Hunting al Qaeda

Foreword

Hunting al Qaeda is a disturbing book. It will disturb a lot of people in the army, in special forces, in the intelligence community, and throughout the United States. It blows apart the myth that everything that can be done to find terrorists is being done. I t hangs out a lot of dirty laundry that many of us would like to pretend isn't there. It illuminates the fact that even special forces is infected with micro management disease, petty infighting, and the fear of making mistakes.  This is not some sanitized war story.  It's the hard, ugly realities of military service, relationships between active and reserve components, and war. More than anything else, it's a story about a group of soldiers who went to fight the enemy and refused to be deprived of their due.

This team is composed of citizen-soldiers who hung up their business suits, stopped their everyday lives, left their loved ones, and went to Afghanistan, ostensibly to hunt terrorists. And they can justify their great sacrifice because they love God and they love their country. They have the training and the skills. They believe in the righteousness of their cause, and they believe they can make a difference. In their deepest, most personal moments of reflection, these men probably imagine capturing Osama bin Laden. They intend to turn that dream into reality and they have every right to believe that they might actually succeed. They are proud to be part of their country's quest to rid the world of the men who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This isn't just any group of part time soldiers. These men are U.S. Army National Guard Special Forces soldiers. They are Green Berets in every sense of the word.

What they don't know is that their biggest challenge will not be finding and destroying al Qaeda. Their biggest challenge will be finding how to work with a political/military bureaucracy that defines victory as not having any accidents, incidents or injuries. This culture of "playing it safe" permeates much of the military and it begins many politicians.

Since the end of World War II, the political commitment to fight and win wars has evaporated. Politicians, lacking the courage to declare war, allow our soldiers to go into battle without the support of the people, as the framers of the Constitution had intended. So the politicians second-guess many battlefield operations. They Monday morning-quarterback military decisions, berate military accidents, and jump on the band-wagon only after success is clearly visible. The consequence is that they get what they wanted: a military that lives in fear of political backlash.

As if this weren't enough, National Guard special forces also experience discrimination at the hands of active-duty special forces units, which view them as something akin to summer help. Ironically, more than any other military career field, trained citizen-soldiers are uniquely suited for special forces missions. 

Reserve-component special forces personnel can, and often do, bring exceptional civilian professional skills and insights to the unconventional warfare environment. But that's a hard pill for some to swallow, and it isn't much appreciated in the rank-and-file active duty units.

In the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, special forces teams weren't as restricted as they would become later in the war. Special Forces units deserve all the credit for bringing that war to a rapid and victorious conclusion. As time went on, more and more military units were sent to Afghanistan, with increasingly more chiefs and fewer Indians. As their numbers grew, more senior officers demanded accountability. More operations came under the scrutiny of higher and higher levels of command.  The staggering number of officers in the war zone had to justify their contribution to the war. They had lost the initiative. They couldn't seize the moment. Their internal controls were choking the operational capabilities of the "ground truth" combatants. More and more, the Taliban became wise to the debilitating elephantitis of U.S. military operations.

Although the author never makes this allegation, it would not surprise me to learn that Donald Rumsfeld himself made tactical battlefield decisions. Oh, make no mistake that Mr. Rumsfeld would never actually call it a decision, but at his level it only takes a loose comment to rapidly become a commandment as it filters down the pipe.  The Sec Def gets his way and has plausible deniability that he may have interfered with decisions that should have been made by a noncommissioned officer.

No one on this team of highly trained citizen-soldiers is influenced, motivated, or limited by career considerations. Hamstrung by higher headquarters-internal controls, they decide to break the "rules." They develop elaborate strategies to deceive both their chain of command and the elusive Taliban, which puts them in a pretty difficult position. If they fail, they could be killed, and bring embarrassment and humiliation to their team, the army, the National Guard, and their country. Although not stated but very clear to any professional soldier, even if they succeed, they may be subject to a court martial.

Many will appropriately ask if the ends justified the means. One can never assume that the author knew all there was to know about higher headquarters' operations. It may be--and we can only hope--that other special forces teams were executing unencumbered missions that were unknown to these men. Nor is it clear to me that these soldiers truly understood the enormous consequences of their rule-breaking strategies. Had they understood, I doubt their actions would have been any different. This team was hell-bent on hunting al Qaeda, and hunt they did.

                                                            Colonel Gerald Schumacher

                                                            United States Army Special Forces (ret)