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By Root 1386 0

branches of the military were involved, there was virtually no integration either for training or for command chains—straining, if not breaking, the bond of unity of effort and unity of command that was absolutely vital for the mission’s success. Miscommunication throughout the entire mission also played a role in defeat: while meteorologists tasked with helping plan the mission were fully aware of the possibility of haboobs—they are common in the region in the spring, forming as a result of updrafts from lines of thunderstorms—they were not allowed to warn either the C-130 pilots or the helicopter pilots, who were shocked and mystified to come across (and barrel through) two of the strange, dark, and disorienting “curtains” during the mission. And no central combat operations center—a node vital for maintaining command and control throughout a mission—was designated for the mission itself, leaving the helicopter pilots unaware of the operation’s status as they tried to locate Beckwith while on the ground at Desert One. Furthermore, the Navy RH-53Ds hadn’t been thoroughly checked for maintenance issues before being handed over to the U.S. Marine Corps pilots who would fly them. From a wide-field perspective, the investigators could see that each piece of the greater “operational machine,” while individually capable, wasn’t integrated so that the machine could function—at all.

While the Goldwater-Nichols Act radically changed the organization of the Defense Department’s conventional forces, Congress—reeling from the Operation Eagle Claw disaster and a SOF-conventional-forces communications-equipment integration debacle during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada in 1983—added a provision to the Goldwater-Nichols Act that would, for the first time, codify a framework for all U.S. nonconventional units. And so, on 13 April 1987, President Reagan signed into law the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Three days later, the Department of Defense activated the United States Special Operations Command. USSOCOM, a body that many consider to be the fifth branch of the military, was born.

A wide variety of specialized units fall under the authority of Special Operations Command, from special operations weather teams—who help other SOCOM units plan, prepare, and augment missions—to Air Force Combat Controllers, to Green Berets, to Navy SEALs, and a multitude of others. Prior to the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the establishment of USSOCOM, nonconventional units often felt themselves cast as the “redheaded stepchildren” of a particular service, having to plead for training and operations funds while their conventional-service counterparts enjoyed a relative bounty of military procurement. With the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, SOF units receive their own, distinct funds for equipment and training as well as for actual operations. The amendment also calls for individual SOF units to train with one another—Army Green Berets with Navy SEAL teams with Air Force Combat Controllers, etc. While Beckwith’s soldiers had thoroughly rehearsed their portion of Operation Eagle Claw, had they been working under a command like SOCOM, in addition to the other benefits afforded by such an organization, all of the mission’s elements would have been able to train and rehearse together, likely preventing the disastrous outcome at Desert One.

The capabilities that Special Operations Command units bring to a fight span a broad range of mission types, from foreign internal defense, or FID, which the Green Berets mastered in Vietnam with their work with local fighters, to direct-action “hard hit” teams, to counterterrorism groups, and many, many more. All four conventional branches of the U.S. military provide personnel for SOCOM units (the Marine Corps was the last to join SOCOM with their MARSOC units), and once with a SOCOM unit, troops fall under an entirely new command structure. And unlike the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marine Corps, SOCOM not only controls training and equipping of individual units, by doctrine they also control units operationally