Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [19]
General Franks, as the theater commander, was asked to come up with a battle plan that would remove the Taliban and allow us to pursue bin Laden and his terrorist organization in Afghanistan. The general laid out his plan and sold it to Secretary Don Rumsfeld and President George Bush. Unlike the Soviets, Franks, who was a conventional artillery officer, opted for the unconventional. In a definitive by, with, and through operation, a handful of Special Forces detachments mobilized the Afghan tribesmen, who were loosely organized under the banner of the Northern Alliance, and executed a classic unconventional-warfare offensive. With the help of the CIA and a generous dose of American precision airpower, the Special Forces—in a word—“took” Afghanistan. What they did and how they did it is chronicled in Linda Robinson’s fine book, Masters of Chaos. It was a marvelous piece of work on the 5th Special Forces Group, who took the lead in this campaign. The details of this action, I’ll leave to Ms. Robinson. This work, Chosen Soldier, is an inside look at the selection and training of special warriors who can accomplish such feats. I can only imagine the awe and bewilderment of the Soviet generals who watched this amazing feat. It must’ve stunned them. It stunned all of us.
I also recall the dire predictions that America would be bogged down in a war of attrition, as were the Soviets in Afghanistan and as we were in Vietnam. There was a lot of conventional wisdom about the tenacity of the Afghan fighters—how we were poking a tar baby that would drag us into prolonged bloodletting. Fortunately, Tommy Franks saw things differently and was able to convince the administration that Afghanistan was a candidate for unconventional warfare. And, to Franks’s credit, he never wavered. When the campaign stalled for a few days and Congress tried to press conventional forces into the fray, Franks stayed the course. The U.S. marines were not landed at Camp Rhino, southwest of Kandahar, until the Taliban was pretty well beaten. My image of Iraq will always be of brave young soldiers and marines pushing their armored columns along the Tigris and Euphrates toward Baghdad. In Afghanistan, it’s of a Special Forces team sergeant, standing at the head of a group of Northern Alliance irregulars. He’s bearded, just like his Afghan fighters, and he’s dressed as they are—in tribal scarf and native headgear. He has a radio in one hand and an M4 rifle in the other. His Northern Alliance troop leader is standing by his side as they plan their next move against the Taliban. As we move to counter the insurgencies in Iraq, we might do well to reflect on what the Special Forces were able to accomplish in those early days. Well-led irregular forces, fighting on their home ground, can be a huge force multiplier in an unconventional-warfare campaign. They can also be the deciding factor in the internal struggle against insurgents. History will, in my opinion, record our success or failure in Iraq by how we were able to assist the fledgling Iraqi democracy in dealing with its insurgency.
The history of Special Forces training is a story of growth and maturity. In the beginning, back in 1952 when Colonel Aaron Bank stood up the 10th Special Forces Group, he personally selected the volunteers for his new unit. “Most of us came from the 82nd Airborne,” one of the originals from the 10th told me. “The