A Warrior Elite For the Dirty Jobs

By Evan Thomas

In military jargon they are called "low-intensity conflicts." More commonly they are known as "dirty little wars." By any name they are the kinds of battles most likely to be fought by U.S. troops in a precarious nuclear age: rescuing hostages from terrorism, fighting guerrillas or teaching allies how to fight them, protecting disparate American interests in a variety of regions.

These unorthodox struggles require a special type of soldier: bold and resourceful, often trained in the black arts of stealth and sabotage, suitable for an elite unit that can vanish into alien territory or strike anywhere with speed and surprise. Recent events have underscored the need for such mobile, small-scale fighting units. As Americans abroad have become increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks like the Christmas-week atrocities in Rome and Vienna, Washington has recognized more than ever the utility of a quick and certain response. At the same time, the Reagan Administration has placed increased emphasis on a "new globalism" designed to assert U.S. interests abroad by providing covert and overt assistance to rebels fighting Soviet-backed regimes around the world.

Deciding just how the U.S. should go about organizing and deploying such Special Forces has provoked a fierce debate in the corridors of the Pentagon and in secret congressional hearings over the past few months. When he went West for New Year's, President Reagan took with him a secret report from the Holloway Commission, a White House task force set up six months ago to explore new ways of fighting terrorism. Next week the debate will spill into the open, as Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger join more than 100 experts to discuss the future of low-intensity conflict at a symposium at Fort McNair in Washington.

Every U.S. President since John F. Kennedy has preferred, whenever possible, to use the scalpel of a Special Forces operation rather than the blunter tools of conventional warfare. The Reagan Administration has given top priority to building up Special Forces, increasing their budget from $441 million in 1982 to $1.2 billion this year, and the number of troops from 11,000 to nearly 15,000. At the very least, the Administration has rescued special operations from the post-Viet Nam era of neglect, which was so ignominiously exposed in the wreckage of Desert One during the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission of 1980.

The military command, however, has been a good deal less enthusiastic about this new breed of warrior. Special Forces are often regarded by the brass as unworthy of precious defense dollars and a bit too independent to boot. Disclosures last November that members of the supersecret Delta Force had been charged with skimming covert intelligence funds only heightened Pentagon suspicions that the Special Forces are a bunch of freebooters. Shrugged retired Army Brigadier General Donald Blackburn, an expert on unconventional warfare: "Special Forces have always been the bastards of the Army."

Partly as a result of this attitude, America's Special Forces are still woefully unprepared for the challenges they could face. Though it is far more likely that the U.S. would use its handful of quick-reaction shock troops rather than any of its 17 active Army divisions or 13 Navy carrier battle groups, special operations still receive less than 1% of the Pentagon's $300 billion budget. Warns Jeffrey Record, a respected expert on military affairs: "I have no doubt that low-intensity conflict is the sort of scenario we'll be fighting in coming decades. What I do doubt is that we'll be prepared."

Congress has found that the combat readiness of U.S. Special Forces is far below acceptable levels and that equipment shortages, despite the recent infusion of dollars, are getting worse. A 1980 investigation into the Desert One fiasco faulted the Pentagon for having available only eight specially equipped helicopters to transport the rescue force when "at least" ten were needed. Today the Air Force has only seven. Although the Pentagon has ordered ten more, "the main transport programs are hopelessly behind schedule and over cost," charges Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We are only slightly more prepared to carry out the Iranian hostage rescue mission today than we were when it failed."

Pentagon records show that over the past five years more than half the Special Forces units have earned readiness ratings of no better than C-3, meaning "marginally ready." (C-l is "fully ready," C-2 "substantially ready," C-4 "not ready.") "The bulk of the units are C-3 and below," one Pentagon official told TIME. Said another: "The readiness has been atrocious."

For one unit in particular, readiness has not been as big a problem as simple logistics. Based at Fort Bragg, N.C., the Army's elite Delta Force has been too far from recent targets of terrorism to play a role. By the time Delta Force troops reached the Mediterranean to respond to the seizure of TWA Flight 847 last June and the hijacking of the EgyptAir flight to Malta in November, they were too late for a successful rescue operation. One of the Holloway Commission's recommendations is for the "forward deployment" of some special-operations forces and equipment overseas.

Reaganauts in the Defense Department accuse the uniformed brass of paying only lip service to the need to build up U.S. Special Forces. In early December, for example, the Air Force canceled an annual inspection of the First Special Operations Wing, at Hurlburt Field, Fla. Officially, bad weather was blamed for the cancellation. The real reason, according to the monthly Armed Forces Journal: all eleven helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft were down for repairs.

Special Forces play several different roles. In a conventional war, small teams of a dozen men are supposed to penetrate behind enemy lines, blend in with the natives and cut off lines of supply and communication. To train friendly forces in the art of guerrilla warfare, the Army has sent hundreds of teams to 60 nations in the past six years--more than twice as many as it sent overseas during a comparable period in the 1970s.

Other Special Forces, like the Army's Rangers, are lightly equipped shock troops parachuted in to seize air bases and key installations before the heavily armored main force arrives. The Navy's SEALs (Sea, Air, Land forces) would be stealthily deployed to blow up bridges and ships. The Air Force's First Special Operations Wing (1st SOW) is set up to ferry combat troops in high-tech flying machines that can race undetected in the dead of night. But the most highly visible, politically popular mission of the Special Forces is counterterrorism. The Delta Force is trained to rescue hostages by land, the SEALs by sea.

One major problem is that instead of fusing into a cohesive elite force, this hodgepodge of different units has increased interservice rivalries, in part because of such rapid growth in recent years. The Air Force's 1st SOW is equipped to transport Special Forces; so is the Army's Task Force 160 of the 101st Air Assault Division. The Rangers, 1,800 strong, see themselves as the elite light-infantry unit; so does the entire 198,000-member Marine Corps. The Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Agency, established in 1984 to advise on policy, is run by Marine Major General Wesley Rice. Yet until 1985, the Leathernecks had no Special Forces and historically eschewed their importance. Not surprisingly, the Marines' new experimental unit is studying hostage rescue, something both the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team Six have been working on for years.

Impatient with the organizational snarl, some Congressmen want to establish the Special Forces as an entirely separate service. Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine is pushing a plan that would carve out all of the Special Forces missions performed by the military and put them under a new civilian-run agency, reporting to the Secretary of Defense, that would control and deploy the units.

The bureaucratic tangle that engulfs the Special Forces is at least partly a result of their rocky evolution. They come from a proud and fiercely independent heritage. The Army's Rangers take their name from Rogers' Rangers, the New Hampshire militiamen under Major Robert Rogers, who skillfully used the Indians' tactics of stealth and surprise against them during the French and Indian War of the 1750s and '60s. From the irregulars under Francis Marion (the "Swamp Fox"), who harassed the British in the Revolutionary War, to Brigadier General Frank Merrill's Marauders, who bedeviled the Japanese in Burma during World War II, old-time American fighting men often proved adept at unconventional warfare.

It was Kennedy who elevated elite units to matinee-idol status. He built up the U.S. Special Forces, first organized in 1952 during the Korean War, and popularized the green beret many commandos had already informally adopted as their symbol. The Green Berets' role was counterinsurgency: to defend freedom by helping developing (and pro-Western) nations ward off Communist-backed guerrilla movements. The great test was to be Viet Nam. But as the war escalated, counterinsurgency was shoved aside as the U.S. resorted more and more to conventional tactics of massed firepower. Special Forces were increasingly miscast, used as garrison troops defending lonely outposts in the jungle.

The bitter frustrations of Viet Nam left the top Pentagon brass longing to wage more familiar combat, such as carrier battles at sea and tank warfare on the plains of Europe. During the 1970s, the Green Berets and other Special Forces were allowed to wither. The special-operations budget dipped from a peak of $1 billion in the late 1960s to less than $100 million in 1975.

Resentful and perhaps a little envious of the Green Berets, few regular Army officers lamented their decline. Green Berets were regarded as "snake eaters," social misfits unable to live by the Army book. Special operations were distrusted for having a "back-door command structure" that bypassed the normal chain of command. Peacetime Pentagon chiefs were more interested in buying costly new weapons systems for their own services than in catering to the peculiar needs of oddball outfits. "When you get the Air Force together and ask them what makes their service go," remarks a congressional staffer, "it's not a funny-looking bunch of C-130s painted black that haul around Army and Navy troops. It's B-l bombers."

Then came the Iranian hostage crisis. The Delta Force, a special detachment created in the late '70s to attack terrorists with "surprise, speed, success," stood ready. But the mission was doomed by interservice rivalry and poor preparation. In typical fashion, every service insisted on a piece of the action. The Delta Force was to be flown in Air Force transports to its Desert One rendezvous and then to the outskirts of Tehran in Navy helicopters piloted by Marine and Air Force aviators. Jury-rigged with special equipment, flown by hastily trained pilots, three choppers malfunctioned and one collided with a C-130 in the desert.

The fiasco led the Pentagon to create the Joint Special Operations Command to prevent such interservice snafus. But the fledgling organization could not hold its own against the traditionalist top brass, as was soon demonstrated in Grenada. Though the invasion was a walkover against underarmed Cuban construction workers, almost all the special operations fell victim to misuse by field commanders who insisted that the special troops work in broad daylight and use conventional tactics. A Delta team sent to free political prisoners in Richmond Hill prison had to turn back under fire before it could reach the prison, which turned out to be abandoned. A Navy SEAL team sent to take over a radio station moved in at first light and was repulsed by enemy fire. The result: the SEALs had to blow up the radio station, rendering it useless as a pacifying tool during the invasion. Another SEAL team, specializing in speed, stealth and quick getaways, was sent to rescue Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon but was pinned down for 24 hours before Marines came to its aid.

Other nations have far fewer branches of their special forces--and much better track records. Britain has just two: the Special Air Service (SAS), which fights on land, and the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), deployed at sea. The Germans have Grenzschutzgruppe (GSG-9), the elite commandos of the Border Protection Group. The Soviets have special forces (known as Spetsnaz) attached to every Red Army unit to perform intelligence gathering and to operate behind enemy lines. In Afghanistan, small (ten-to-15-man) Spetsnaz teams have begun to disrupt the ability of the rebel mujahedin to move freely at night on their supply trails. Israel also has special forces attached to every military unit.

The scandal brewing in Delta Force over misappropriated funds shows the problem of allowing U.S. Special Forces wide berth to act as independent operators. This fall at least 80 members of Delta Force were reprimanded or court-martialed for cheating on their expense accounts. The investigations have spawned a series of news leaks that disclosed a wide array of covert operations undertaken by Special Forces. According to the Washington Post, military pilots posing as civilians have flown secret missions out of Honduras to pinpoint rebel radio transmitters in El Salvador, while other Special Forces agents have engaged in spookery normally associated with the FBI and CIA, like bugging Soviet officials in a hotel room on the West Coast.

The motto of the Special Forces is "Anything, anytime, anyplace, anyhow." Such an open-ended commitment to mayhem gives some people pause. Critics fear that if the Administration succeeds in building up the Special Forces, the President will be tempted to use them. Small wars, the critics point out, have a way of escalating into large ones. "The U.S. could find itself 'training' one day and fighting in a war the next," warns the Center for Defense Information, a dovish think tank that analyzes military strategy. "Nowhere is the danger of being dragged into a war more acute than in Central America."

Just because a President may abuse a weapon of war, however, is not sufficient reason to discard it. In a nuclear world where global struggles are, by necessity, fought at the margins, a country that cannot back up its words with actions is soon rendered impotent. Terrorism demands the capacity to react swiftly and surely. So does the difficult task of defending U.S. interests and countering the spread of surrogate Soviet regimes. Until the Pentagon faces up to the realities of low-intensity conflict, the U.S. will remain a highly visible and too often helpless target. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Michael Duffy and Bruce van Voorst/Washington

With reporting by Reported by Michael Duffy, Bruce van Voorst/Washington