Oppose Any Foe Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Mark Moyar

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

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  Designed by Amy Quinn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moyar, Mark, 1971–author.

  Title: Oppose any foe : the rise of America’s Special Operations Forces / Mark Moyar.

  Other titles: Rise of America’s special operations forces

  Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016047871 (print) | LCCN 2016048644 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465053933 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465093014 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Special forces (Military science)—United States—History. | United States. Army. Special Forces—History. | Special operations (Military science)—United States—History.

  Classification: LCC UA34.S64 M69 2017 (print) | LCC UA34.S64 (ebook) | DDC 356/.160973—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047871

  E3-20170320-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 Rangers and Forcemen

  CHAPTER 2 Raiders and Frogmen

  CHAPTER 3 OSS

  CHAPTER 4 The Forgotten War

  CHAPTER 5 Vietnam

  CHAPTER 6 JSOC and SOCOM

  CHAPTER 7 Gothic Serpent

  CHAPTER 8 Regime Change

  CHAPTER 9 Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism

  CHAPTER 10 Overreach

  CHAPTER 11 Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More Advance Praise for Oppose Any Foe

  Notes

  Index

  To America’s special operators

  PROLOGUE

  The airplanes entered Somali air space several miles above the earth’s surface, at an altitude where one would expect to find an intercontinental passenger jet traveling from Paris to Singapore. Had a Somali high-adventure company been offering nighttime skydiving excursions, their planes would have been flying at something less than half as high. These aircraft had nonetheless shown up for parachuting, of a sort known in the military as High Altitude, High Opening, or HAHO for short. Designed to prevent hostile ground forces from hearing the parachutes popping open, HAHO jumps require parachutists to spread their canopies after a free fall of only a few seconds, leaving them floating at such high altitudes that they need oxygen tanks to keep breathing on the way down.

  Twenty-four US Navy SEALs, each of them specially trained in the technique, had been assigned to parachute from these fearsome heights onto Somali territory. They checked over their gear one last time, then leaped from the aircraft, one at a time, into a frigid and moonless night. Once the chutes jerked the SEALs out of free fall, the men extended their arms and legs like flying squirrels, so as to guide their canopies during the long glide.

  Monitoring their locations with global positioning system devices, the parachutists steered toward predesignated landing zones near the town of Adado, the capital of a Somali district with several hundred thousand people. American planners had chosen a landing zone several miles outside of town, a clearing where reconnaissance flights on previous nights had spotted no Somalis at this hour. During the descent, the SEALs realized that the intended drop zone was enshrouded in fog, so they initiated a midair discussion over their helmet microphones, at the end of which the team commander decided to shift to an alternate location.

  The burly SEALs, bearing sixty-pound armored vests and a panoply of other gear, thudded down in an area of scrub brush and acacia trees, all twenty-four of them landing safely. With night goggles strapped to their foreheads, they caught sight of one another by the infrared beacon that each man wore on his uniform. The SEALs were not carrying grenades or heavy machine guns but instead brandished precision weapons that would minimize harm to innocent persons, including Heckler & Koch MP-5 and MP-7 machine pistols, highly lethal at short distances, and Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifles, lethal at longer ranges owing to their larger shell and higher muzzle velocity. Each SEAL also possessed a long fighting knife, which could kill an unsuspecting guard without a sound.

  The SEALs had been sent to rescue two captives, thirty-two-year-old Jessica Buchanan of the United States and sixty-year-old Poul Hagen Thisted of Denmark. The pair had been abducted three months earlier while working on a demining project for the Danish Refugee Council. On October 25, 2011, they had been driving by car through southern Somalia when their vehicle was cut off by a large Toyota Land Cruiser, out of which swarmed pirates who banged the butts of their AK-47s on the car’s windows and windshield. Hauling Buchanan and Thisted from the vehicle, the thugs drove them to a desert hideout. A pirate spokesman issued a demand of $45 million in ransom for the two of them.

  The pirates had moved the prisoners almost daily to keep foreign governments and rival kidnappers off their scent. Separated from one another, Buchanan and Thisted received one small can of tuna and one piece of bread per day. After three months of this bleak existence, Buchanan contracted a urinary tract infection. She notified the captors that the infection was going to kill her if left untreated, a piece of information that they conveyed to an American hostage negotiator in an effort to strengthen their bargaining position. When Washington learned that her life was in jeopardy and that US intelligence had drawn a bead on her location, President Barack Obama decided to send in the SEALs.

  According to the intelligence reports, at least nine Somali men were guarding the prisoners, and they were likely to be well armed. The guards might also have dogs, which would begin barking well before the SEALs reached their preferred attack positions. As soon as the guards caught wind of American intruders, moreover, they could alert other pirates or clan members in the area, who could drive to the site with heavy machine guns. The guards might even choose to kill the hostages out of spite or desperation. Then there was the possibility that the SEALs might inadvertently kill the hostages, as had occurred fifteen months earlier when a SEAL team tried to rescue Scottish aid worker Linda Norgrove from the Afghan Taliban.

  Fortunately for the SEALs, the men guarding Buchanan and Thisted had not been trained in the finer arts of hostage handling. They did not have dogs, perhaps because of the generally low esteem in which Somalis held the creatures. More egregiously, all nine of the Somali guards had fallen asleep earlier in the night. At least one of them was supposed to be awake at all times, but the men had trouble keeping their eyes open during night hours because by day they chewed khat, a stimulant whose afternoon high was followed by a big downer in the evening. When the SEALs reached the target, they were astonished to find that the only person walking around was a gaunt Caucasian woman who appeared to resemble the person they had seen in a “proof-of-life” video of Buchanan provided by the kidnappers one month before.

  Earlier that evening, Buchanan had gone to sleep on a mat that was surrounded on all sides by the sleeping mats
of six guards, each of whom lay within twelve inches of her. She and the guards had developed a routine whereby she would say “toilet” when she needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then a guard would give his consent for her to make for the bushes. On this night, however, none of the guards had responded when she awoke in the dark and uttered the word. Walking toward the bushes, she flashed her pen light in order to show any awakening guards that she was not trying to escape. Once she had taken care of business, she returned to her mat and lay back down.

  Moments later, Buchanan began to hear noises. They were faint, but she thought she could make out the breaking of twigs and the scratching of insects or small animals. Five minutes after her trip to the bushes, she heard one of the guards next to her jump to his feet and cock his rifle. The man called the name of his boss once, panic in his voice. Silence. He called the name again, and then other guards sprang up, weapons at the ready.

  Bursts of gunfire shattered the serenity of the night. Buchanan listened as the Somalis screamed orders at one another. Lacking night-vision equipment, the guards were firing blindly in the general direction of the incoming fire. They were knocked to the earth in quick succession, as if a giant bowling ball had rolled into the camp. Buchanan heard shrieks of mortal agony from several men who had been snoozing next to her seconds earlier.

  Remaining flat on the ground, Buchanan bundled herself in a blanket, hoping that the bullets would not find her there. She guessed that another Somali group was trying to kidnap her and her fellow hostage. They might be from al-Shabaab, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, whose fanatical fighters would surely kill the hostages if they gained possession of them.

  Buchanan had not been listening to gunfire for long when she felt someone tugging at her blanket. She clung to it with mad desperation, as if it could protect her from falling into another captor’s clutches. “Jessica!” said a male voice. To her bewilderment, the man had an American accent. She relaxed her grip on the blanket and saw the outlines of several men in black masks. “Jessica! This is the American military. We’ve come to take you home.”

  A big man picked Buchanan up in a fireman carry position and ran from the camp with the speed and grace of an athlete burdened by nothing more than a T-shirt and shorts. She was puzzled by the fact that neither he nor any of the other Americans seemed to need a flashlight to find their way. At a small clearing, the man set her down, then went back to the site of the shooting to retrieve her sandals and medicine bag. More figures arrived in the dark, one of whom she made out as Thisted.

  The gunfire had not lasted long. The SEALs had killed all of the guards without a single injury to themselves or the hostages, and evacuated the camp before any enemy reinforcements could arrive. Once the twenty-four SEALs had assembled at the clearing, they jogged for a few minutes with their precious cargo to a landing site where they had scheduled a rendezvous with the extraction helicopters.

  Through the darkness and the whirling sand, Buchanan could discern three helicopters, one of which she boarded at the signal of a SEAL. Once the aircraft lifted off she was able to see the faces of her rescuers for the first time. Many were younger than she, and they impressed her with their courteousness. One SEAL gave her a folded American flag. “I just started to cry,” Buchanan remembered afterward. “At that point in time I have never in my life been so proud and so very happy to be an American.”

  Eight thousand miles away, Barack Obama was preparing to deliver his 2012 State of the Union Address. He entered the House chamber a few hours after the SEALs had parachuted into Somalia, whereupon he prefaced his address by looking over at Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and saying, “Leon, good job tonight. Good job tonight.”

  The president did not utter any further words about the raid in his remarks to the Congress, leaving millions of Americans wondering what the Defense Department had been up to that night. His address did, however, make mention of another recent SEAL operation, the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.

  “One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden,” the president remarked. “On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter.” The SEALs had shown how Americans worked together regardless of political party, the president averred. “Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes,” he said. “No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team.”

  Obama’s address also included a reference to his new defense strategy, which involved downsizing the nation’s conventional forces on the premise that smaller special operations forces were a more effective and less expensive substitute. “Working with our military leaders,” he said, “I’ve proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget.”

  Obama did not explain the rationale for the new strategy in the speech, but the announcement of Buchanan’s rescue hours later gave the White House an opportunity to cite special operations successes as justification. On the next day, January 26, the Washington Post relayed statements from unnamed US officials that “the raid, by members of the Navy SEAL Team 6 unit that killed Osama bin Laden in May, demonstrated President Obama’s focus on the narrow, targeted use of force after a decade of large-scale military deployments.” The Associated Press reported later on the same day that “the Navy SEAL operation that freed two Western hostages in Somalia is representative of the Obama administration’s pledge to build a smaller, more agile military force that can carry out surgical counterterrorist strikes to cripple an enemy. That’s a strategy much preferred to the land invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost so much American blood and treasure over the past decade.”

  THE FIRST MONTH of 2012 was, indeed, a highly auspicious time to wave the banner of special operations forces in support of a new national security strategy. Through the Bin Laden raid and other recent victories, special operators had amassed unprecedented prestige both within Washington and in the country more generally. Special operations forces seemed not only more exciting, but also more efficient and decisive than the large conventional military forces that had been employed in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hollywood was releasing movie after movie extolling the virtues of the special units, including a film called Act of Valor that starred active-duty SEALs. On the Internet, dating sites were hit by epidemics of men pretending to be special operators in order to win the hearts of unsuspecting women.

  Although President Obama relied mainly on subordinates to sell his new strategy to the public, he did cite the special operators while explaining the strategy during an interview with journalist Mark Bowden, who was writing a book on the Bin Laden operation. “Special Forces are well designed to deal with very specific targets in difficult terrain and oftentimes can prevent us from making the bigger strategic mistakes of sending forces in, with big footprints and so forth,” he explained. “So when you’re talking about dealing with terrorist networks in failed states, or states that don’t have capacity, you can see that as actually being less intrusive, less dangerous, less problematic for the country involved.”

  What Obama had called “Special Forces” were in actuality the special operations forces (SOF)—the official term for all the units dedicated to the conduct of special operations. Special operations forces include not only the US Army’s Special Forces, but also the Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Night Stalkers, and Special Operations Marines, among others. Mixing up Special Forces with special operations forces was a common enough mistake, and one that might have been unworthy of mention had the president merely been dispensing praise to an obscure federal bureaucracy, on the order of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission or the American Battle Monuments Commission. But SOF had become the centerpiece of Obam
a’s national security strategy, and hence the misstep encouraged doubts about the amount of thought that had gone into the strategic redesign. Later events were to confirm that administration strategists had not given adequate consideration to the strengths and limitations of special operations forces before hoisting them to the apex of the world’s most powerful military.

  It was not the first time that presidential ambitions for special operations forces had outstripped presidential familiarity with those forces. Indeed, no president, Republican or Democrat, has ever demonstrated a commanding grasp of special operations forces and their capabilities, although John F. Kennedy at times came close. Presidential unfamiliarity acquired a new significance under Obama, however, because US special operations forces were larger and more prominent than ever before, and because their ascent in Obama’s first term contributed to a terrific crash during his second term. Egged on by the White House, the Special Operations Command would attempt to acquire new powers at the expense of the rest of the US military and government. Its leadership would flout the rules of the Defense Department and the Congress, on the presumption that no one would dare challenge the men who had killed Osama bin Laden. Congress eventually used its power of the purse to rein in Special Operations Command, killing the budgets for ambitious plans to extend the reach of special operations forces.

  Most of the factors that precipitated this calamity could have been anticipated, and at least some avoided, had the principal players been attuned to the history of American special operations forces. That history began during the first months of US participation in World War II, when in the crucible of total war the United States formed its first units dedicated to special operations. From 1942 to 1945, the Army Rangers, the Marine Corps Raiders, the Navy Frogmen, and the special operators of the civilian-led Office of Strategic Services (OSS) executed difficult and dangerous operations that not only made them role models for future special operators, but also brought into daylight the main challenges that were to confront special operations forces ever afterward.