Calland, a fresh-faced former Navy SEAL, ran the naval Special Forces unit that in 1987- 88 fought a covert war in the Persian Gulf. The Reagan administration wanted to stop Iranian Special Forces from disrupting oil shipping during the Iran-Iraq War. Calland’s men, secretly running high-speed launches from drilling barges, worked with helicopter-borne Army Special Forces to ambush the Iranians. The Army AH-6 “Little Bird” choppers, with ultraquiet rotor blades, zoomed in at 50 feet above the water under cover of night to track the Iranian attack boats. The SEALs also conducted raids on the bases and jetties of the Iranian commandos. They stopped the Iranians cold, and barely made a headline.
Today Calland is head of Special Operations for Central Command, based at McDill Air Force Base in Florida–which means the Navy man is probably the threat Osama bin Laden and his confederates in landlocked Afghanistan most have to fear in the weeks ahead. Calland represents the advance guard of America’s frontline troops in a new kind of war for a new century.
The units commanded by the admiral are drawn from a highly trained body of men–of 2.2 million people in the U.S. military, just 46,000 are Special Forces–who are likely to be the only significant ground forces that America uses anywhere around the world in its long-term fight against terrorism. U.S. Special Forces are also fighting other 21st-century conflicts, from training foreign troops in anti-trafficking in Latin America’s drug war–which some have likened to the war on terror–to peacekeeping efforts in Africa. In any given week, some 5,000 Special Forces personnel are deployed in about 60 countries worldwide.
America’s increasing need for Special Forces–the Green Berets in Vietnam are the prototype–is, strategists say, a countermove to the shifting tactics of potential enemies. “A lot of this stems from the fact that the United States has the world’s best military, and after the gulf war nobody in their right mind planned to take us on tank for tank, plane for plane,” says Andrew Krepinevich, who runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. As seen in terrorist insurgencies, “enemies are adopting strategies of the weak, the asymmetric approach.” The only way to beat them? Have your own fast-moving, guerrillalike units. If the United States lacks home-turf advantage in places like Afghanistan, it has superior training and technology. With better intelligence, it also hopes to gain an edge in “information warfare”–learning where the enemy is faster than he can figure out that the Americans are on to him.
In the Pentagon, the shift to this new field of conflict portends jealous bureaucratic battles between the conventional services and Special Forces. Since the cold war, the budget for most conventional units has declined or remained stagnant; funding for Special Forces has grown. Special Forces will need even more of the pie now–not least because there is a crying need to attract more talent (more than 50 percent of applicants fail the grueling qualifying courses). Of the first installment of emergency funds released to the Department of Defense since the Sept. 11 attack, half of what is allocated–about $1.2 billion–will go to hasty upgrades of the intelligence-gathering systems that underpin Special Ops, DoD Comptroller Dov Zakheim indicated. Among them: Global Hawk, a high-altitude reconnaissance drone that can stay aloft for 36 hours.
In his Sept. 20 speech laying out the war on terrorism, President Bush spoke of bringing justice to the terrorists. That means the Special Forces’ war could extend beyond Afghanistan. The most suitable places are other “failed” or failing states like Sudan or Lebanon. In other allegedly terror-supporting states now part of America’s new coalition, like Yemen, Special Forces will perform commando raids less than training missions and covert stings alongside the FBI.
In the developing operation against bin Laden, Calland and his men already have their orders for Afghanistan. Working in squads as small as four men, teams will be flown at night into Afghanistan by helicopter; their mission is to blend into the scenery, in some cases for weeks, while they lie in wait and watch for clues to the whereabouts of bin Laden and his lieutenants. If they can be found, the plan is to snatch or kill them.
But Special Ops’ record on manhunts isn’t promising. In Mogadishu they underestimated the Somalis and failed to prearrange a backup force; 18 soldiers died. In 1989, 23,000 U.S. troops occupying Panama couldn’t find dictator Manuel Noriega; four SEALs died trying.
Since then Special Operations’ tactics have been rethought. The first lesson of Mogadishu, for example, was that timely intelligence means the difference between success and disaster. Accordingly, Washington in recent days has strong-armed neighboring Pakistan, which has been close to the Taliban, to provide it. The second lesson was to have adequate backup close at hand; hence the discreet pre-positioning of U.S. support forces in bases around Afghanistan. In the future the military may rely on long-range drones like Global Hawk not just for recon, but to provide on-call precision firepower for Special Forces.
As the administration’s tactics against Al Qaeda have developed since Sept. 11, there is more pressure than ever on the Special Forces. Sources tell NEWSWEEK that the administration has undergone a major shift in its thinking in recent days on how to destroy bin Laden’s operation inside Afghanistan. Leaning toward long-range bombing at first, the Bush team has come to realize that worthwhile targets are even more elusive than the hard-to-hit tanks in Kosovo. The terrorist camps have emptied; the only good military targets, apart from a few TV and radar stations, militia headquarters and fuel dumps, are the Taliban’s “cavalry” of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers. Going after those, says a senior Defense official, would be “like trying to hit the Pony Express.”
At the same time the likely costs of bombing seemed to grow. CIA chief George Tenet warned Bush and his inner circle that airstrikes could elevate the ruling mullahs into symbols of patriotic defiance, uniting the notoriously fractious Afghans around them. That is exactly the opposite of what Bush wants. So the administration has settled on a new strategy: to weaken the Taliban’s hold on power by capitalizing on ethnic unrest in Afghanistan, beefing up the opposition Northern Alliance and encouraging dissent within the Taliban by deploying a menacing armada of ships and planes.
That’s where Calland’s Special Forces come in. Neutralizing the Taliban, the Bush administration hopes, will leave bin Laden–who fled one country after another in the ’90s until he became the Taliban mullahs’ “guest”–high and dry without protection. “Draining the swamp,” Bush aides call this approach. Their goal is to force bin Laden to run–at which point, they hope, U.S. Special Forces will be there to grab him, along with the computer disks that presumably hold the secrets of his global network.
By last week U.S. Special Forces were being deployed around the borders of the mountainous country. U.S. bombers were set to fly into Afghan airspace–but, ironically, mainly to drop food packages to starving communities. To dispel any notion of weakening U.S. resolve, however, some Bush advisers are urging that these aid flights be matched with airstrikes on Afghan poppy fields and some opium-processing plants, a key source of Taliban financing.
If the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is evolving, it’s even less settled elsewhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week admitted the uncertainties. “It’s a little like a billiard table. The balls careen around for a while, and you don’t know what’ll do. But the end result, we would hope, would be a situation where the Al Qaeda is heaved out.” One thing is likely: U.S. Special Forces will be on the front lines to do the pushing.
