1990s, the 'best military advice,' when it came to counterterrorism, was always wary of the use of force. Both risk-aversion and a deep-seated distrust of SOF traceable all the way back to World War II informed the military counsel offered to top decision makers....
...
"8. Big Footprints...One original Delta Force member traced this problem back to Desert One. 'We took some bad lessons from that,' he said. '. . . One was that we needed more. That maybe it would have been successful if we'd had more helicopters. That more is better. And now we add too many bells and whistles. We make our footprint too large. We price ourselves out of the market.'
...
"9. No Actionable Intelligence...In effect, to turn the need for 'actionable intelligence' into a showstopper, all you have to do is define the target narrowly. That makes the intelligence requirements nearly impossible to satisfy. Broaden the picture, and the challenge of actionable intelligence became more manageable."
Worth the read.
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