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33–596 2008

[H.A.S.C. No. 109–129]

ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS

COMMAND’S MISSIONS AND ROLES

HEARING

BEFORE THE

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND

CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

HEARING HELD

JUNE 29, 2006
(II)

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES

SUBCOMMITTEE

JIM SAXTON, New Jersey, Chairman

ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina

W. TODD AKIN, Missouri

JOE WILSON, South Carolina

JOHN KLINE, Minnesota

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania

GEOFF DAVIS, Kentucky

JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado

MAC THORNBERRY, Texas

JIM GIBBONS, Nevada

JEFF MILLER, Florida

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey

MARTY MEEHAN, Massachusetts

ADAM SMITH, Washington

MIKE MCINTYRE, North Carolina

ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey

JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island

RICK LARSEN, Washington

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

JIM MARSHALL, Georgia

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY, Georgia

ALEX KUGAJEVSKY, Professional Staff Member

BILL NATTER, Professional Staff Member

BRIAN ANDERSON, Staff Assistant
(III)

C O N T E N T S

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS

2006

Page

HEARING:

Thursday, June 29, 2006, Assessing U.S. Special Operations Command’s Missions and Roles ..................................................................................................... 1

APPENDIX:

Thursday, June 29, 2006 ......................................................................................... 29

THURSDAY, JUNE 29, 2006

ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND’S MISSIONS AND

ROLES

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Meehan, Hon. Martin T., a Representative from Massachusetts, Ranking

Member, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee .......................................................................................................................... 2

Saxton, Hon. Jim, a Representative from New Jersey, Chairman, Terrorism,

Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee ................................. 1

WITNESSES

Boot, Max, Senior Fellow in National Security Studies, Council on Foreign

Relations ............................................................................................................... 8

Downing, Gen. Wayne A. (Ret.), Chairman, Combating Terrorism Center,

U.S. Military Academy at West Point ................................................................ 2

Vickers, Michael G., Director of Strategic Studies, Center for Strategic and

Budgetary Assessments ....................................................................................... 6

APPENDIX

PREPARED STATEMENTS:

Boot, Max .......................................................................................................... 43

Saxton, Hon. Jim .............................................................................................. 33

Vickers, Michael G. .......................................................................................... 38

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Documents submitted.]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:

[There were no Questions submitted.]

(1)

ASSESSING U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND’S

MISSIONS AND ROLES

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES,

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES

SUBCOMMITTEE,

Washington, DC, Thursday, June 29, 2006.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:31 a.m., in room

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Saxton (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JIM SAXTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. SAXTON. Good morning.

I have an opening statement that I am going to ask be put in

the record.

The purpose of today’s hearing is to update ourselves on the activities and capabilities of the Special Operations Command.

As the threat changes, our capabilities have to change as well.

And one of the agile parts of our national security system is Special

Operations Command (SOCOM), and the agility never ceases to

amaze me and how we identify threats and change our tactics and

procedures to meet those threats. SOCOM has been very good at

that over the years.

So we thought we would get together this outside panel to give

us a current look at how SOCOM activities are perceived, experts

who are not necessarily still or have been part of Special Operations Command.

With us today are General Wayne Downing, Chairman, Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I

would especially like to thank General Downing for being with us

today as a former commander of SOCOM. I am sure your testimony

will be particularly enlightening.

And also, Michael Vickers, director of strategic studies, Center

for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; and Max Boot, senior fellow of the National Security Studies Council on Foreign Relations.

We look forward to hearing from you.

But before we do that let me ask my friend and companion here,

Marty Meehan, for any comments he may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Saxton can be found in the Appendix on page 33.]
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STATEMENT OF HON. MARTIN T. MEEHAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MASSACHUSETTS, RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE

Mr. MEEHAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to join you in

welcoming the witnesses today and associate myself with the chairman’s remarks and provide a few of my own for emphasis.

Mr. Chairman, as you know, I am keenly interested in our national security posture and philosophical approach to the Global

War on Terror. Much of our work since 9/11 has been focused on

the business of providing the best possible resources available.

I would like to believe that this focus and the work of this committee has contributed to SOCOM’s current capability, yet with the

beginning of our 5th year in this struggle I have grown increasingly pessimistic about our overall philosophy.

As the conflict continues to grow in duration, I am faced with the

prospect that we might not be applying military resources in the

most prudent and effective manner.

As a nation, are we overly focused on the area of our operation

in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do we overly favor the option of direct

action at the expense of unconventional military techniques?

Have we failed to accurately interpret the nature of this conflict?

Does it call for a counterterrorism or counterinsurgency strategy?

In essence, are we properly expanding the use of forces? These are

just a few of the questions that have been put before this committee that are of concern.

General Downing, you find yourself in fine company today. You

are flanked by two of the great writers in the field of military theory. Yet because of your own experiences, you are obviously uniquely qualified to present testimony.

And I am impressed with your experience not only in uniform

but your experience since then on the staff of the National Security

Council (NSC) and as an independent critic of SOCOM and Secretary Rumsfeld, and your present role, obviously, at West Point.

So I hope the panelists can share their candid assessment of this

and help us help the department to improve. And you know, I

think this country deserves nothing less than that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much.

General Downing, why don’t you lead off and tell us what you

think?

STATEMENT OF GEN. WAYNE A. DOWNING (RET.), CHAIRMAN,

COMBATING TERRORISM CENTER, U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY

AT WEST POINT

General DOWNING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you

and members for allowing me to come back in here. I don’t get to

come to these hearings very much anymore, and, unlike some military guys, we were always treated very well up here. So my experiences coming both here and to the other body were always generally very positive experiences, because we were created, as you

know, by the Congress, and we were certainly well taken care of

here. I see that continuing.
3

I am reminded that I have been retired for 10 years, and the capability of U.S. Special Operations Command, which I left 10 years

ago, is exceedingly greater than it was in 1996. And certainly, their

performance in this struggle over the last almost 5 years has really

allowed them to develop and to hone their skill.

I am also reminded that I left Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) 15 years ago, and the JSOC capability is so far beyond what we had when we went out into the desert during the

first Gulf War.

The performance of the units has been outstanding, primarily focused in Afghanistan and Iraq. You are well aware of this. I think

one of the things that we have got to remember is that this great

performance has not come without cost to the command. We have

got cost in materiel, aircraft, vehicles, weapons, radios.

I think we ought to also remember that over 1,000 special operators have been killed or wounded since we started, a percentage

and a rate which far exceeds that of the conventional forces. I

think that is to be understood.

The number of killed in action, I really don’t know what that

number is, except I certainly know it is north of 100 and perhaps

even closer to 200.

That is very troubling to me because it takes so long to train

these special operators to make them effective. It takes about 18

months to get a special forces soldier through all of his training,

his language training, and get him out to the field.

It takes about the same kind of thing for a combat controller or

for an Air Force para-rescue guy. Some of these crew members, for

the 160th and for AFSOC take over a year to get them trained to

go to the field.

When you go to the special mission units, both the Army and the

Navy special mission units, it takes 10 years to 15 years to get the

kind of experience that you need to replace those. So we have a big

gap that unfortunately—of money and resources—cannot fill.

While we have done an outstanding job in our current operations, we must prepare for the future fight. I think we have got

to possibly remind ourself that this is not a war that we are involved with. It is more on the order of a global counterinsurgency

campaign.

The objective is to drain the swamp, not kill all the alligators in

the swamp. In some cases, we end up killing the alligators and

they are replaced almost as fast as we can kill them or capture

them.

And so what we have got to look at is we have got to look at getting after causes of this insurgency. And this reminds us all that

this is not a military struggle. This is a political, it is an economic,

and it is a social struggle.

The military has a role to play, but it is just a role. I would offer

to you that the military cannot win this struggle, but they could

lose it.

And one of the things that I have seen over the last five years

is the great difficulty in bringing the power of the United States

government to bear on these problems. And this is tied up in our

interagency process. There is a lot of competition. We have a lot of
4

inability to bring this team together. And I think we really have

to get after that.

I think we have also got to remind ourself that this struggle is

more than global manhunting. It is more than the direct action

piece. It is more than combat, foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare.

These are necessary activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they

are not enough. I think sometimes we get mesmerized because of

the skill and the daring of our special operators that do these jobs,

and I think sometimes people think that that is all that is involved

in the special operations forces’ contribution to the struggle. It is

not.

We have got to get after the future base area. We have got to

get after developing friends and allies and proxies. Because when

you fight an insurgency, the best people to do this are the host

country. They are not American forces.

And that is one thing that special operations do, is they are a

tremendous force multiplier, where, you know, 10 special forces soldiers can leverage 500 or maybe even 1,000 of the other.

We are, I believe, expanding our Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

operations, and I think this is totally appropriate because intelligence is so important in a counterinsurgency operation.

I see great progress between the Pentagon and the intelligence

community on flexible detailing of special operators into places like

the CIA, where they can be used for Title 50 authorities rather

than Title 10; very effective to get out and accomplish the job.

U.S. SOCOM has been given a very, very difficult task. General

Brown has been tasked with Unified Command Plan (UCP) 2004

with being the synchronizer and the coordinator of this term Global

War on Terror. And this is very, very difficult for him, because

what he has been asked to do is counterculture.

He has been asked to do things which, in the past, have been the

purview of the joint staff. There has certainly been resentment in

the geographical combatant commanders about his new roles and

his ability to get out and synchronize and coordinate.

Tampa, Florida, is a long way from Washington, D.C. Believe me,

I remember that from my days here. And it is very, very difficult

to think that you are going to synchronize and coordinate the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) effort in this struggle and do it from

Tampa, Florida, because where things get done and where things

happen is in this town.

So General Brown has been given a very, very tough mission. I

think there is recognition of how tough it is in the Pentagon. I

think they are trying to help them, but I don’t think we should delude ourself that all these barriers that inhibit him have gone

away.

There is also a lot of overlap. Some overlap is always good, but

you have got to question yourself how much overlap and how much

duplication of effort is there going on between things like the Center for Special Operations down in Tampa, JSOC at Fort Bragg,

the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) up here in Washington and the Joint Staff. There is a lot of effort going on, and

some rationalization probably ought to be applied to that.
5

I think SOCOM needs a command element in D.C. If I could

change the world, I would move the whole command up here. But

that is very difficult, because real estate is at such a premium.

But of course, this flies in the face of what is the role of the

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the services. And many

of them see that as a threat to what they do if you move SOCOM

up here.

But yet for SOCOM to be given this mission of synchronize and

coordinate, they have to be up here. So we have a dilemma here,

and in my mind it is not solved.

I would like to see more special operations forces flag officers in

the global combatant commands and in the joint task forces, because they have very unique capabilities.

I would also like to see more conventional units assigned to the

joint special operations task forces. We have always been able to

handle that. It is certainly a talent of our commanders that they

enable this to happen.

The fourth point I would like to make is on JSOC. One of the

recommendations that myself and Mike Vickers made along with

Bill Garrison in November when we did a quick look at this subject

for Secretary Rumsfeld was we recommended that he enhance

JSOC to a three-star command.

We also recommended he be given four deputy commanders—two

major generals and two brigadier generals—which would give that

command the ability to field five joint special operations task

forces.

Right now, there are just three of them, and all three of those

commanders have never been in the same room together because

of their operations tempo (optempo). At least one of them has always been gone, and the only time they see each other together is

on video teleconferences.

I also recommended that JSOC report directly to the secretary of

defense. Now, that was rejected. I understand why. But the

thought was while SOCOM is going through this very, very difficult transition period to these new missions that they have been

given, my feeling was that the JSOC could operate much faster and

much more efficiently if you took out a command layer—in other

words, let them go direct to the SECDEF.

It would allow them to be very, very flexible, because one of the

things that we found is that the staff processes in the Joint Chief

of Staff (JCS), in Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and in

the interagency impede operations. The national command authority wants fast, responsive, flexible and innovative solutions to their

problems in this Global War on Terror, but their staff system produces exactly the opposite.

Things that should take days take weeks. Things that should

take weeks take months. And some of the decisions that have to

be made have to be made in hours, absolutely in hours.

The other thing that I think command should look at, and that

is lowering this wall between black and white SOF. That has always been a problem between the special mission units and the

rest of special operations. I would judge that since the war those

walls are higher than they were in 2001.
6

There is some reasons for it, but one of the reasons that we proposed the five joint special operations task forces is that we would

like to see the black and the white operate together under one commander. You can still have walls for security, but I just think we

could get a better application of resources if we did that.

The last point I would like to make is that there has been some

great practices that have come out of Operation Iraqi Freedom

(OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and we need to

benchmark those practices not only for the rest of special operations but for the entire military. These are the joint interagency

task forces.

I think General McCrystal’s work in this area has just been exemplary, how he has brought all of these different elements of the

United States government together, and they brought them together and they work very, very effectively together.

This operation against Zarqawi is the epitome of it. That goes on

not only in Iraq but it also goes on in Afghanistan. They have done

that very, very well.

Counternetwork operations task force—been developed. They

work well. Transient screening facilities have worked well, and also

joint reconnaissance task force have worked very well. Some very,

very good things going on.

Gentlemen, I obviously don’t have the answer to a lot of the detailed questions. Members of the command can give you that. Certainly, General Brown can.

I am very proud of these soldiers, sailors, airmen and now these

Marines, and I think you should be too. They are doing a hell of

a job.

Thank you.

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much, General Downing.

We are going to hear from Mike Vickers next, and then we will

go over to Mr. Boot, and then we will have some questions.

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL G. VICKERS, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND BUDGETARY ASSESSMENTS

Mr. VICKERS. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today

to share my views with you on the missions and roles of the United

States Special Operations Command.

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review produced a number of important decisions with respect to Special Operations Forces operational capabilities, capacity and posture, a number of which were

recommended by General Downing, Bill Garrison and myself in the

report that General Downing mentioned.

These capability and capacity expansions are absolutely essential. About 80 percent of our current force is tied up in Operations

Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, and the basic intent over

the longer term is not only to redeploy these forces but to have a

more intense city-state effort for the Global War on Terror (GWOT)

until this necessitated the SOF expansion.

SOF will really be the main DOD instrument, not necessarily the

main U.S. Government instrument in all cases, but main DOD instrument in the longer term Global War on Terror.
7

A number of special operations units were increased by onethird. Special forces battalions, ranger companies, classified special

mission unit squadrons, psychological operations (PSYOPs) and

civil affairs both in the active duty and Reserve component.

A Marine Special Operations Command was stood up that will

contribute to the foreign internal defense area as well as the direct

action and special reconnaissance area. And investments were

made in new capabilities in tagging, tracking, locating terrorists, in

covered air mobility and in persistent air surveillance with the

UAV squadron for Air Force Special Operations Command.

These are all very, very good initiatives. I want to highlight,

however, that while SOCOM is doing a very good job in facilitating

this expansion with its new 18X program to attract additional special forces talent directly from civilian life, and increasing the institutional base, increasing the throughput of the special forces

school, which has essentially doubled in the past couple of years.

Retention is really critical, and incentives to retain the force that

we have will be vital to its expansion as well as its continued quality.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the planning capacity of the Department of Defense for the Global War on Terror

has been significantly bolstered. As General Downing mentioned,

SOCOM has stood up the Center for Special Operations.

The Theater Special Operations Command has been significantly

augmented to make them far more capable of 24/7 long duration

operations. And the command and staff elements of JSOC have

likewise been strengthened for long duration operation.

SOCOM has produced GWOT-related concept plans and operations plans, the 7,500 series, which were first rate. The Defense

Department is currently in the process of identifying the resources

needed to implement these plans.

Mr. SAXTON. Let me just interrupt just for a minute, just so everybody—here is the game plan. We have got a 15-minute vote, a

2-minute vote, and another 15-minute vote, so we can be here for

another 10 minutes before we have to leave, and then we will be

gone for about 20 minutes.

Mr. VICKERS. Okay.

As General Downing noted, SOCOM has experienced some difficulty in fulfilling its role as the lead combatant command in two

areas, in top-level integration and interagency planning process

and in control of global SOF forces or other forces that may be

placed under their command.

As General Downing noted, the GWOT is an intelligence and special-operations-intensive war. SOCOM has made great strides in

the intelligence arena since 9/11. Two advanced special operations

training level three courses have been stood up, and they are producing a couple hundred graduates a year, which significantly expand our HUMINT capability.

Making full use of authorities in the GWOT both in intelligence

and operations, as General Downing noted, is critical, particularly

the flexible detailing and exploitation of the CIA’s Title 50 authority.

Further, integrating our partners since this indirect approach

and leveraging proxies and surrogates will be central to our oper-
8

ation through a global counterterrorism network and with appropriate communications is also vital.

On the legislative side, given the importance of seasoned operators—and one of the things of the GWOT is it is very kind to 40-

year-olds where some of the direct action missions weren’t. It has

placed a premium on the intelligence side.

One of the things we might look at is providing SOF additional

relief from the provisions of section 517 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code

which limits the number of E8 and E9 soldiers in the force.

The special mission units have received waivers in this area, but

it is time to look at expanding this to white SOF as well, given the

increasing role those senior soldiers are playing.

Unconventional warfare is a vital GWOT instrument against

both state and non-state actors, and SOCOM has made very good

strides of late in this area to develop a global unconventional warfare plan. It needs to be properly resourced, however.

The section 1208 authority which grants SOF the authority to

conduct paramilitary operations or fund irregular forces needs to be

expanded several fold over the program years to several hundred

million dollars a year, up from its current level of $25 million or

so.

I fully concur with what General Downing said about black and

white integration of SOF in the field under a single commander. It

does seem like, in some cases, we are doing better in the field, but

the general direction is not good.

With that, I will conclude my statement.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Vickers can be found in the Appendix on page 38.]

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you very much.

Mr. Boot.

STATEMENT OF MAX BOOT, SENIOR FELLOW FOR NATIONAL

SECURITY STUDIES, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

Mr. BOOT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to

the members of the subcommittee for inviting me to testify along

with two men I hold in such high regard as Wayne Downing and

Mike Vickers.

I would like to begin by noting, as have my fellow analysts, that

SOCOM is, in many ways, a very impressive organization. But I

think it is also a very limited organization, and certainly not the

organization that is going to win the Global War on Terror for us.

In fact, SOCOM, I would suggest, as Congressman Meehan suggested in his opening statement, has become very focused on direct

action, on rappelling out of helicopters, kicking down doors, taking

out bad guys.

Now, we need to do that, and that strategy can obviously pay off

with some major dividends, as when we capture Saddam Hussein

or kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But I think we have seen in the aftermath of those major operations the limitations of that manhunter model of counterterrorism

or counterinsurgency, because what we are still stuck with in Iraq

and Afghanistan and elsewhere are very large, very decentralized

insurgencies which are not going anywhere even if you take out a

handful of the top leaders.
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Making real progress against Islamist terrorism is going to require accomplishing much more difficult and much less glamorous

tasks such as establishing security, furthering economic and political development, and spreading the right information to win hears

and minds among the uncommitted Muslim masses.

Above all, it will require working with indigenous allies who

must carry the bulk of the burden in this type of conflict. In other

words, it will require more emphasis not on direct action but on

unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, PSYOPS, civil affairs, all of those other specialties which have been getting shortchanged by SOCOM.

There is certainly a sense among the Army special forces community, among the Green Berets, that what they do is less appreciated and less valued, and less emphasis is put on it than it

should be, in favor of these sexier Special Weapons and Tactics

(SWAT)-style raids in which SOCOM has become so proficient.

I got an e-mail a few weeks ago from one recently retired special

forces colonel who wrote to me the current problem of SOCOM is

that it is unbalanced. Most of the leadership and planning staff

have come from the direct action (D.A.) side. They have no understanding of unconventional warfare (U.W.)

Another more senior retired special forces officer e-mailed to me

to complain of the total USSOCOM preoccupation with rating SOF

orientation on special operations and absolutely none on low-intensity conflict.

And similar concerns have shown up in print, for example, in

Sean Naylor’s article in Armed Forces Journal, ‘‘More Than DoorKickers,’’ which quoted yet another retired special forces officer

who warned that if we spend the rest of our lives capturing and

killing terrorists at the expense of those special forces missions

that are more important, gaining access to the local population,

training indigenous forces, providing expertise and expanding capacity, then we are doomed to failure.

When I hear such complaints coming from so many special forces

veterans for whom I have such high respect, I take them very seriously. And obviously, the committee does as well, and I am glad to

hear that.

The question, of course, you are confronted with is well, what do

you do about this. Is it possible to change SOCOM’s orientation?

I think given the way it is currently constituted, given its emphasis

on kicking down doors, given where the bulk of its leadership has

come from, I think it is very hard to have major changes within

the current structure of SOCOM.

For this reason, there is growing interest within U.S. Army special forces circles about creating a new joint unconventional warfare command within SOCOM which would basically be a U.W.

equivalent to the Joint Special Operations Command which encompasses units like Delta Force and Seal Team 6, and focuses on direct action missions.

An unconventional warfare command could bring together Army

special forces, civil affairs and PSYOPs by essentially expanding

the role of the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg.

That strikes me as a pretty good idea.
10

But I would also urge the committee to think outside of the current bureaucratic boundaries and think about possibly removing

the unconventional warfare mission from SOCOM altogether.

I would like to conclude my testimony with a very brief synopsis

of an old idea for how this could be accomplished, by essentially

resurrecting the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was created in 1942 to gather intelligence as well as to conduct low-intensity warfare behind enemy lines in occupied Europe and Asia.

OSS was disbanded after World War II and, as you know, both

the Green Berets and the CIA trace their lineage to this august ancestor. My proposal was to recreate OSS by bringing together

under one roof not only Army special forces, civil affairs and

PSYOPs, but also the CIA’s paramilitary special activities division.

This could be a joint civil military agency under the combined

oversight of the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence, like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) or National

Security Agency (NSA). It could bring together in one place all of

the key skill sets needed to wage the softer side of the war on terrorism.

Like SOCOM, it would have access to military personnel and assets, but like the CIA special activities division, its operations

would contain a higher degree of covertness, flexibility and

deniability than those carried out by the uniform military.

One of the key advantages of an OSS redux is that it might be

able to enhance our understanding of the societies in which terrorists operate. Such knowledge can be acquired in one of two ways,

either by long-term immersion in foreign societies or by simply recruiting from the societies in which we fight.

OSS II could facilitate both approaches in the first place by modifying the military’s frenetic personnel rotation policies which make

it almost impossible to acquire true area expertise, and in the second place by modifying our overly restrictive citizenship requirements, which currently limit military service to citizens or green

card holders.

The Green Berets recruited non-citizens in the 1950’s when the

Lodge Act allowed the enlistment of Eastern Europeans. Something

similar should be tried today to recruit from Muslim societies

around the world, starting with Muslim immigrant populations

within the United States.

I bet there would be plenty of high-quality recruits who would be

willing to serve in return for one of the world’s most precious commodities, U.S. citizenship. It might even make sense to stand up

an entire brigade or even a division of foreign fighters led by American officers and Noncommissioned Officers (NCOs). Call it the

Freedom Legion.

OSS II would be a natural repository for such an outfit, considering the success the original OSS had in running indigenous forces

such as the Burmese tribesmen who battled the Japanese in World

War II.

It is also possible that OSS could be a prime repository of nationbuilding expertise within the U.S. Government, which is a capacity

that we desperately need to develop and for which we have paid

a high price in Afghanistan and Iraq.
11

Nation-building is an important part of counterinsurgency, because you have to provide a viable government to compete with the

guerilla shadow government. This is not something we have done

a very good job of doing. And again, this OSS-type agency could be

tasked with developing a core of personnel who are skilled in those

areas.

Now, I realize the creation of a new OSS is a radical notion and

it needs a good deal more study and discussion and debate. But if

we are to be successful in the long war, we need to think outside

of the traditional bureaucratic boxes, because the U.S. Government, as currently set up, and that includes SOCOM, simply is not

adequately configured for the tasks ahead.

Thank you very much.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Boot can be found in the Appendix on page 43.]

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Boot. That

was a very stimulating and enlightening set of thoughts.

We are going to go ahead and vote, and we have probably got

about 5 minutes left in this vote, and that will give us time to get

there, and we will be back in about 20 minutes.

[Recess.]

Mr. SAXTON. General Downing, while I was gone, I thought about

talking with Bill Young about moving SOCOM headquarters to

Washington. I decided otherwise. [Laughter.]

I had a few minutes to think about the testimony that we heard,

and it is very encouraging testimony in this respect.

Military and political leaders have always known that the threat

constantly changes, and therefore our capabilities to meet the

threat have to constantly change as well. It goes without saying.

It is a very basic principle.

And in the case of the Global War on Terror, that is as true

today as it has ever been. And we found out that we had some

weaknesses in the 1980’s, and in 1987 we took some steps to try

to change to face that threat.

We found out the threat changed again in the—maybe it didn’t

change again, but it manifested itself in the early 1990’s, and we

recognized that the conventional force was less capable of dealing

with it and the Special Operations Command was more capable of

dealing with it.

And recently, as I flew from Balad to Baghdad, after hearing

briefings about the oil flow, the electricity, and on that helicopter

flight, I looked down at Iraqis with hoes and rakes and picks, and

no tractors, I recognized that there was not only work to be done

in the oil sector and in the electrical sector, utility sector, but in

the agricultural sector as well.

And when we got back to Baghdad and had a chance to talk with

the U.S. ambassador, I realized as I sat in, I don’t know, over 100

degrees of heat and watched them elect their first speaker, and

was introduced to some number of their parliamentarians, I recognized that the State Department had a lot of work to do.

And I came back to this country and talked to General Vines,

who had just come back, and I said how are we doing. He said,

well, the military was doing okay. But he said in the other sectors,

we are not doing as well—not doing very well, maybe he said.
12

Actually, he was more graphic than that. He said some things,

though, that led me to believe that the way that we are meeting

the threat today in Iraq, even though we have tried to change to

meet it better, is not very good.

One of the changes that we recognized is that people who were

there on the ground before me, before I was, before I had these

thoughts that I just expressed to you, we recognized that there was

a need for better coordination among agencies and gave General

Brown the job of synchronizing the activities involved in the Global

War on Terror.

So we are trying to make the changes that are necessary to better enable us to meet the threat and solve the problems of the

Global War on Terror. And so within that context, all of your testimony is very welcome, and your ideas are very, very welcome.

And we want to help make that happen, of course, in conjunction

with the people who are currently in SOCOM, and the military

leadership at the Pentagon as well.

Let me just ask this. If you had a blank sheet of paper—no, let’s

start where we are now. If you had your wish list, what are the

three or four things in order to meet this threat that you would do

differently?

Mr. Boot, you testified last. Why don’t you take a stab at that

first?

Mr. BOOT. Well, I think the big thing upon which there is wide

agreement is the need to have better human intelligence, better

knowledge of foreign cultures and languages and societies. The

question upon which it is very difficult to find an answer is how

do you achieve that.

I mean, we all talk about let’s do more language training, let’s

do more of this and that, but is that really going to achieve the

goals that we need to achieve?

And I think the problem is that given the current bureaucratic

structures it is very, very hard to do that. Structures such as the

personnel rotation policies, where even in specialized units like the

Army Special Forces, you have officers who have to rotate in and

out for various career development reasons, where they have to

spend a little time in the field, a little time in staff jobs, schools,

et cetera, et cetera.

And it makes it very hard to maintain that kind of very deep

knowledge of one specific area where you might wind up operating,

and the same problem exists in the State Department, in the CIA

and elsewhere in the government, because all of our personnel policies, which I think are really in some ways at the root of the problem here, are designed for rotation and to create well-rounded individuals, essentially, well-rounded officers, well-rounded State Department officers, well-rounded CIA officers.

And that is a commendable goal, and we need those well-rounded

people, but what it means it that we don’t really have the people

who are the world’s living top experts on places like Waziristan or

Anbar Province or wherever our forces may be operating.

And I think what we need to do is basically create exceptions

within our current system. We need to carve out some people who

are not going to be generalists, some people who are not going to

be rotating, some people who are not going to be on the fast track
13

to the top, but who can stay in one place or one area for decades

at a time and gain the kind of knowledge that the Brits—and the

Brits did this so well in the 19th century, when they had people

like T.E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton, and Gertrude Bell

and others who were these kind of eccentric characters but who

were incredible repositories of information on the very areas of the

world where the British Empire was operating.

And we need those same kind of people, too. They exist, and

there are Americans who fit these categories, and I meet them

whenever I go around the world.

No matter how terrible the place, you always find American

expats who are living there, except they are usually working as aid

workers, or journalists or some other capacity in the private sector.

They are not working for the U.S. Government. And we need to

harness those kinds of people for the U.S. Government.

And so my idea for creating an OSS is just one thought I threw

out there, and perhaps a clumsy one, for how do you kind of create

this carve-out, this set-aside, from the cookie-cutter personnel policies that govern most of the military and most of the other government agencies, so you can create this kind of true expertise that

we can draw upon and build the kind of personal relationships we

really need in order to pacify some of these troubled areas that give

rise to terrorism.

Mr. SAXTON. General Downing.

General DOWNING. I would say, and it re-emphasizes something

I said in my opening remarks, we need an interagency process that

works. I don’t know, Mr. Chairman, if you can legislate something

like that. But certainly, the executive branch has to come up with

it. It doesn’t work here.

It works better in the field, but it always does, because when you

get out in the field you have people trying to solve their own problems and realizing they have to work together.

One of the things that is just killing us, beyond the Washington

problem, is when you get to the field the other parts of the United

States government are not there. In other words, you don’t have

the kind of expertise from the State Department that you need

throughout the area.

I was in Al Anbar Province, I guess, five times in the last couple

of years, and they had a Political Advisor (POLAD) out there, a foreign service officer, that had been out there almost two years. I

think he was on his third or fourth Marine commander.

And this guy knew that province inside and out. I mean, he

knew every tribe. He knew the leaders. He knew how things fit together. But you know, he is kind of a one man. Where are the rest

of the 18 provinces? You know, how are they covered? There is a

few of those.

You see the same thing out in Afghanistan. I was in Oruzgan

Province in February, talked to the province reconstruction team,

asked them—you know, they have had some FBI people. They were

doing well. Asked them what they needed, and the head of the

province reconstruction team, female Military Police (M.P.) officer

who was a Russian foreign area officer specialist, very impressive

woman, said the thing they really needed were their two Department of Agriculture people who left last summer.
14

And I said, why? They said because they really added value to

what they were trying to do, and the Afghans trusted them, and

they were really making some headway. I said, well, why did they

leave? They left because the Department of Agriculture didn’t have

enough money to go ahead and extend their contracts.

So we have got to bring the interagency into the fight. I think

there is a lot of duplication of effort between the Center for Special

Operations (CSO), the National Counter-Proliferation Center

(NCPC) and JSOC. I really think that we probably need to either

move the CSO to JSOC or move it to the CTC. I think we would

get more out of it.

My JSOC comment about the SECDEF, I think that would do it.

And then these five JSODAs that bring black and white together

is the way I would go. During your vote, two of us talked. We

talked with some subject matter experts here in the room.

There is also another good case to do OSS II, as Max presents,

or as Mike and I have talked about some kind of a JTF, but something that brings this together, that gets this direct action world

and this UW/FID world and all the HUMINT operations tied together so they support each other.

A lot of distrust there, and we are not getting optimal results.

Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Vickers.

Mr. VICKERS. I think we are on a pretty good path right now for

this long war. I think there are a couple shortfalls that if I could

be king for a day I would work on resolving. The big one is really

how the U.S. Government implements GWOT strategy and integrates elements of national power.

The NCTC is really more of a roles assigner and monitoring organization, to create integrated effects between agency, military,

war of ideas, financial interdiction.

We really don’t have that kind of thing either globally in Washington. And as General Downing said, there is a lot of duplication,

but we really don’t have the national level, other than setting

broad strategic policy, that is actually monitoring global operations

and integrating them.

So I think we have a ways to go on U.S. Government organization, interagency organization. I would underscore several of the

things General Downing said in that area.

Related to that is still some work in organizational capabilities.

I think DOD is well on its way. They need to do a better job in

languages and a few things, but made big strides in the past few

years.

And if we continue on this path and resource it—and SOCOM

will require significantly more resources to implement this plan. It

will probably require another 50 percent increase in their budget

or so over the program period. But they are well on their way.

I think the CIA is well on its way toward transforming from a

Cold War force to a GWOT force. Now, they have got a very young

workforce right now, and that is a problem, because you have to

season these folks.

I think that is less true in the other areas of the government in

terms of war of ideas or in terms of an expeditionary foreign service. We have a ways to go in that area and creating the capabilities

that we will need to do the fight.
15

Mr. SAXTON. Thank you.

Mr. Larsen, feel free to jump in here at any time. But I just want

to advance one set of ideas based on something that happened very

recently.

Yesterday, General Eikenberry was here, and in his testimony he

talked about the reorganization or re-emergence of the Taliban. So

there continue to be security issues, and our Operational Detachment Alpha (ODAs) seem to be doing a pretty good job leveraging

indigenous forces against the Taliban. So we are working that

angle.

When he was asked what is your biggest need in Afghanistan,

he said $50 million for roads. And so we pursued that, and it once

again emphasized to me the need for interagency cooperation and

international cooperation.

So General Eikenberry turned to the State Department representative who was there and said tell the congressman how we

are doing with the international effort. So the U.S. agency called

the State Department is now working an international set of issues

trying to get together $50 million to build that big loop that we

need and other things.

And then we got to talking about what else do you need. He said

well, we need more activities about people who can make it profitable for Afghans to grow something besides poppies. And so there

is a need for that kind of expertise as well.

And of course, to know more about all of that and the indigenous

problems, we need intel. And so both in Iraq and Afghanistan we

see that our military guys are there doing what they are trained

to do, doing a good job, and have identified different sets of needs

in the two countries, but a variety of different kinds of needs that

we are not geared to meet, effectively, at least.

So with that, let me just go to Mr. Larsen.

Mr. LARSEN. Sure, and really bouncing off of that statement, I

think a very general assessment—and obviously we can get into details—a general assessment is the PRTs tend to be working better

in Afghanistan, generally, than they are in Iraq. And this is a fundamental critique that General McCaffrey brought back from his

recent trips to both countries as well.

And I was wondering if, maybe starting with you, General Downing, you can help us, perhaps with focus a little bit on our subject

matter today, but can you help us understand why there is a general difference between, again, the relative success of the PRTs in

Afghanistan and Iraq?

General DOWNING. Sir, I would say it is directly related to the

security situation. I think in Afghanistan we are able to put them

out. They are able to, you know, depending upon local conditions,

travel. But I think generally in Afghanistan the security situation

is better.

Some of the places in Iraq are just too dangerous to put them

out. And of course, we made a decision to live out of bases, which

means we get concentrated, and we are also, when we are in those

bases, completely cut off from contact with the Iraqi people.

That, added to our sunglasses, our body armor and our helmets,

kind of create, you know, a formidable presence that oftentimes
16

isn’t conducive to getting the people-to-people kind of relationships.

I think it is directly related to security.

Mr. LARSEN. Yes.

Mr. Vickers, Mr. Boot, anything to add?

Mr. VICKERS. I would agree totally. And the security situation is

a function of the unsettled politics. The Afghan people were weary

of 25 years of war. The political process worked really well after

Kabul fell and installing a government right away, and so you had

better initial conditions.

Now, there have been, you know, some resurgence of the Taliban,

but it is still a very, very different situation than Iraq, where lots

of things are still unsettled. And so expecting, you know, sort of the

PRTs to be the savior, you know, it is going to take time for that

to work.

The Iraqis are going to have to establish some measure of security, and then we will be able to work on the development side.

Mr. BOOT. I will just pick up on the points that were just made.

I think absolutely we need more security right now in Iraq, before

you can have more development, and I think more security will

probably require more troops, at least in a place like Baghdad

where I think there is a real security crisis going on right now.

But to pick up on a point that General Downing made, which I

completely agree, because I was struck by this as I traveled around

Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few months, is the extent to which

we are walling ourselves off from the indigenous population on

these giant bases, where you go to places like our logistics support

area, Anaconda, up near Balad, or Camp Victory at Baghdad. I am

sure you have all been to these places. They are gigantic, tens of

thousands of people, and you could just as easily be at Fort Hood,

Texas. There is almost no way of knowing that you are actually in

a foreign country.

And most of the personnel we have in those countries spend most

of their time on those bases where I think anybody like Mike Vickers or General Downing who has been engaged out in the field will

tell you you have got to be out in the field.

You have got to be interacting with the civilian population in

order to have success in a counterinsurgency. And very few of our

forces do that, for a variety of logistical and force protection reasons.

So much of our effort basically is going to sustain these giant

bases, not necessarily to actually fight and win the

counterinsurgency, which is the reason why those bases are there

in the first place.

And I think, just to pick up on another point that was briefly

mentioned in terms of the interagency process, I think one of the

real gaps that we are missing is an agency that specifically focuses

on nation-building. because you see what we had to do in the case

of Iraq.

And a lot of the reason why we have the current problems in

Iraq is we didn’t have an institution that would come in and run

a place like Iraq. The Administration created the ORHA from

scratch two months before the invasion in 2003 and then created

CPA from scratch in the middle of the war.
17

And neither of those organizations functioned very well, and we

don’t have this natural repository within the government of skill in

nation-building.

A lot of it falls to the military because they are the guys on the

spot, but they are not trained in it, and they often don’t want to

do it. They have to do it, but they wish there would be somebody

who could come in with the skill set to do that.

And the skills do exist in places like the Department of Agriculture and State and Treasury, and in the civilian sector and various other places. But there is no organization that knits those

skills together so that in peace time, so we are ready when a war

breaks out or when a country disintegrates to come in and run

these things.

And I think that is one of the big organizational gaps that we

have to fill.

Mr. LARSEN. So working backwards from that, or maybe getting

more particulars, especially with the subject of this particular hearing, in Iraq what role does SOF play, say, in Iraq to get us to that

point where there can be something more like an Afghanistan PRT

team on the ground as opposed to what we are doing right now?

General DOWNING. Well, of course, you have got the one special

operations force which is doing the manhunt, direct action stuff.

We all know about them, and they get, you know, the majority of

the press and the publicity.

The other part of special operations, though, are actually working and training with the indigenous battalions, generally the special battalions, special police commandos, Iraqi special forces.

And then there is a significant endeavor with our regular special

operations forces on human intelligence operations, which have

been quite successful, which have benefitted not only the U.S.

forces but have also benefitted the Iraqi forces.

In my judgment, those are exactly the kind of activities that we

want them to do. In other words, we want to get more into the unconventional warfare and more into the foreign internal defense

missions, and I think they are doing that.

While I don’t have the details of this, I understand that there are

frictions on the ground between the special operations forces and

the conventional units, the conventional units wanting the special

operations guys to live and act and behave more like they do.

And that has always been a problem. We used to have a problem

in Vietnam with that, although we keep the special forces teams

very separate. A lot of conventional commanders didn’t like their

lack of haircuts or, you know, maybe the way they wore their

knives and their weapons. These are small things.

We had this problem in Haiti when we went down there in 1994,

but these little irritants sometimes impede operations. I can remember in Afghanistan—and we have got several Afghanistan veterans here; special forces tell these stories better than I can—that,

you know, they pretty much went indigenous, grew their hair and

their beards and everything.

You know, after a few months some of these guys with their hair

growth looked like hajis. I mean, you couldn’t tell them from another haji. But they showed up back at an American base camp,
18

and the first thing a conventional commander told them was to get

cleaned up.

Well, they weren’t doing that just because they wanted to look

different. They were doing that because it fit in with the people

that they were working with, and you don’t want to stand out. And

so they were doing the kind of things that you do in an unconventional warfare mission. These are the kind of things that really bite

us.

But I think they are doing what we want them to do in Iraq. The

problem is that there is not enough of them. And you know, that

is probably the only U.S. troops I would like to see more of.

I don’t know what Max meant about more troops for security. I

don’t want to see another American soldier go to Iraq, not that I

am worried about casualties and these kind of things—of course, I

am. I think the key to Iraq, and the key to every country that we

are involved in this struggle with, is the host country.

And I think what we have got to do, and what we have done very

successfully, is build the host country forces. Now, in Iraq, of

course, we have got to build a civilian ministry that is going to run

those.

That is where the effort—I don’t want to see any more U.S.

forces go in there, because I think the U.S. forces are marginally

effective. I mean, they are great. They are doing great things. But

their presence inflames the Iraqis. There is just no other way to

say it. You know?

In general, a U.S. patrol going through a street angers them, and

I think we need to get more Iraqis on the street.

Mr. LARSEN. You know, we may have an opportunity to talk to

special operations folks and chat with them about their experience

in some of these conflicts.

Mr. Vickers.

Mr. VICKERS. Well, I would strongly add my concurrence to that

last point about Iraq strategy going forward. And we have shared

this testimony with some high-level consumers recently.

On special forces, I agree with everything General Downing said.

The one piece that we might add: The biggest bang for the buck

we are getting with SOF in Iraq right now is with the direct action

forces, the manhunting and JSOC, with the special forces working

with the special units, the Iraqi special operations brigade and the

special police counterpart, and then the intelligence stuff that General Downing mentioned.

And it is hard to do better than we are doing that stuff right

now. There is probably 4.5 special forces companies there, or a little more than—about two-thirds of our effort, that there is this friction with the conventional forces.

They are probably not being as optimally utilized in some of

these badland areas where they might work with the Iraqis to

bring some security where development could go.

One way to resolve that potentially is to give them an area of operation, give them an area in Iraq and say you know, senior SOF

commander, this is your area, and as General Downing suggested,

you may have some conventional forces in support of you, but give

them a little more freedom of action.
19

And again, that is just a thought. You know, I don’t want to tell

commanders over there how to do their business. And so it is one

way, you know, potentially, we might get a little mileage out of a

portion of the force.

But Iraq is going to be a protracted conflict, and it is going to

be won by the locals, as General Downing said.

Mr. LARSEN. Can I just continue?

And just to clarify, Mr. Vickers, that is your personal assessment

on that.

Mr. VICKERS. Yes, that is my personal assessment.

Mr. LARSEN. Okay.

The next question I have sort of gets beyond Iraq and Afghanistan and has to get us thinking about other places. Of course, a lot

of our attention is focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, and certainly

that is what we read about. But there are other places: Djibouti,

Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Philippines.

Two things: What are your personal assessments about how special forces are doing there in the tasks that we have asked them

to do?

And second, that begs the question, where are we going to engage down the road? I will just ask it generally and——

General DOWNING. Well, you hit the areas. And, Mr. Congressman, you are obviously very well informed on that. And we are seeing right now what is happening in Somalia, because, you know,

that kind of answers part of your question. There is stuff that is

going on now that we have tried to mount operations against and

we have not.

It is not the military’s particular job. It is another government

agency that has to. But of course, the military has to perform that.

In my opening comments, I said we need to get ready for the future

war, and that is exactly what I was talking about.

There are just very few precious assets left to go around the rest

of the world, but yet this is where the new fight is, and this is

where we have got to go to develop these proxies, these partners.

But once again, this is going to have to be done under a broader

umbrella than the military, and you are really talking about, in

these countries, the country teams, headed by the country teams

under which those military elements will be working.

And so they have got to have a comprehensive political, social,

economic program that is going to fight these insurgencies. One of

the things that is very troubling is in many of these countries they

are going to have to undergo profound political change within those

countries if we are to dry up the causes that people are joining this

insurgency.

I mean, you know, you can just look at where these people are

coming from, and when you interrogate these people, these are not

poor, ignorant peasants. These, in many cases, are well-educated,

middle-class, wealthy and psychologically stable. These are not psychopaths.

They are electing to join this movement because they are

disenfranchised citizens of whatever states they come from. And so

this has to be addressed if we are going to make progress. And of

course, that is like watching paint dry. It is going to take a long

time.
20

But that is what we have got to get ginned up for if we are going

to be successful.

Mr. BOOT. If I could just—I think there is a big distinction between the kind of conflicts you mentioned in your second question

and what you were talking about in the first one, which was really

Iraq and Afghanistan, because I think when you look at places like

the Horn of Africa or Northern Africa or the Pankisi Gorge, or the

Philippines, or all these other places, those, to my mind, those are

really SOF wars.

Those are the places where you are going to have special forces

on the front lines. And I think they are doing a tremendous job of

these kinds of foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare

missions, very small units operating very low profile, and basically

trying to manage these situations, so we don’t wind up in a situation like Iraq, where you have 130,000 troops occupying the country.

Your ideal of counterinsurgency is the opposite. In fact, what we

did in El Salvador in the 1980’s, when you had 55 special forces

advisers, and you can argue that they achieved more than 500,000

troops did in Vietnam. I mean, in some ways, that is the ideal if

you can achieve it.

But Afghanistan and especially Iraq are in a somewhat different

category, because we didn’t pursue the kind of low-intensity strategy, and probably for good reasons. I am not sure the low-intensity

strategy would have necessarily worked in Iraq.

But so we go in there, we destroy their existing government, we

disband their existing army and security structure, and then you

can’t say okay, then we are going to send 55 special forces trainers

to recreate the army and the police forces in Iraq and restore order.

That is not going to work.

You need a bigger presence. And in general, I am very much in

sympathy with the outlook of General Downing and Mike Vickers,

as I understand it, basically, which is more is less, and concentrate

on the special forces, don’t have a big conventional footprint.

I think a lot of what we do with the conventional footprint is

counterproductive. A lot of it is basically a self-licking ice cream

cone, where the resources are going to sustain the bases that we

operate instead of actually fighting the insurgency, as I suggested

earlier.

But nevertheless, I think that when we come in and totally take

over a country with over 100,000 troops, we do have some responsibility to restore law and order.

And I think in the case of Baghdad, for example, right now,

where we have three combat battalions operating within Baghdad,

fewer than 10,000 troops, that is just not going to be enough, given

the rate at which it takes to stand up Iraqi army and security

forces which will be able to go into the fight.

So I think you can’t have 100 percent hard and fast principles

that you abide by in every single case. I think 99 times out of 100,

you do want to go the low-intensity route. You do want to favor

special forces. You do want to put them on the front lines and keep

conventional forces as far back as possible.
21

But when you have invaded a country and taken it over, I think

that is a different set of circumstances, where you have to deal

with that situation as it develops.

Mr. SAXTON. Let me—go ahead, I am sorry.

Mr. VICKERS. Just quickly on the—I think the future of the long

war or Global War on Terror will predominantly be persistent operations in countries with which the U.S. is not at war, leveraging

locals.

And so as we redeploy forces and take on this additional capacity that the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the program

budget decisions will create, we will probably have somewhere on

the order of 80 ODAs to 90 ODAs deployed in 20 priority countries,

and they may change, but they will span continents, and then 40

or so other countries.

And so the key will be to have a distributed global presence

where we are working with lots of locals to suppress this global insurgency down to very low levels.

And so if we are successful—and, you know, we may not always

be successful—rather than sort of what is the next hot spot, it will

really be how are we driving this global threat down to lower levels

across regions, South Asia, Central Asia, Trans-Caucuses, Sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera.

Mr. SAXTON. Let me change the subject slightly. The Administration and Congress jointly made the decision over the last several

years to increase the number of folks in SOCOM. And in so doing,

when this idea first came up, the first question that we had—I can

remember asking it the first time out in Coronado—how do we do

this?

And the answer was painstakingly carefully, because we have got

to have a quality of person and a quality training program that

gets us to where we need to be. We are in the process of this expansion. My question is how is it working.

General DOWNING. I will take a first crack at it. I think it is

working unevenly, by different elements, which you would expect

it would. I think the special forces that started this X-ray program

which takes people in off the street—and which we haven’t done

since the 1970’s. And I think we have got over 300 of these now

in the force, of these men, and I understand that they are performing extremely well. So that has worked very, very well.

The Sea Air Land (SEALs), I mean, traditionally—and it has not

changed, to my knowledge, very much since 9/11—about 22 percent, 23 percent of the enlisted men and about 78 percent of the

officers make it through Basic Underwater/Demolition Training

(BUDs). I mean, that has historically been the rate, and they have

tried everything you can think of to try to get that rate up.

Mr. SAXTON. Have the number of trainers in BUDs increased?

General DOWNING. I can’t answer that, Mr. Chairman. I know

somebody from the command could, so that has been difficult. The

air crews, they have been able to do that. They have been able to

keep that up. I think that they are going to have enough crews to

be able to man the additional aircraft that you funded.

The Rangers, you know, basically, those are entry-level soldiers

that come in and get screened and go. I know one of the things that

we recommended in our report to the SECDEF was they add an-
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other two Ranger battalions. They would be helpful for the force

structure, for the actual fighting now.

But the main reason we recommended they add about 1,000

more Rangers to the force structure is the Rangers become the

prime source of candidates after 3 years or 4 years in the Rangers

to go in to regular Army special forces and into the Delta force.

And so what it does is it gives you a better pool to draw from,

or it gives you a larger pool, so that you could build those forces.

Once again, it takes time.

The Delta force is probably 70 percent Rangers who have come

out of either a Ranger special forces track or directly from a Ranger regiment to Delta.

Mr. SAXTON. How does the Marine Special Operations Command

(MARSOC) look to you?

General DOWNING. I understand that the MARSOC is building

well, and I have not talked with Denny Hejlik for, oh, probably six

months, but you know, my take is that that is going well.

And I am not involved in any of the, of course, visceral issues

that were attendant to bringing the MARSOC on, but I think the

MARSOC is a good idea, and I think SOCOM is going to be able

to make good use of those Marines.

Mr. SAXTON. This expansion program to me seems to be very important, but as was said to me when the subject was new to me,

certainly you do it very carefully.

Do you have any comments to make, Mr. Boot, Mr. Vickers?

Mr. VICKERS. Yes. I would just underscore a couple of points

there, that you need a multifaceted approach to this.

One is things that aren’t obvious at first light, like the Rangers,

in addition to their very valuable operational role, really being seed

corn for the rest of the force, and so if you can grow that portion,

then you can potentially grow the others, and having these things

in balance.

The 18X program was a very good initiative. That is how I came

into the force in the 1970’s. They didn’t call it that—or early

1970’s, but it is the same basic idea. And so you are able to attract

some characters that you might not get into the Army other ways.

The retention and incentive programs to retain the force we

have—and some of the initiatives that General Downing talked

about, and one that I did—one on the officer side, that you see that

if this is main effort and our main war, that SOF officers then can

compete for Geographic Combatant Command (GCC) positions and

senior level commands will help with retention and motivation.

And then the senior enlisted programs, which we are starting to

make some progress on as well.

So really, attention to all this, and going about it reasonably

gradually, which I think the department is on that path. Where we

have gotten in trouble before, like in Vietnam, where we have done

rapid expansions in shorter periods of time, quality goes down.

They don’t look like they are headed on that reckless a path right

now. But this is a daunting problem; same thing with expanding

the CIA. I mean, it is just very, very hard to do without sacrificing

quality.

Mr. BOOT. I think one of the dangers involved here is that you

may further put even greater emphasis on direct action as a result
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of this expansion than even exists today within SOCOM, because,

hard as it is to train men to become Seals or Delta Force or some

of these other elite special mission units, I think it is even harder

to train long-term type of cultural skills and abilities that you need

for special forces.

And in fact, I was talking to somebody in the audience here earlier, and he was saying well, you know, you can train commandos,

but in terms of special forces you really have to educate them.

It is not training. It is a long-term process of educating and seasoning them in the field, where the skills are not—I mean, you can

quantify these basic military skills of the Seals in the underwater

demolition course or, you know, shoot houses or whatever. I mean,

you know what the standards are.

But it is much more difficult to quantify the standards that you

need for people in special forces, because a lot of what you need is

basically the ability to manipulate people, to interact with foreigners, all these kinds of skills which are very hard to put a hard and

fast rule on and say that, you know, we have reached this standard, and we are going to have that standard, and we have X number of people at that standard.

It is very hard to do, and so I think there is a real danger that

as you expand out, what you are going to expand is the number

of basic people who are skilled, you know, shooters and paratroopers and all the rest of it, but not necessarily the skills that I think

in some ways are the most important in the war on terrorism with

the softer side of the cultural knowledge and the intelligence and

all the rest of it.

And I think one way to counteract some of that is, as I suggested

before, the absolute imperative to recruit foreigners, to not limit

our recruiting to people who are American citizens or green card

holders.

I mean, I was talking to General Downing during the break, and

he was recounting how under the Lodge Act in the 1950’s, I mean,

you had entire A-teams who spoke nothing but Czech or Hungarian

or some other language from Eastern Europe.

I mean, wouldn’t it be pretty amazing if we had entire A-teams

today where the members spoke nothing but Arabic or Pashto? I

mean, these are exactly the kind of skills that we need. And it is

very, very difficult to get it by taking kind of white-bread Americans and training them up to infiltrate these foreign societies.

I mean, you can do some of that, and we need to do some of that,

but much more so we need to recruit from within those societies

so that we are not just getting these kind of direct action skills, but

we are also getting the kind of cultural and softer side skills that

I think are ultimately going to be more important.

Mr. SAXTON. Interesting idea.

Mr. Vickers, we are now going to go to Mr. Kline.

Mr. VICKERS. If I can just add one point on that, there is also

a reciprocal relationship that is important on the UW direct action

side as well, that with the exception of the surgical special mission

units, some of the commando stuff tends to be a young man’s game.

And you know, at some point the body just can’t carry the 150

pounds anymore, you know, and so you reach your mid 30’s and

you can’t keep up as well. That is not true for Unconventional War-
24

fare (UW)/Foreign Internal Defense (FID), and for intelligence collection missions, which are dominant missions to the GWOT.

And so part of the challenge here is also to retain, if I may say

it as well, some of the old geezers, the 40-year-olds, who perform

extremely valuable things but can’t necessarily do the knife-in-theteeth stuff anymore. You know, they have passed that point.

And they will help us a lot with the GWOT, and we need to have

a personnel system that lets us do that.

Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Kline.

Mr. KLINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. I apologize for being a little tardy coming back after the votes, so I missed a little bit of the

discussion, and I caught the tail end of the answer to Mr. Larsen’s

question. I will try not to be too duplicative, whatever that word

is.

We have had some pretty interesting recommendations from Mr.

Boot concerning perhaps a new organization and recruiting only

foreign language speakers. And that is interesting. I am not sure

if I buy onto the idea of bringing people into our Special Operations

Command who speak only Arabic. But it is an interesting notion.

I did notice, Mr. Vickers, that you recommended that we in Congress look at section 517, which is limiting the numbers of E8s and

E9s.

In that vein, could you give us, you know, an example like that—

it is open to any of you—of some specifics where you see a problem,

perhaps because of the expansion or for any other reason, where

we ought to be looking at making a change to make the Special Operations Command work better?

Mr. VICKERS. Yes. It really gets into the idea of can you be a specialist longer. And the special mission units have more exemptions

and deal with this better, so, for example, you know, as you move

up the ranks you have to have broader and broader command.

And so typically, an E8—or certainly when you get to E9, even

in the special mission units, you need to move out and take on

broader command. But they are able to use E8s as snipers or small

unit team leaders that is very, very different from the rest of the

Army. And it is a very, very valuable thing to capture all that experience.

That then descends as you move down into the other elements

of the special operations community, that you lose the ability to

have operators as E9s, for example.

Mr. KLINE. Right. No, I understand. I understand your recommendation on 517. What I am asking is do you have other recommendations.

Mr. VICKERS. In this area on personnel, or——

Mr. KLINE. Or anything. You came to us with a recommendation,

I thought—I wrote it down as one—that we ought to look at section

517, which currently limits the numbers of E8s and E9s, and we

ought to look at changing that.

Mr. VICKERS. Yes.

Mr. KLINE. I agree with you. I think that is great. Now what I

am asking is——

Mr. VICKERS. I got it.

Mr. KLINE [continuing]. Do you have another one?
25

Mr. VICKERS. Yes. Another one is section 1208, which is the unconventional warfare or paramilitary funding that allows SOF to

work with the regulars. We had a big problem in 2001 in Operation

Enduring Freedom with this. Congress addressed this a couple of

years back.

As we move into an expanded definition of unconventional warfare, rather than applying it against state sponsors of terrorism,

but applying it globally against transnational actors, where you use

surrogates to try to attack al Qaeda, the resources are likely to go

up beyond the current level.

SOCOM is working on plans in this area. I encourage you to look

at them and look at the resourcing requirements, which is, I think,

well above the current levels. But that is about all I would say on

it right now.

Mr. KLINE. Okay.

General, did you have any thoughts?

General DOWNING. No, I think SOCOM also has some recommendations for you, if they have not given them to you already,

on some reforms they would like to see in their acquisition system

allowing them to do some things faster, and perhaps not get caught

up in that DOD acquisition bureaucracy.

Mr. KLINE. Wouldn’t that be splendid?

General DOWNING. That would.

Mr. KLINE. Not just for SOCOM.

General DOWNING. Maybe they could be the cutting edge of it, to

get it started.

Mr. KLINE. And just a comment I would like to make, because

we have been talking about, particularly Mr. Boot, about the softer

perhaps part of SOF, and the special forces role of training and

working with indigenous personnel, and just a comment.

The last couple of trips that I have taken to Iraq, we had the

chance to talk to our Green Berets who were training the Iraqi—

it used to be called the Iraqi counterterrorism force. They have

changed the names because a couple of weeks have passed, so you

have got to do that—and just doing a terrific job in that training.

And by the way, the Iraqis, in our Special Operations Command’s judgment and in our own, looking at it, we are doing a very

good job. That is kind of a cross.

That is not bringing them, Mr. Boot, into our Special Operations

Command, but it is certainly working with people who speak Arabic and are able better to work with the local population. But

again, that is in Iraq. And perhaps we ought to look at things like

that elsewhere.

And then finally, General McCrystal—thank goodness they are

doing some kicking down doors and tracking and following. I still

think that is an important part of what we are doing. And the killing of Zarqawi and many other things, classified and not, that they

are doing are still very impressive, a very important part of this

war.

And I don’t mean that to be argumentative with Mr. Boot, because I think it is important that we do the other aspect as well.

And I am sorry that I missed the discussion with Mr. Larsen about

what we are doing in Africa, because that seems to me to be very

ripe for that very kind of work right now.
26

And perhaps if we had a lot of time, I would like to talk about

what has been going on in Somalia and Mogadishu and certain

things that have not gone well there. But I won’t.

I will yield back.

Mr. BOOT. Can I just briefly——

Mr. KLINE. Oh, sure.

Mr. BOOT. Is it okay if I respond very briefly?

Mr. KLINE. Oh, yes.

Mr. BOOT. Because, I mean, I completely agree with you. I don’t

mean to say that we shouldn’t be kicking down doors or we

shouldn’t be killing Zarqawi. Obviously, that is a good thing and

a vital thing. I am just saying it is not enough.

I mean, it is a necessary part of the war on terrorism, but there

is a lot more that we have to do. And it is the other parts that I

think we are not as far advanced as we are, because, in terms of

the special mission units, they are the best in the world.

They are tremendous professionals at what they do, and there is

a little bit of room for improvement in terms of how they coordinate

with other forces, but they are very, very good. But what I am suggesting is there is more room for improvement on the other side.

And just to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that we should be recruiting people who only speak Arabic. Obviously, people who are going

to be in the U.S. armed forces or interact with them have to have

a basic command of English as well.

What I was just suggesting was that we need to recruit native

speakers of Arabic, people who will be bilingual, but it is very hard

to become bilingual, truly, if you start off growing up here and trying to learn a foreign language through the school system.

You have a much better chance of really having that native level

ability if you are, in fact, a native and you can speak both English

and your native language.

Mr. KLINE. I am glad that you clarified that, because I very

clearly heard you say a couple of times spoke only Arabic, and so

I am——

Mr. BOOT. No, what I was referring to was General——

Mr. KLINE. Arabic as well as English.

Mr. BOOT. Right. No, I mean, what General Downing was talking

about was, I think, if I understood him correctly, was under the

Lodge Act, when we were bringing Eastern Europeans in the

1950’s into the special forces, and you had units where their level

of proficiency in a language like Czech was high enough that they

could converse among themselves in Czech.

It wasn’t that they didn’t know English. This was the language

they could converse in among themselves.

Just a final point, if I could very briefly make, about following

up on the point that Mike made about retention, which I agree is

very important.

And I think one of the paradoxes or one of the kind of screwy

situations we have gotten ourselves into here is why do the Special

Operations Forces have such a hard time retaining their most

skilled and better operators.

And it is because they are being recruited by private security

contractors at very high rates of pay. And who is paying those pri-
27

vate security contractors? It is the U.S. Government. Ultimately

those people are being paid out the same pot of money.

And so basically, the U.S. Government is competing against itself

for the services of the people that it trained and paid for many decades in the Special Operations Forces, and we are basically giving

these contracts to Dyncorp or others to recruit those people out of

the special force, and then we have to give more incentives to keep

those people in the special forces.

So I don’t know what the solution is, but to an outsider it seems

like a somewhat screwy situation.

Mr. KLINE. Thank you.

Mr. VICKERS. May I add one point on the use of foreigners? Another approach as well, which—I was trained by early Lodge Act

guys, but when I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, we

were—I can’t say too much about this, but we were able to use foreign SOF a lot.

We established relationships with—who had, you know, exquisite

cultural knowledge and language that we could never match and

skills, and then we could direct for strategic purposes. And that is

a very, very valuable asset for the U.S. Government, and something that we can do more of down the road.

Mr. SAXTON. Let me just add a thought to this foreign language

line of conversation that we have been having. I would go at least

two steps further. It has also been mentioned here today as a next

step to understand that we need people who understand local customs. A pretty simple concept.

And to go one step further, I think we need to understand that

people in different parts of the world think a whole lot differently

than we do.

And tell you how little experience that I had, the first time I

went to Iraq back in 2003 or 2004, whatever it was, we went to

visit a school, and while we were in the school—it was actually

Congressional Delegation (CODEL) Hunter. And while we were in

the school, the teachers were being just as nice as they could be.

And as we were getting ready to leave, they said, you Americans

are here to help, right? Yes, ma’am. The teacher gave me a list of

things they needed in the school. And I didn’t think a lot about it

at the time. I took it back to Ambassador Bremer and gave it to

him. I have no idea whatever happened to the list or whether it

got fulfilled or not.

But here is the conclusion that I drew. The Iraqi people lived for

35 years having to make one of two decisions—that is it—basic decisions: Be nice and cooperate with Saddam and be treated well

and have your list fulfilled, or not cooperate with Saddam and be

punished for it.

Those are the decisions that those folks had to make for 35

years. So we as Americans sit in our culture, with our way of

thinking, trying to be creative about all kinds of things, and go do

our own thing, and make thousands of decisions over some period

of time, and the Iraqi people had two decisions they had to make:

Be happy and cooperative with Saddam, or not.

And so the use of indigenous forces, however we decide to structure the process to get there, is absolutely vital to our effort. And
28

we need to give some more thought to how we interface with indigenous folks.

Anyway, we are going to have another series of votes here in a

few minutes. We want to thank you for being with us today.

And I am sure that when I ask you if you will be willing to interface with us on an individual basis as we go forward and try to figure out answers to the problems that we face as to how we change

our way of doing business, I am sure that, as you are all shaking

your head yes, you will be there to help us.

Thank you very much. We appreciate you being here today.

[Whereupon, at 12:31 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X

JUNE 29, 2006

PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

JUNE 29, 2006

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