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By Root 1769 0

of this war goes back to fighting the current war with the Army you have. In spite of the recent powering-up of SOF budgets, we still have a conventional force in the field and battle management by the regular Army or Marine Corps ground-force commanders. They own the battle space in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s an SOF command structure in these theaters, with joint special operations task forces and task units and forward operating bases and advanced operating bases—like the one I visited at Al Asad. But none of these “own” battle space; they provide only administrative, logistical, or intelligence support. If a detachment of Special Forces and their Iraqi army scouts or local tribesmen want to mount an operation against insurgent elements in the neighboring town or neighboring mountains, they have to get permission from the conventional commander responsible for that area or sector. Training of the Iraqi army or the Iraqi police is a conventional U.S. Army responsibility. They may ask for Special Forces help with this, and the smart military-training teams do, but they don’t have to. A lot of field-grade and senior SOF commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq are in the position of “selling” SOF capability to an Army (or Marine) battalion or regimental commander. I’d like to see battle space or territory given to SOF commanders and subordinate conventional forces assigned to support them. I realize that this runs against the current military culture, but I think it’s time to rethink our approach to fighting this enemy—even though less than one soldier in twenty in the active theaters is an SOF operator. We need a more robust SOF command-and-control structure. Maybe in the next war—or when the light goes on and we build and tailor a force to meet the threat and tactics of this insurgent enemy. Or the next one.

Finally, there is the issue of restrictions in the use of force. The rules of engagement and the Rules of Land Warfare, as you have seen, are drilled into future Special Forces soldiers in the Q-Course and are a fact of life for all our deployed forces in the operational theaters. The SOF operators in the field live with these rules, and many a battle-space commander lives in fear that they will be violated—that there will be an incident that will get him relieved of command and end his military career. The bad guys know these force restrictions and how to get around them. IEDs and suicide bombers kill our soldiers and marines, and they kill even more Iraqi soldiers, policemen, and civilians. Yet placing an IED is a crime, not so much an act of war. If an insurgent is caught with a shovel in his hand digging alongside the road, he can put his hands up and not be shot. He will, in all probability, be processed, sent to an interrogation center, and released. He knows it, the average Iraqi knows it, and so does that Army specialist out patrolling those mean streets in his armored Humvee. They see some of these guys more than once. However, if the act of placing an IED were to earn a bomber an on-the-spot bullet, then there would be fewer of them out there—a lot fewer. Some of the detainees I observed appeared to have smirks on their faces. They were known insurgents, foot soldiers, and they knew they would be back on the streets in a few weeks. The issue of security and the ability of a government to protect its citizens is paramount. IEDs and suicide bombers visibly threaten this—and from what I saw, they threaten it effectively. Again, most of our combat casualties on the nightly news are from IEDs.

I don’t have an answer for this one; it’s very dicey business. The special operators I speak with feel the level of insurgent violence could be dramatically reduced if they and the locals they train could take stronger action—specifically, against the bomb makers and the bomb placers. But the on-the-spot-bullet call is a difficult one. Any decision to shoot preemptively is a serious one—for those you make eligible for the bullet, certainly, and for those who have to make the on-the-ground decision to shoot preemptively. I