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America only managed to drop 26,171 bombs in 2016!
U.S. Special Operations Forces Deploy To 138 Nations, 70% Of The World’s Countries
8 January, 2017
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have every year since 2001.
For
America, 2016 may have been the year of the commando.
In one conflict zone after another across the northern tier of Africa
and the Greater Middle East, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF)
waged their particular brand of low-profile warfare. “Winning
the current fight, including against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and
other areas where SOF is engaged in conflict and instability, is an
immediate challenge,” the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command
(SOCOM), General
Raymond Thomas, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee last year.
SOCOM’s
shadow wars against terror groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
(also known as ISIL) may, ironically, be its most visible
operations. Shrouded in even more secrecy are its activities —
from counterinsurgency and counterdrug efforts to seemingly endless
training and advising missions — outside acknowledged conflict
zones across the globe. These are conducted with little
fanfare, press coverage, or oversight in scores of nations every
single day. From Albania to Uruguay, Algeria to Uzbekistan,
America’s most elite forces — Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets
among them — were deployed to 138 countries in 2016, according to
figures supplied to TomDispatch by
U.S. Special Operations Command. This total, one of the highest
of Barack Obama’s presidency, typifies what has become the golden
age of, in SOF-speak, the “gray zone” — a phrase used to
describe the murky twilight between war and peace. The coming
year is likely to signal whether this era ends with Obama or
continues under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
America’s
most elite troops deployed to 138 nations in 2016, according to U.S.
Special Operations Command. The map above displays the
locations of 132 of those countries; 129 locations (blue) were
supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command; 3 locations (red) —
Syria, Yemen and Somalia — were derived from open-source
information. (Nick Turse)
“In
just the past few years, we have witnessed a varied and evolving
threat environment consisting of: the emergence of a militarily
expansionist China; an increasingly unpredictable North Korea; a
revanchist Russia threatening our interests in both Europe and Asia;
and an Iran which continues to expand its influence across the Middle
East, fueling the Sunni-Shia conflict,” General Thomas wrote last
month in PRISM,
the official journal of the Pentagon’s Center for Complex
Operations. “Nonstate actors further confuse this landscape
by employing terrorist, criminal, and insurgent networks that erode
governance in all but the strongest states… Special operations
forces provide asymmetric capability and responses to these
challenges.”
In
2016, according to data provided to TomDispatch by
SOCOM, the U.S. deployed special operators to China (specifically
Hong Kong), in
addition to eleven countries surrounding it — Taiwan (which China
considers a breakaway
province),
Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Laos,
the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan. Special Operations
Command does not acknowledge sending commandos into Iran, North
Korea, or Russia, but it does deploy troops to many nations that ring
them.
SOCOM
is willing to name only 129 of the 138 countries its forces deployed
to in 2016. “Almost all Special Operations forces deployments are
classified,” spokesman Ken McGraw told TomDispatch.
“If a deployment to a specific country has not been declassified,
we do not release information about the deployment.”
SOCOM
does not, for instance, acknowledge sending troops to the war zones
of Somalia, Syria,
or Yemen,
despite overwhelming evidence of a U.S. special ops presence in all
three countries, as well as a White House report, issued last month,
that notes “the
United States is currently using military force in” Somalia, Syria,
and Yemen, and specifically states that “U.S. special operations
forces have deployed to Syria.”
According
to Special Operations Command, 55.29% of special operators deployed
overseas in 2016 were sent to the Greater Middle East, a drop of 35%
since 2006. Over the same span, deployments to
Africa skyrocketed by
more than 1600% — from just 1% of special operators dispatched
outside the U.S. in 2006 to 17.26% last year. Those two regions
were followed by areas served by European Command (12.67%), Pacific
Command (9.19%), Southern Command (4.89%), and Northern Command
(0.69%), which is in charge of “homeland defense.” On any
given day, around 8,000 of Thomas’s commandos can be found in more
than 90 countries worldwide.
U.S.
Special Operations forces deployed to 138 nations in 2016.
Locations in blue were supplied by U.S. Special Operations Command.
Those in red were derived from open-source information. Iran,
North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia are not among those nations named
or identified, but all are at least partially surrounded by nations
visited by America’s most elite troops last year. (Nick Turse)
The
Manhunters
“Special
Operations forces are playing a critical role in gathering
intelligence — intelligence that’s supporting operations against
ISIL and helping to combat the flow of foreign fighters to and from
Syria and Iraq,” said Lisa
Monaco,
the assistant to the president for homeland security and
counterterrorism, in remarks at the International Special Operations
Forces Convention last year. Such intelligence operations are
“conducted in direct support of special operations missions,”
SOCOM’s Thomas explained in
2016. “The preponderance of special operations intelligence
assets are dedicated to locating individuals, illuminating enemy
networks, understanding environments, and supporting partners.”
Signals
intelligence from computers and cellphones supplied by foreign allies
or intercepted by
surveillance drones and manned aircraft, as well as human
intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has
been integral to targeting individuals for kill/capture missions by
SOCOM’s most elite forces. The highly secretive Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC), for example, carries out such
counterterrorism operations, including drone
strikes, raids,
and assassinations in
places like Iraq and Libya. Last year, before he exchanged
command of JSOC for that of its parent, SOCOM, General
Thomas noted that
members of Joint Special Operations Command were operating in “all
the countries where ISIL currently resides.” (This
may indicate a
special ops deployment to Pakistan,
another country absent from SOCOM’s 2016 list.)
“[W]e
have put our Joint Special Operations Command in the lead of
countering ISIL’s external operations. And we have already
achieved very significant results both in reducing the flow of
foreign fighters and removing ISIL leaders from the battlefield,”
Defense Secretary Ash Carter noted in
a relatively rare official mention of JSOC’s operations at an
October press conference.
A
month earlier, he offered even
more detail in a statement before the Senate Armed Services
Committee:
”We’re
systematically eliminating ISIL’s leadership: the coalition has
taken out seven members of the ISIL Senior Shura… We also removed
key ISIL leaders in both Libya and Afghanistan… And we’ve removed
from the battlefield more than 20 of ISIL’s external operators and
plotters… We have entrusted this aspect of our campaign to one of
[the Department of Defense’s] most lethal, capable, and experienced
commands, our Joint Special Operations Command, which helped deliver
justice not only to Osama Bin Laden, but also to the man who founded
the organization that became ISIL, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.”
Asked
for details on exactly how many ISIL “external operators” were
targeted and how many were “removed” from the battlefield by JSOC
in 2016, SOCOM’s Ken McGraw replied: “We do not and will not have
anything for you.”
When
he was commander of JSOC in 2015, General Thomas spoke of his and his
unit’s “frustrations” with limitations placed on them.
“I’m told ‘no’ more than ‘go’ on a magnitude of about ten
to one on almost a daily basis,” he said.
Last November, however, the Washington
Post reported that
the Obama administration was granting a JSOC task force “expanded
power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist
cells around the globe.” That Counter-External Operations
Task Force (also known as “Ex-Ops”) has been “designed to take
JSOC’s targeting model… and export it globally to go after
terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.”
SOCOM
disputes portions of the Post story.
“Neither SOCOM nor any of its subordinate elements have… been
given any expanded powers (authorities),” SOCOM’s Ken McGraw
told TomDispatch by
email. “Any potential operation must still be approved by the
GCC [Geographic Combatant Command] commander
[and], if required, approved by the Secretary of Defense or [the
president].”
“U.S.
officials” (who spoke only on the condition that they be identified
in that vague way) explained that SOCOM’s response was a matter of
perspective. Its powers weren’t recently expanded as much as
institutionalized and put “in writing,” TomDispatch was
told. “Frankly, the decision made months ago was to codify
current practice, not create something new.” Special
Operations Command refused to confirm this but Colonel Thomas Davis,
another SOCOM spokesman, noted: “Nowhere did we say that there was
no codification.”
With
Ex-Ops, General Thomas is a “decision-maker when it comes to going
after threats under the task force’s purview,” according to
the Washington
Post’s
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Dan Lamothe. “The task force would
essentially turn Thomas into the leading authority when it comes to
sending Special Operations units after threats.”
Others claim Thomas
has only expanded influence, allowing him to directly recommend a
plan of action, such as striking a target, to the Secretary of
Defense, allowing for shortened approval time. (SOCOM’s
McGraw says that Thomas “will not be commanding forces or be the
decision maker for SOF operating in any GCC’s [area of
operations].”)
Last
November, Defense Secretary Carter offered an indication of the
frequency of offensive operations following a visit to Florida’s
Hurlburt Field, the headquarters of
Air Force Special Operations Command. He noted that
“today we were looking at a number of the Special Operations
forces’ assault capabilities. This is a kind of capability
that we use nearly every day somewhere in the world… And it’s
particularly relevant to the counter-ISIL campaign that we’re
conducting today.”
In
Afghanistan, alone, Special
Operations forces conducted
350 raids targeting al-Qaeda and Islamic State operatives last year,
averaging about one per day, and capturing or killing nearly 50
“leaders” as well as 200 “members” of the terror
groups, according to
General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in that country. Some
sources also suggest that
while JSOC and CIA drones flew roughly the same number of missions in
2016, the military launched more than 20,000 strikes in Afghanistan,
Yemen, and Syria, compared to less than a dozen by the Agency. This
may reflect an Obama administration decision to implement
a long-considered
plan to
put JSOC in charge of lethal operations and shift the CIA back to its
traditional intelligence duties.
World
of Warcraft
“[I]t
is important to understand why SOF has risen from footnote and
supporting player to main effort, because its use also highlights why
the U.S. continues to have difficulty in its most recent campaigns —
Afghanistan, Iraq, against ISIS and AQ and its affiliates, Libya,
Yemen, etc. and in the undeclared campaigns in the Baltics, Poland,
and Ukraine — none of which fits the U.S. model for traditional
war,” said retired
Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland, chief of U.S. Army Special
Operations Command from 2012 to 2015 and now a senior mentor to the
chief of staff of the Army’s Strategic Studies Group.
Asserting that, amid the larger problems of these conflicts, the
ability of America’s elite forces to conduct kill/capture missions
and train local allies has proven especially useful, he added, “SOF
is at its best when its indigenous and direct-action capabilities
work in support of each other. Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq and
ongoing CT [counterterrrorism] efforts elsewhere, SOF continues to
work with partner nations in counterinsurgency and counterdrug
efforts in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.”
SOCOM
acknowledges deployments to approximately 70% of the world’s
nations, including all but three Central and South American countries
(Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela being the exceptions). Its
operatives also blanket Asia, while conducting missions in about 60%
of the countries in Africa.
A
SOF overseas deployment can be as small as one special operator
participating in a language immersion program or a three-person team
conducting a “survey” for the U.S. embassy. It may also
have nothing to do with a host nation’s government or military.
Most Special Operations forces, however, work with local partners,
conducting training exercises and engaging in what the military calls
“building partner capacity” (BPC) and “security cooperation”
(SC). Often, this means America’s most elite troops are sent
to countries with security forces that are regularly cited for
human rights abuses by the U.S. State Department. Last year in
Africa, where Special Operations forces utilize nearly
20 different programs and activities — from training exercises to
security cooperation engagements — these included Burkina
Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Democratic
Republic of
Congo, Djibouti, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania,
and Uganda,
among others.
In
2014, for example, more than 4,800 elite troops took part in just one
type of such activities — Joint
Combined Exchange Training (JCET)
missions — around the world. At a cost of more than $56
million, Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and other special operators
carried out 176 individual JCETs in 87 countries. A 2013 RAND
Corporation study of the areas covered by Africa Command, Pacific
Command, and Southern Command found “moderately low”
effectiveness for JCETs in all three regions. A 2014
RAND analysis of
U.S. security cooperation, which also examined the implications of
“low-footprint Special Operations forces efforts,” found that
there “was no statistically significant correlation between SC and
change in countries’ fragility in Africa or the Middle East.”
And in a 2015 report for Joint Special Operations University, Harry
Yarger, a senior fellow at the school, noted that
“BPC has in the past consumed vast resources for little return.”
Despite
these results and larger strategic failures in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Libya,
the Obama years have been the golden age of the gray zone. The
138 nations visited by U.S. special operators in 2016, for example,
represent a jump of 130% since the waning days of the Bush
administration. Although they also represent a 6% drop
compared to last year’s total, 2016 remains in the upper range of
the Obama years, which saw deployments to 75 nations
in 2010, 120 in
2011, 134 in
2013, and 133 in
2014, before peaking at 147 countries
in 2015. Asked about the reason for the modest decline, SOCOM
spokesman Ken McGraw replied, “We provide SOF to meet the
geographic combatant commands’ requirements for support to their
theater security cooperation plans. Apparently, there were nine
fewer countries [where] the GCCs had a requirement for SOF to deploy
to in [Fiscal Year 20]16.”
The
increase in deployments between 2009 and 2016 — from about 60
countries to more than double that — mirrors a similar rise in
SOCOM’s total personnel (from approximately 56,000 to about 70,000)
and in its baseline budget (from $9 billion to $11 billion).
It’s no secret that the tempo of operations has also increased
dramatically, although the command refused to address questions
from TomDispatch on
the subject.
“SOF
have shouldered a heavy burden in carrying out these missions,
suffering a high number of casualties over the last eight years and
maintaining a high operational tempo (OPTEMPO) that has increasingly
strained special operators and their families,” reads an
October 2016 report released by the Virginia-based think tank CNA.
(That report emerged from a conference attended by
six former special operations commanders, a former assistant
secretary of defense, and dozens of active-duty special operators.)
A
closer look at the areas of the “undeclared campaigns in the
Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine” mentioned by retired Lieutenant
General Charles Cleveland. Locations in blue were supplied by U.S.
Special Operations Command. The one in red was derived from
open-source information. (Nick Turse)
The American Age of the Commando
Last
month, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Shawn
Brimley,
former director for strategic planning on the National Security
Council staff and now an executive vice president at the Center for a
New American Security, echoed the
worried conclusions of the CNA report. At a hearing on
“emerging U.S. defense challenges and worldwide threats,” Brimley
said “SOF have been deployed at unprecedented rates, placing
immense strain on the force” and called on the Trump administration
to “craft a more sustainable long-term counterterrorism strategy.”
In a paper published in
December, Kristen
Hajduk,
a former adviser for Special Operations and Irregular Warfare in the
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations
and Low-Intensity Conflict and now a fellow at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, called for a decrease in the
deployment rates for Special Operations forces.
While
Donald Trump has claimed that the U.S. military as a whole is
“depleted”
and has called for
increasing the size of the Army and Marines, he has offered no
indication about whether he plans to support a further increase in
the size of special ops forces. And while he did
recently nominate a
former Navy
SEAL to
serve as his secretary of the interior, Trump has offered few
indications of how he might employ special operators who are
currently serving.
“Drone
strikes,” he announced in
one of his rare detailed references to special ops missions, “will
remain part of our strategy, but we will also seek to capture
high-value targets to gain needed information to dismantle their
organizations.” More recently, at a North Carolina victory
rally, Trump made specific references to the elite troops soon to be
under his command. “Our Special Forces at Fort Bragg have
been the tip of the spear in fighting terrorism. The motto of our
Army Special Forces is ‘to free the oppressed,’ and that is
exactly what they have been doing and will continue to do. At this
very moment, soldiers from Fort Bragg are deployed in 90 countries
around the world,” he told the
crowd.
After
seeming to signal his support for continued wide-ranging,
free-the-oppressed special ops missions, Trump appeared to change
course, adding, “We don’t want to have a depleted military
because we’re all over the place fighting in areas that just we
shouldn’t be fighting in… This destructive cycle of intervention
and chaos must finally, folks, come to an end.” At the same
time, however, he pledged that the U.S. would soon “defeat the
forces of terrorism.” To that end, retired Army Lieutenant
General Michael Flynn, a former director of intelligence
for JSOC whom
the president-elect tapped to serve as his national security adviser,
has promised that the new administration would reassess the
military’s powers to battle the Islamic State — potentially
providing more latitude in battlefield decision-making. To this
end, the Wall
Street Journal reports that
the Pentagon is crafting proposals to reduce “White House oversight
of operational decisions” while “moving some tactical authority
back to the Pentagon.”
Last
month, President Obama traveled to Florida’s MacDill Air Force
Base, the home of Special Operations Command, to deliver his capstone
counterterrorism speech. “For eight years that I’ve been in
office, there has not been a day when a terrorist organization or
some radicalized individual was not plotting to kill Americans,”
he told a
crowd packed with
troops. At the same time, there likely wasn’t a day when the
most elite forces under his command were not deployed in 60 or more
countries around the world.
“I
will become the first president of the United States to serve two
full terms during a time of war,” Obama added. “Democracies
should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war. That’s
not good for our military, it’s not good for our democracy.”
The results of his permanent-war presidency have, in fact, been
dismal, according to
Special Operations Command. Of eight conflicts waged during the
Obama years, according to a 2015 briefing slide from the command’s
intelligence directorate, America’s record stands at zero wins, two
losses, and six ties.
The
Obama era has indeed proven to be the “age
of the commando.”
However, as Special Operations forces have kept up a frenetic
operational tempo, waging war in and out of acknowledged conflict
zones, training local allies, advising indigenous proxies, kicking
down doors, and carrying out assassinations, terror movements
have spread across
the Greater
Middle East and Africa.
President-elect
Donald Trump appears poised
to obliterate much
of the Obama
legacy,
from the president’s signature
healthcare law to
his environmental
regulations,
not to mention changing course when it comes to foreign policy,
including in relations with China, Iran, Israel,
and Russia.
Whether he will heed advice to decrease Obama-level SOF deployment
rates remains to be seen. The year ahead will, however, offer
clues as to whether Obama’s long war in the shadows, the golden age
of the gray zone, survives.
Nick
Turse is
the managing editor of TomDispatch, a
fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for
the Intercept.
His book Tomorrow’s
Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa received
an American
Book Award in
2016. His latest book is Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South
Sudan. His
website is NickTurse.com.
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