psychological operations, or PSYOPs (in Aaron Bank's day: psychological warfare).
'Helping people' usually comes under the rubric of civil affairs (CA), a tool that's been in the special operations kit nearly as long as PSYOPs. There are many justifications for CA, including simple goodness, but its main military one is this: A population that is friendly to you and has experienced your kindness is not likely to feel kindly to — or give help and support to — your enemy.
The debate has raged over which is the purest model for 'special' units — larger units such as Rangers and commandoes, which tend more to direct action or smaller teams such as Jedburghs and A-Detachments, which specialize more in teaching and training indigenous forces.
Here, as it turns out, 'purest' is a blind alley, and the best answer is 'all of the above.'
Historically, there is no clean division between conventional and unconventional wars. The historical roots of both go back equally far. At the time of Jesus, freedom fighters fought a long, drawn-out guerrilla war with the occupying Romans. A thousand years later, Vikings launched commando-type raids from seas and rivers. During Napoleon's occupation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, Spanish guerrillas forced the French army to regret their conquest (and Spaniards gave this form of warfare its name:
Traditionally, resistance, insurgent, or guerrilla movements spring up from people who are otherwise powerless to gain liberation from foreign occupation or to gain freedom from their own oppressive or tyrannical government — a prime instance of Carl von Clausewitz's most famous insight, in On
Though von Clausewitz's insight has never been lost on the more thoughtful of military men, military planners don't normally give the political aspects of a problem serious consideration when they develop their strategy and tactics. They mostly see civilians as either encumbrances, props, or potential threats ('Get the damned civilians out of my way!').
Recent times have seen a change in these attitudes, a change that is reflected in the currently fashionable expression, 'end state' — as in, 'What end state do we want and how can we achieve it?' 'End state' reflects both the military
Such is not the case with practitioners of unconventional war. Special soldiers have to be conscious of both the political implications of their military actions and the military implications of political actions — in fact, they have to be conscious of anything they do or say that could have an impact on the people they have been assigned to help and guide. Success lies far beyond the obtaining of military objectives.
This is why psychological operations and civic affairs[1] have always been part of the special warfare toolkit. It is also why flexibility, resourcefulness, and political savvy were so important to Jack Singlaub, Aaron Bank, and the other Jedburghs. It is also, finally, why governments have come to find more and more uses for military forces that have these and associated capabilities.They are precision instruments, while tanks, artillery, and the other major combat arms are, by comparison, blunt — though far more powerful.
To put it another way: Special operations are conducted against strategic and operational targets that can't be attacked in any other way. A strategic and operational target generally has to do with the center of gravity of an enemy (another term from Clausewitz), and that center of gravity can be physical, psychological, or economic. If conventional weaponry can't deal with it… special operations can.
When a nation finds it has a recurring need for these kinds of forces, then they form them into a special operations branch. During World War II, for example, the British knew they could never slug it out toe-to-toe with the German armies. Their special operations branch was intended to give them a lever that might even up the score.
By way of contrast, the Germans did not institutionalize special operations, and it's a mystery why. It is equally mysterious that, when their armies were defeated, they did not organize guerrilla and partisan resistance to counter the Allied occupation of their country. Though they had extensive experience with partisans in the USSR, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and elsewhere, and knew personally how partisans could make an occupying power suffer, the Germans did not themselves choose to organize such movements.
It is especially puzzling because German commando exploits were among the most daring and resourceful ever conducted. In 1940, for example, the fortress of Eben Emael, in southern Belgium at the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal, was the most powerful fortress in Europe — heavily armored gun turrets above ground, the rest in hollowed-out underground galleries, and manned by 1,200 men. None of the Waginot Line fortifications came close to it. If the Germans hoped to attack west, toward the channel ports, or south, toward France, they had to overcome Eben Emael.
After six months of training in glider operations, as well as on a replica of the fortress itself, eighty German engineer-commandos, commanded by a sergeant, landed on the roof of Eben Emael in nine gliders and launched a carefully orchestrated attack — highlighted by the first-time-ever use of shaped charges in war — that resulted in the capture of the impregnable fortress thirty hours later. Shaped charges focus blast effects in order to penetrate armor, and are now very common in all kinds of anti-armor and deep-penetration-type weapons.
But then when the operation was over, the engineer-commandos went back into the Wehrmacht war machine. The Germans saw no recurring need for a standing special operations capability.
In 1943, after the Allied invasion of Italy, the Italians kicked Mussolini out of power and placed him in exile, under heavy guard, at an isolated mountaintop hotel, where it was believed no conceivable force could rescue him. The only access was by funicular railway. On September 13, however, another daredevil band of German glider commandos, led by one of the greatest of special operators, the Austrian Otto Skorzeny, landed a hundred yards from the hotel, overwhelmed the carabinieri guards, brought in a small Fiescier-Storch aircraft, and spirited the Duce away in it.
The commandos then returned to their regular units.
IN THE WILDERNESS
From 1946 to 1951, the Army maintained an interest in rebuilding an unconventional-warfare capability, and conducted many studies, but not much actually happened. Since there was a Ranger precedent, one study looked at the possibility of starting up a Ranger group that could carry out both a Jedburgh-like teaching-and-training mission and Ranger-type raids. Another study proposed creating a special operations force using refugee soldiers from Soviet satellite countries in eastern Europe, many of whom had extensive unconventional warfare experience fighting the Nazis. These men could join up under the provisions of the Lodge Act, which allowed foreigners to join the U.S. military services and, after two years, be granted citizenship. It would be a kind of American Special Forces Foreign Legion.
Unfortunately, there were at most 3,000 men available for such a unit, which was not enough to do the job (though Lodge Act volunteers later did become a major component of early Special Forces).
Nothing came of any of these proposals.
Like all Jedburghs, Aaron Bank had some familiarity with psychological warfare techniques, such as spreading rumors to build up civilian morale or enemy fears, or to spread false information. However, Bank never imagined he himself would be assigned to a psychological warfare unit. He simply was not trained for it.
Yet that was what happened, early in 1951. Bank, a colonel by then, was with a combat unit in Korea, the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, when he received orders to go back to the States and report to the Psychological Warfare staff in Washington, under Brigadier General Robert McClure.
McClure, a remarkable man, had run psychological warfare (more accurately, created it out of nothing) in Europe for Eisenhower and, after the war, had directed the de-Nazification program for the Allied military government in Germany. The outbreak of the Korean War had pointed up to him the necessity for rebuilding a psychological operations capability.
