'Why do we need Special Forces guys to do this?' Stan Florer asks.
'Because nobody else has all it takes to do the job — the capability to organize and direct, together with the security edge. Civil Affairs guys don't have all that. Our solders are packing an advantage, and they know how to use it.'
Or to put it another way: Fifty armed Americans add an eloquence of persuasion to any suggestion. It's not so much 'You better get your act together or we're going to shoot' as 'Here is a strong, steady, and secure structure within which you can operate. With that in place, you can begin to take charge of your own needs.'
Similar conditions apply in dealings with external relief organizations. These are all fine people, but they tend to run off every which way, and tending to horrendously complex needs in an utterly chaotic situation requires focus, direction, and order.
Carl Stiner points out that the Army's — and especially the SF's — streamlined command structure facilitates getting things done, and getting cooperation from such organizations. 'We obviously won't use force on them, but if they persist in wanting to do their own thing, the CINC can step in and say, 'I am responsible for this whole area and you are going to comply. And here is the schedule you're going to operate under if you want security, and if you don't, you are on your own.''
'What was interesting about this was its relationship to the larger political picture, a larger connection to DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM obviously, and the combat relationship,' Florer comments. With more than two dozen government and nongovernment relief agencies involved, Special Forces' ability to work with a variety of groups under difficult conditions proved to be critical. While strict discipline is necessary for any military operation, PROVIDE COMFORT demonstrated what Bill Yarborough and others long ago foresaw, that flexibility and creativity are a major force multiplier.
The same attributes that make Special Forces soldiers so valuable in combat actions — the ability to adapt to unexpected situations, to use cutting-edge technology to its fullest, to think creatively, to act quickly, decisively, and independently — turned out to be the qualities most needed to help the Kurds in the free-flowing crisis following the war with Iraq.
Training for war goes hand in hand with the battle to save lives. Tomorrow's SF soldier will continue to find his role in a shadowy territory, where there are few boundaries between armed conflict with bad guys, on the one hand, and working closely and productively with local friendlies, on the other.
'In a way,' Dick Potter recalls, 'the Special Forces legacy lives on in that part of the world. If you travel in northern Iraq and visit a Kurdish settlement, you're likely to encounter children in the ten-to-eleven-year group. Ask the parents and the elders their names. If they were born in the camps on the Turkish border during the great migration, you will find a middle name of Smith, Jones, Swicker, or Gilmore — the Kurds' tribute to men of the 10th Group, a living honor to the men that saved them.'
FACING FORWARD
During the next ten years, special operations optempo greatly increased, with many more humanitarian assistance missions, and many more missions across the broad range of SOF capabilities. From Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan to Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, they were busy men.
A small sample of what they were doing during that busy decade:
SOMALIA During the '90s, SOF missions called on them to prevent fighting — or keep the lid on it — more often than to engage in combat. Through no fault of their own, their peacemaking efforts did not necessarily yield freedom from strife, most notably in Somalia, where several special operators on a UN-sponsored peacekeeping and humanitarian operation sacrificed their lives in the fiercest close combat engaged in by American forces since the Vietnam War. Two of the men earned Medals of Honor.
This incident took place in Mogadishu in October 1993, and generated much press and a bestselling book. Its notoriety has tended to overshadow the genuine successes of American and UN operations in that benighted country. In the early 1990s, many Somalis were starving, and anarchy is too kind a word to describe the chaos. The country was divided among warring tribal factions; many of these were ruled by warlord-thugs, most were engaged in 'civil wars' with the others, and some were fundamentalist Muslims, hostile to the United States.
Mending Somalia — like mending Afghanistan — will not be a quick fix.
Nevertheless, during the period from 1992 to 1995, SOF made a positive difference there. They conducted reconnaissance and surveillance operations (SOF elements drove more than 26,000 miles); assisted with humanitarian relief (bringing an end to starvation); conducted combat operations; for a time tamed many of the warring factions; and protected American forces (capturing hundreds of weapons and destroying thousands of pounds of ordnance). PSYOPs troops hired and trained thirty Somalis as a nucleus for radio broadcasting and newspaper publishing. They put out a newspaper,
HAITI In 1990, after hundreds of years of corruption and oppression, Haiti — always in a bad way — seemed about to lurch at last into the twentieth century. In their first free election, the Haitian people selected a civilian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The new freedom did not last long. In September 1991, the legitimate government was thrown out by a military government, headed by General Raoul Cedras. After diplomatic efforts and a UN-mandated embargo failed to force the Cedras clique to step down, and with thousands of Haitians fleeing the impoverished country in rickety, leaky boats (many perished at sea), a U.S. invasion was planned — Operation UPHOLD DEMOCRACY, modeled on Operation JUST CAUSE (Panama).
As in Panama, the XVIII Airborne Corps would run the operation, with extensive support from Army, Air Force, and Navy SOF. Special operators would take down key governmental sites, followed by linkup with conventional forces. Special Forces teams would then fan out and secure the countryside.
In September 1994, former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and retired General Colin Powell negotiated a last-minute deal with Cedras that aborted the invasion. Cedras stepped down in favor of Aristide, and the U.S. forces were quickly reconfigured for peaceful entry. The invasion metamorphosed into a large-scale humanitarian mission.
Lieutenant General Henry Shelton, the XVIII Airborne Corps commander, used conventional forces (most of the from the 10th Mountain Division) to secure Port-au-Prince, the capital. To secure the rest of the country, he called on Brigadier General Dick Potter to form an SF task force (called Joint Task Force Raleigh). A-Detachments fanned out into the villages and countryside, and became the only source of law and order until the Haitian civilian government could move in and take over.
The PSYOPs campaign used leaflets, radio broadcasts, and airborne loudspeakers to send the message that cooperating with American forces and staying out of bloody conflicts with the remnants of the illegal regime would be the quickest route to a restoration of democracy. Civil Affairs troops made a start on restoring Haiti's long- wasted civilian infrastructure. For example, in an operation they called LIGHT SWITCH, they brought electricity back to Jeremie, Cap Haiticn, and other northern cities and towns — places that hadn't had electricity in years.
THE BALKANS
In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia fractured into rival independent states, each striving to attain some dream of ethnic-religious purity — Eastern Orthodox, Muslim, or Roman Catholic. An impossible dream — the different ethnic groups were scattered pretty much all over the map. Tragedy followed, when the ethnic factions tried to bring about ethnic purity by force — and acted out age-old hatreds in the process. Thousands of people were driven from homes their people had lived in for centuries — or worse, they were massacred.
From 1992, the UN and NATO sent forces to the region in order to impose peace, but it took a coordinated
