Always Faithful, Always Forward: The Forging of a Special Operations Marine - Couverture souple

Couch, Dick

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0425268608 ISBN 13 : 9780425268605

Editeur : Penguin Publishing Group, 2015

A propos du livre

Extrait :

INTRODUCTION

Let me say at the outset of this work that I consider myself among the most fortunate of authors. Not only am I fortunate, but I am doubly blessed. As a young man from a small town in southern Indiana, I was afforded the opportunity to attend the United States Naval Academy. That was in the summer of 1963. As my parents drove me to the city and put me on the train that would take me from Indianapolis to Annapolis, I was filled with dreams of travel, ships, service, and adventure. My time aboard a Navy destroyer following my graduation from Annapolis and my subsequent service in Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL teamsfollowing my time at sea made those dreams a reality and then some. Following my active service, I joined the Central Intelligence Agency, and it was just as exciting and rewarding. Collectively, those experiences were my first blessing. However, special operations and field intelligence work are the province of young men. Along about my mid-forties, when I knew my operational glass was well past half-empty, I began my career as a writer.

I began by writing novels. The first was SEAL Team One, where the reader and I followed a young man through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training and into combat in Vietnam. It very much paralleled the journey I had made some twenty years earlier, only this young fictional warrior was smarter, faster, and more daring. Yet he had the same anxieties, doubts, and fears as I did; he felt the same crushing responsibility that comes from leading men in combat. He also felt the same rush that comes with surviving mortal combat. I wrote SEAL Team One back when there was only one Navy SEAL writing books—me.

SEAL Team One did well, and is still in print through the Naval Institute Press. I followed this book with Pressure Point, Silent Descent,and Rising Wind—all novels about SEALs and terrorists in more contemporary settings. Each day I arose early, got myself a cup of coffee, and went to my word processor. Each morning I was able to hang out with my imaginary friends for a few hours and do some dashing and daring things. I created bad guys with evil in their hearts who plotted against our nation. To defeat these enemies, I developed SEALs and other special operators who stepped into the breach to counter those threats. Then the folks at Random House came to me and asked if I could write a book on Navy SEAL training—real SEALs and real training. Candidly, it’s not easy for a novelist to step back into the real world and write about real people.

Thomas Ricks of Fiasco and The Generals fame had just written a very successful book on Marine Corps basic training called Making the Corps. Random House wanted to know if I could do the same for SEAL training. So I went to the SEAL training compound in Coronado, California, and began my second journey through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—this time with SEAL Class 228. It was a wonderful experience. Not only was I allowed to revisit an important and formative period in my own journey as a warrior, but I was privileged to meet and share that journey with the next generation of SEALs. Yet a nonfiction work is very different from the make-believe world of writing novels and developing imaginary characters. Following the very real young men through the difficult and demanding ordeal that is modern Navy SEAL training was hard work. A nonfiction book is a 110,000-word term paper. Yet the result, The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228, was satisfying and rewarding beyond my wildest expectations. I’ll always be in the debt of Thomas Ricks for helping me to make the transition from novels to nonfiction.

The Warrior Elite, which has recently been updated and rereleased in a special edition, was followed by The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident and Downrange: Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism. Then it was back to basic special operations training withChosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior—Army Green Beret training. Following that came Sua Sponte: The Forging of a Modern American Ranger, which followed the training of young warriors for duty in the 75th Ranger Regiment. For each of these works, I was allowed to follow some of the finest young men in America as they prepared for war and went into battle in the defense of our nation. I had the high honor to share a part of their journey and to tell their story. This was my second blessing. Perhaps now you can see why I consider myself so fortunate. My time as a special operations warrior is long since over, but I’m now permitted to accompany those preparing for the current fight.

This brings us to Always Faithful, Always Forward, the Marine Special Operations Command, and my final work on the training and qualification of American special operations ground-combat warriors. The Marines only recently joined the Special Operations family with the commissioning of the U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, in early 2006. In joining this brotherhood at this late date, they were able to learn a great deal from their SEAL, Special Forces, and Ranger brothers. They also had the challenge of standing up their force and immediately deploying that force during time of war. The first MARSOC deployment was a combat deployment. How they did this so quickly and entered the current fight with such professionalism is the story of Always Faithful, Always Forward. Once more I am honored to be able to tell the story of the newest of these superb young special warriors.

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The business of special operations is different and distinct from that of conventional or general purpose military forces. It differs both in the specific mission sets and the scale of military operations. With respect to ground combat, there is some overlap on the periphery of what special operations forces (SOF) and general purpose forces are asked to do, most notably in the increasingly important areas of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and the disciplines that relate to these activities. That said, the job of our conventional land army is to defeat enemy armies—to defeat them and to take and hold ground. When general purpose forces try to assume the mission of SOF on their own, they are usually ineffective. When special operations units try to do the conventional, they are almost always overmatched. Yet special operations teams can often be very effective working in concert with general purpose forces—in what we call the “seams of the battlespace.” With some notable exceptions, special operations forces are often highly dependent on conventional units for security and support. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the special operations mission set and the special operations units tasked with those missions. Briefly and broadly, those missions are unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, direct action, and foreign internal defense. Each of our SOF ground-combat components has priorities within these special tasks, to include variations and expansions on this basic mission set. The Marine Special Operations Command has certainly done this within their tasking and training, but these are the basics.

Unconventional warfare, or UW, is a somewhat ambiguous term for wresting control of a village, a province, or a nation from an unfriendly government—or an unfriendly nongovernment actor—currently in power. This can be done conventionally with armor and infantry or unconventionally by organizing and encouraging popular opposition to the established order. When we do this “by, with, and through” the efforts of a local, internal opposition, these indigenous forces are often called freedom fighters. Regime change in this fashion is a great deal cheaper than the process of invasion and quite often seen as more legitimate.

Immediately following the attacks of 9/11, it was quickly determined that Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda organization were responsible. It was soon learned that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan—a nation characterized by its mosaic of tribal entities and its historic resistance to outside intervention. Those same tribes had fought the invading Russian army for more than ten years and, with our covert help, defeated them. Now it was our turn to be the invaders. As America debated just how to respond to the attacks of al-Qaeda, there was a great awareness of the difficulties of sending a conventional army into Afghanistan—difficulties we may not have fully appreciated later in our Afghan venture. Memories of the tenacious Afghan mountain fighters and Russian casualties were still fresh in 2001. So we sent no large conventional army; we took an unconventional, irregular approach.

Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, along with CIA paramilitary specialists and a generous dose of American airpower, mobilized an alliance of northern tribes and swept the Taliban from power, although without completely vanquishing them from the nation. This instance of enlisting, arming, and leading local tribes to bring about the expulsion of the Taliban proved to be a classic unconventional warfare operation. This UW effort accomplished in just a few months what the Russian army could not do in a decade, and at a fraction of the cost in both lives and treasury. My vision of that campaign will always be of an Army Special Forces sergeant standing on a hilltop with a Northern Alliance tribal leader at his side, looking down onto a valley held by the Taliban. The sergeant and his tribal counterpart look a great deal alike—both have full beards and both wear native pakol hats and are wrapped in keffiyeh scarves. Both are filthy from weeks in the mountains. The Green Beret sergeant is on his radio, directing American fighter-bombers as they deliver precision air strikes onto the Taliban positions below. The tribal leader seems always to be at the sergeant’s elbow. After a thorough pounding of the Taliban lines, the Northern Alliance tribal fighters move down to mop up the battered and demoralized enemy fighters.

Special reconnaissance, or SR, is the mission to put “eyes on” an enemy position for a future special-operations or conventional targeting. Sometimes an SR mission is a clandestine operation prior to the commitment of a larger force. Navy SEALs conducted a multiday special reconnaissance prior to the Marine occupation of the forward operating base known as Camp Rhino in Afghanistan, a base near Kandahar that preceded the conventional-force occupation of that nation and the capture of Kabul. Sometimes, a special reconnaissance mission is launched for reasons of discrimination. American precision airpower has the ability to isolate, target, and completely destroy almost any given structure on the ground. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, SR teams have been used to observe a target building to ensure that target individuals are inside at the time of the attack and that noncombatants are not. I’ve spoken with special operators who have spent days in hide sites, under harsh, cold, and miserable conditions, watching remote buildings to confirm that the target individual was there and/or to ensure that women and children were not. With what we’ve now come to call the Global War on Terror often becoming an insurgent/counterinsurgent conflict, issues of proportionality, restraint, and discrimination are becoming increasingly important. Special reconnaissance may also extend to casual observation in an urban area to assess matters that relate to cultural or political intelligence in an area of interest.

While special reconnaissance is still a core SOF mission, its methodology has changed with recent advances in manned and unmanned airborne ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) platforms and enhanced satellite imagery. Yet ISR platforms have their limitations, especially in politically sensitive environments. Then only the careful observations of someone on the ground can obtain the needed information. In addition, the role of special reconnaissance is changing to more fully address the increasingly important interface between intelligence collection, targeting, and direct-action operations. In its current application, special reconnaissance has as much to do with intelligence collection as with reconnaissance.

Direct action is what most Americans think of in relation to a special operations mission—daring squads of heavily armed men parachuting at night into a remote area to attack an enemy compound, or silent warriors moving room to room with night-vision goggles as they clear a building in order to capture or kill an enemy commander. It’s certainly the stuff favored by the media in their coverage of war. If the Army Special Forces mission to mobilize the northern Afghan tribes that swept the Taliban from power embodies the UW mission, then the Navy SEAL raid into Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden is the prototype of a direct action, or DA, mission. All of our special operations ground-combat components have the capability to conduct DA missions. It’s a SOF mission staple and an extension of basic infantry tactics. The bin Laden raid was one of eleven DA missions carried out that night. At the height of the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns, our SOF units carried out between three and four thousand of those missions each year, with the majority of the raids being conducted by our SOF light-infantry component, the 75th Ranger Regiment. Direct-action missions are certainly the most dramatic and media-genic of the SOF operational taskings and, candidly, a favorite of our SOF ground combatants. It’s certainly on the minds of our insurgent enemies. Anytime, anywhere, they may be visited by a lethal contingent of American special operators.

Yet in my opinion, the most difficult, nuanced, and important of the special-operations mission set is foreign internal defense, or FID. Unlike direct action, FID emphasizes the indirect. As it was in Iraq and Afghanistan, the final assessment of whether we ultimately win or lose in these irregular-warfare, often insurgent-contested conflicts lies with our success in the conduct of foreign internal defense.

Foreign internal defense, often called stability operations or village stability programs, frequently seems to pass under the media radar and is overlooked in a conflict. Yet it has been the primary focus of the majority of our deployed SOF personnel over the last two decades. Why is FID so important? Quite simply, it’s our ticket out of a conflict. If we can successfully groom and train local, host-nation forces to achieve security and stability, then our forces can come home. These efforts in FID helped to bring some measure of stability to Iraq, where at least some of our national objectives were met. Our efforts in Afghanistan and the relentless pressure of the Taliban in their “UW campaign” may have been too little and too late.

When our SOF teams are deployed in a FID role with support of an elected government, as they have been in Colombia, the southern Philippines, and southern Thailand, they can be very effective. They can help local military forces and militias contain an insurgent movement before it reaches a national-level threat. In areas like Africa, where a national government may be weak and resource-challenged, a FID campaign can he...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Established in 1986, the U.S. Special Operations Command was set up to bring the special operational disciplines of all branches of the military under a single, unified command to act on missions involving unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and direct action... The Marine Special Operations Command ("MARSOC") is the newest component of the military's shift toward a fully integrated Special Operations Command structure. At first, the Marines were strongly against any Marines serving under anyone other than another Marine. Then 9/11 happened. In the years following, Marine forces found themselves growing more agreeable to inter-branch operational command, finally forming the Marine Special Operations Command in 2006. Always Faithful, Always Forward follows the journey of a class of Marine candidates from their recruitment, through assessment and selection, to their qualification as Marines Special Operators. Retired Navy Captain Dick Couch has been given unprecedented access to this new command and to the individual Marines of this exceptional special-operations unit, allowing him to chronicle the history and development of the Marine Special Operations Command and how they find, recruit, and train their special operators.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0425268608
• ISBN 13: 9780425268605
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368