As the war on terror rages on, U.S. Special Forces are at the frontlines of America’s counterterrorism strategy abroad. Michael Waltz, the President of Metis Solutions and a former commander of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan explains that U.S. Special Forces have “the lead in the global war on terror” as they play a critical role in “taking down whole networks of enemy leadership” and “building up the capacity of our allies.” However, Waltz, cautions that U.S. Special forces should not be expected to reconstruct countries’ entire armies or failed political systems.
The Cipher Brief: How effective have U.S. Special Force raids been at removing top terrorist targets?
Michael Waltz: Special Forces have had varying levels of effectiveness in terms of raids and decapitating terrorist group leadership. Much depends on whether they can fully exploit the tactical intelligence they pull off of an objective with sufficient resources and rules of engagement for follow-on raids.
With so-called drone strikes, our military can get into many more denied spaces, have loiter time over a target, and can essentially wait until there are near perfect conditions for a strike. However, once you do a drone strike, that’s it.
With Special Forces raids and boots on the ground, we can confirm the death of a target, capture and interrogate a target, and then pull intelligence off of the site. And when we’re able to do that, and when commanders are willing to risk our most elite forces, you get a much more effective outcome. Where you truly realize the benefit of Special Forces raids is not in taking out individual targets, but rather in taking down entire networks. This is what JSOC and its commander General Stanley McChrystal and others really perfected at the height of the Iraq War. They conducted one raid, procured intelligence, analyzed it in almost real time, and sent it out to our Special Forces teams who then conduct four, five, six, seven raids at the same time before the enemy could even react. We got inside their decision cycle and were able to take down entire networks just from the intelligence from one raid.
That’s where you get ahead of what people criticize as the old game of whack-a-mole, where you’re taking one guy out who gets replaced by another guy and so on. But if you’re able to take five, ten, fifteen down in a period of just days because you have this kind of ripple effect from each raid that grows exponentially, you can decapitate entire networks. And you can then create the space for local security forces to actually move in and create the space for the softer lines of effort, such as development, governance, and other pieces by putting these groups on their back feet.
TCB: During Special Forces raids, what is the level of coordination between the U.S. and local governments?
MW: It varies hugely across the entire spectrum. Unfortunately, most of these extremist groups take hold and thrive in places where there is no local government to speak of – such as Somalia, Libya now, unfortunately, parts of Syria, western sections of Pakistan, and areas of eastern Afghanistan. There usually isn’t local government control; that’s what we’re trying to re-establish. There is obviously an operational security concern of tipping folks off that comes with local coordination.
However, if you have a legitimate government in place, we certainly try to cooperate with them, because our ultimate goal is to bolster their legitimacy and bolster the notion that they can provide local security in partnership with either American forces or coalition forces. So whenever it makes sense, every effort should be made to inform and coordinate, but often, there is no government to speak of. That’s what we’re trying to reestablish.
TCB: How have U.S. Special Forces coordinated with local armies and forces (in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) to combat terrorist groups?
MW: I can tell you from my own experience in Afghanistan, that Afghan army commandos accompanied us on every raid. In fact, as the capability of the Afghan army grew, we moved to what we called leadership from the rear, a kind of perspective where we were guiding, helping, and embedding in a training and mentoring role, and walking them through the intelligence, helping them with the planning and letting them make the decisions – with the caveat that it wouldn’t endanger our embedded forces. But whenever possible, not only were Afghan commandos a part of the raids, they were leading, implementing, and executing the raids with our mentorship. That’s not to say we did not conduct unilateral operations - we did. But we tried to make that the exception.
TCB: President Obama recently ordered Special Forces to Syria and Cameroon to help fight against ISIS and its affiliates. Should we expect Special Forces to represent the primary tool operating against foreign terrorist organizations?
MW: Special Operations command, for sometime now, has had the lead in the global war on terrorism. And I do still call it a global war on terrorism, because on the one hand, terrorism is a tactic of Islamic extremism and other extremist groups, but on the other hand, it is a global war. And we should call it a war, because they are certainly at war with us.
In terms of the recent deployments, we have to keep in mind that you have two different flavors, so to speak, of special operations forces. One is very focused on what I call ‘breaking things’ and finding our enemies in order to kill or capture them. And then the other flavor, which is where I come from, the Green Berets, really focuses on helping our friends and building their capacity to fight our enemies for us. Green Berets are much more focused on embedding with those forces, helping increase their capability, understanding their needs, providing U.S. assistance where able, and then operating by, with, and through local surrogates. And our partner forces can be everything from tribal militias to local government forces. A perfect example of that model is when the Green Berets embedded with tribal militias who made up the Northern Alliance during the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government. When the new government was established, we then embedded with the newly formed government security forces to help build them up for the fight against the insurgency.
It’s also important to remember that Special Forces are neither a silver bullet nor a constant Band-Aid to fill the vacuum created by the lack of a broader political strategy, and frankly, even in a broader strategy in the War on Terror. I discussed the shorter term, direct action missions designed to keep these extremist groups on their back foot, and the longer-term capacity building efforts with our partners and allies. Both of those will be far less effective, and in many cases have not been effective, in the absence of a political strategy to tackle local grievances and a broader strategy to undermine this thing called Islamic extremism.
Just as it took us decades to defeat fascism and the better part of the twentieth century to defeat communism, we need a strategy that really gets at the ideology of Islamic extremism and undermines it and discredits it. Today, you don’t see groups like the Shining Path in Peru or the Red brigades in Italy, effectively able to recruit anymore or even exist. Why? Because their ideology has been discredited. That’s the ultimate goal and that’s really what ultimate success will look like in this long war. Special Forces, on their own, can’t do that.
TCB: Looking forward, do you expect the future role of Special Operations to grow even further in the fight against terrorism?
MW: On the one hand, yes. I think you’ll see those two roles, these two lines of efforts moving forward in parallel. One is very focused on targeting, taking down whole networks of enemy leadership so that it keeps the terrorists on their back foot. If our enemies are worried about where they’re going to sleep at night, they really don’t have time to plan, plot, and coordinate attacks against Paris, Brussels, or the United States. If they are trying to reestablish their Twitter networks because they are constantly being taken down and shut down, then they are on their back feet in terms of spreading propaganda and recruiting. So that pressure needs to be maintained. That’s shorter to medium term.
In the medium to longer-term is building up the capacity of our allies and our security forces and doing it responsibly, always aware of potential human rights violations and other related issues. That’s often very difficult to do and a fine line that we are walking. But the longer-term is building our allies capacity, like what we’re doing in Cameroon, so that they can take care of the problem themselves.
A perfect example of where that works is our efforts in Colombia over the past 20 years. Plan Colombia went into place in the late 1990’s, where we’ve had Special Forces trainers working with the Colombian army, to the point where now the FARC is almost non-existent. Colombia truly has re-established its security apparatus and built up, with our help, quite a professional army. So that’s kind of the model over the long term where I think Special Forces will have a credible role.
Where I would draw the line though, is in actually rebuilding armies from scratch. There are just not enough Special Forces operators to rebuild entire ministries and to essentially rebuild an army from the ground up. Both the Afghan and Iraqi Armies had to be rebuilt, but the effort exposed a gap between what Special Forces had historically done in advising and training foreign armies at the tactical level and the need for rebuilding an entire Air Force, the logistical infrastructure for the Army, and so forth. The conventional U.S. Army tried to step in to fill the gap, but it was geared towards fighting large battles like the first Gulf War and eventually shifted to battle counterinsurgency. It was not trained to take on the massive advisory and rebuilding effort that was needed. I’m still not sure we have really institutionalized that ability should we have to do it again somewhere like Syria or Yemen.
