Victory Point - Ed Darack [32]
Because of the nature of the fight in the earliest days of Operation Enduring Freedom—where the first and foremost goal was the toppling of the Taliban regime—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld felt that Special Operations Command units, particularly the Army’s Special Forces with their global orientation and years of foreign internal defense work and capability to topple an “asymmetric” and elusive enemy, best fit the bill to lead the charge. Hence his ultimate designation of SOCOM as the main effort of the war, meaning that SOF units would be supported by conventional forces (Operation Enduring Freedom marked the first time in American military history when SOF had been tasked as the lead, supported element in a large-scale campaign). But special operations forces are just that—special, units extremely capable at highly focused mission spectra. After the incredible work that the SOF teams completed in early OEF—linking up with the Northern Alliance, going far, far downrange virtually unsupported, ground-directing precision interdiction strikes from F-15s, B-52s, B-1s, and other platforms, and facing side by side with their Northern Alliance allies often overwhelming forces of Taliban—the fight evolved into one of stabilization and nation building, which requires long-term conventional-force commitment versus short-term get-in-get-out roles that SOF teams often perform. And as the conflict would reveal, this long-term military commitment would be one of a counterinsurgency nature, necessitating that American forces work closely with locals to pull the rug of support out from under terrorists and other destabilizing elements in addition to kinetically engaging those inimical groups.
During 3/3’s predeployment workup, Cooling studied not only the enemy and their tactics, but the complex command structure in which he and his battalion would fight. With an eye for ensuring that the toils of his Marines would have lasting effects on the overall mission, the battalion commander and his staff focused on the myriad SOF command lines driving into AO Trinity, forming not a single chain of command, but one best described as a complex web of invisible strands. The SOF teams used most frequently would be those tasked directly by Major General Olson, the commander of CJTF-76, through a unit called Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A. The ground units under the command of CJSOTF-A were mostly Special Forces, broken into groups called Operational Detachments, either company-size Operational Detachment Bravos (ODBs), or the smaller, team-size Operational Detachment Alphas (ODAs). The ODAs and ODBs primarily worked FID missions with an emphasis on border security along a corridor called Joint Special Operations Area (JSOA) “Oklahoma,” which ran along the frontier with Pakistan and “on top of” the eastern edge of AO Trinity. But other teams could be sent in by levels even higher than CJSOTF-A—directly from a SOF command working in concert with CENTCOM (a unit called SOCCENT). Additionally, SOCOM itself could insert teams, ordering units to hit the ground in Afghanistan from SOCOM’s command center at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. And beyond that, supposedly, are the so-called Tier-1 SOF teams, whom the president or the secretary of defense can activate directly, for those missions deemed to be of the highest national priority (such as acting on time-critical intelligence indicating the location of Osama bin Laden).
Cooling and his staff, upon studying the after-action reports of the Third Battalion of the Sixth Marine regiment (whom 3/3 was replacing in their November 2004 Afghan deployment) as well as their on-the-ground experience once in-country, realized that one of their greatest operational