Angry Planet - Stretching the special forces thin

Episode Date: May 10, 2017

America is at war with the Islamic State. Typically, citizens think this war comes in the form of drone strikes, signals intelligence and cooperation with regional partners. But that’s only part of the story. Even while popular opinion has shunned U.S. “boots on the ground” in the Middle East, U.S. Special Operations Forces are the boots. They conduct complicated operations that take the fight to the Islamic State, fighting and dying in covert operations all across the globe. But the strategy might not be sustainable. This week on War College, freelance journalist Joseph Trevithick walks us through the ins and outs of the SpecOp’s war on Islamic State and the strange trick journalists have to use to uncover information about a class of warriors that does its best to go unnoticed. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. There's a lot of very negative connotations around this phrase, boots on the ground, and one of the biggest things has been that special operators somehow magically don't count. You know, the joke has always been that special operators are sneakers on the ground,

and therefore you don't have to mention them. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is freelance journalist Joseph Trevethic. Joseph Trevethic writes a lot for The War Zone, where he is the master of the Freedom of Information Act request.

He spent the last few years tracking America's shadow wars. Now, these are the secret operations that the Pentagon runs to combat Islamic State and other similar groups across the world. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so I wanted to have you on the show today because you've been, you and I have been kind of pinging back and forth and talking about the different stuff that you've been uncovering over the past month or so. So let's get into some of this. So America is at war in several countries across the world. People traditionally think of Afghanistan and Iraq, but what people don't think so much about is the secret war against the Islamic State.

And I say secret because it's mostly carried out by special operations forces. So tell us what does this war look like exactly. And we know mostly about the air campaign, correct? That's what we think of when we think of these things. When you imagine the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and now expanding into Afghanistan and Libya and other places where Islamic State has been able to co-opt regional terrorist groups and franchise out in much the same way that Al-Qaeda did in the early 2000s. You start to sort of vote. What gets focused on is there is a very public, often air campaign against those groups.

You know, we've been bombing people since 2014 in Iraq and then in Syria. and then we also conducted a short-term campaign of air strikes in Libya around the city of Sirt, which was specifically focused against Islamic State, and then perhaps most dramatically we dropped the mother of all bombs on top of a sort of ISIS splinter faction thingy in Afghanistan. It's really unclear exactly that group's relationship to the Islamic State as the global entity, but it does seem to be tangentially related. And so, you know, these are the primary ways that American forces are going at Islamic State, at least publicly. You know, you think of these airstrikes, and it's, you know, big air campaigns with large bombs.

But behind the scenes, there's actually a significant amount of sort of special operations raiding and targeted attacks against even low-level groups of Islamic State fighters, as well as working with local security forces around the world to conduct those operations either with American forces directly or to provide intelligence so that they can conduct their own operations or some combination of these things. And you don't hear much about that because these forces, by their very definition, you know, they are secretive. And it may not be secret, but it's definitely not publicized. And then some of it actually is very secret because, you know, these campaigns end up, very timely and very time sensitive, and the Pentagon becomes very anxious about letting terrorists know just how close we are getting them. So, you know, you really don't end up hearing a lot about this, but it's had a dramatic impact in Iraq and in Syria. Do we have any idea

what the ground operations look like? You know, we typically think of ground operations boots on the ground. Are there actually special forces soldiers in the field for lack, you know, killing people? without a doubt, without a doubt. How many of them there are is completely unclear. Like I said, you know, these exact numbers and details are very few and far between. But in Iraq and in Syria, there is an entity called the Special Operations Joint Task Force for Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the campaign in those two countries against Islamic State. And that unit has definitely a ground component as well as an air component.

And we've been able to confirm that through documents received through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as on the record statements from the top American command, the very public American command leading both the air war and the advisory mission to help Iraqi and Kurdish and Syrian rebels fight Islamic State. Strangely, you know, we speak about not really knowing their effectiveness, but strangely, you kind of stumbled into knowing how many people they've killed, right? They published something by accident. It seems that way. There was a ceremony at an undisclosed location somewhere in Southwest Asia where members of the headquarters element for special operations joint task force operation inherent resolve got their new unit patch. And this was sort of an important thing for them because it formalized the entity to a new degree. They had previously been using someone else's unit patch as a way of creating this esprit of core. and so now they have their own distinctive unit insignia.

But in the captions to these pictures, there was some very interesting details about the extent of these special operations, and they quickly removed them from the captions online, but when I emailed the Combined Joint Task Force for Operation Inherent Resolve, they were more than happy to confirm that these numbers were true, though they were an estimate. they made clear that it was an estimate, but they definitely were more than happy to let me know that that that was, you know.

What exactly was in those captions? What information was there? They said that they had, that special operators with the task force had been responsible for 21,000 Islamic State fatalities. So they had killed 21,000 Islamic State fighters. And this, based on the latest body count that the Pentagon has put out, which is about 70,000 in total, if that is a portion of that and not on top of that 70,000, then that's 30% of the overall casualties against Islamic State have been perpetrated just by Special Operations Forces in some capacity.

They also said that Special Operations Forces had been responsible directly for the liberation of more than 45,000 square kilometers of terrain, which was another interesting detail. And it's not just U.S. soldiers in these photos, correct? Oh, no. And that was also an interesting detail that's not highlighted. The pictures are still available, but it's not highlighted that in these images, you can clearly see members of the Turkish military and the United Kingdoms military. And there are multiple members of different American services.

The Army and Marines are at least present. And there's probably also others. But you can see that it's a multinational and joint service effort. it. Now, when I think of, are these like nighttime raids, like when they killed bin Laden, or do we have any idea? We don't have any idea specifically, but these raids historically have occurred at night. Traditionally, the United States has an advantage fighting against its opponents at night because of its equipment. And so there is a benefit of attacking at night when your opponents will be most vulnerable to these operations, because they don't necessarily have the same level of night vision equipment or thermal imaging gear or other sensors that you can employ to spot them before they can spot you.

And it gives you a different element of surprise. So we definitely don't have any details specifically on the operations by and large that we've seen so far in terms of time of day and the exact nature of those missions. But it seems likely that the vast majority of them have occurred in the dark of night, you know, when they can catch terrorists most off guard. All right. Now, let's switch tracks a little bit. Tell me about this plane crash that you uncovered. How did you get on the trail of this thing and why is it important?

So there's a plane crash that's at the center of how we've learned the most about what's going on, specifically in Iraq and Syria. And what happened was in March 2016, a plane fell out of the sky into a farmer's field in northern Iraq. And it had an American flag on the back. It had a lot of bits and bobs sticking out of it, antennas and randoms and other things that were very analogous to what we had seen in certain small spy planes.

And it had no camouflage paint job and had no standard national insignia. It had a U.S. civilian registration code on the side of it. And it quickly became clear that this was probably more interesting than just, you know, an accident involving a small spy plane, that it was part of this shadowy campaign against Islamic State. And after a year of sort of picking at it and trying to find who own the plane and who was responsible and what was going on, I finally got a hold of the accident report. And it very clearly said that the top secret joint special operations command had been operating this plane in Iraq and, you know, possibly in Syria, but at least in Iraq.

And it is known through rare, but existing public statements by then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who was Obama's Secretary of Defense, the Joint Special Operations Command is leading this targeted fight against Islamic States leaders and other sort of important high-value targets. So what kind of plane was this? How big, how many people does it seat? And did they have, were there any bodies in the plane crash? It's a small plane. It's a twin-engine turbo prop. It's sort of the Beachcraft King Air as a plane has become one of the, I don't know, I'd say the industry standard for small. all spy planes like this. And there are about a zillion different configurations that you'll find over the years based on this particular airframe. They all have different sensors and other

equipment. It appeared that this version had both night vision, day and night vision cameras and the ability to scoop up enemy communications activity or home in on their, either their cell phone transmissions that are radio transmissions or something like that, what we call signals, intelligence. And there are only four people on board this plane. According to the accident report, the interesting fact was that of the people on this plane, three of them were actually contractors. Only one of them was a uniform member of the military. He was actually a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who was the tactical systems operator likely in charge of the signals intelligence end of things. And they all survived. The plane had a twin engine failure, but the

pilot managed to glide it into this open field outside of Airbill, which is the Kurdish capital in northern Iraq there. And nobody was injured. And the plane was totaled. So they promptly scoop the plane up out of the field and loaded it into the back of a semi-truck and hauled it back to Airbill International Airport where they stuck it inside a controlled hangar until the safety investigators could show up to give their analysis of what had happened, which.

was inconclusive. The accident report says that they ship both engines back to the manufacturer in Canada to try and figure out what it happened. And they didn't have a conclusion at the time of the report was published. What's the advantage of operating a spy plane like that with four actual people in it as opposed to just having, it feels like a drone could do most of that work, right? Gather that signals intelligence and then feed it back to someone on the ground. There's a running debate about the benefits of drones versus small spy planes like this, which, as you point out, can carry much of the same equipment. The factors at play are that small man spy planes often have a different level of situational awareness. You know, you have a pilot and a co-pilot who are just taking in the scenery and keeping an eye on things, and they may be able to see, you know, something going on off to the same.

that would grab their attention differently and just generally have better situational awareness. You know, remember that people piloting unmanned aerial vehicles, they're only looking through the camera. You know, they're effectively flying it through the camera, and it's a very narrow field of vision that you can't always see what's going on, and you might, you know, miss things or you might just, you know, not be aware of what's happening to the side or behind you or wherever the camera isn't looking. But like I said, it's a long-running debate.

and there are pros and cons to both systems, because as was obvious in this situation, when the plane crashed, you put four people in danger, and that has to be taken into account. Another thing that I think is strange here with this plane is that it's three civilian contractors and in a Marine in a plane that's ostensibly owned by the special forces, right? Well, the ownership of this plane is indicative of how these,

most secretive, these covert, you know, this is actually, you know, essentially a covert operation. It's not readily acknowledged by the U.S. military that this is going on unless they have to. It's not necessarily deny. They don't deny it, but they're just not going to talk about it. It's secret. And so the ownership arrangement of this plane reflects that. It's owned by the army. They are the managers.

You know, it's run, there's a program manager's office in the Army that handles fixed-wing aircraft, you know, including the Army's publicly acknowledged small spy planes. And that was one of the first places that we found any evidence that this thing existed at all was in a maintenance contract because it is situated at an air base, at an airfield, not an Air Base, an Army Airfield in Georgia, where the Army also has its own military intelligence. aircraft and it's because most likely there is a logistical reason for keeping all of them in the same place. They're all basically the same plane. So if you hire people to repair them and keep them flying, it's easy enough to keep them all co-located in the same place. But these two planes, the ownership train goes all the way down to Special Operations Command and they're the sort of bottom of the ownership tree. And it then ends up this weird thing and that it's a government-owned airframe managed by the army that's administered by U.S. Special Operations Command.

It is flown by contractors with systems operated by military personnel on behalf of the Joint Special Operations Command. And if that's obtuse and confusing, that's by design. We're going to get a little bit more into obtuse and confusing, but first we are going to take a break. You are listening to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt, sitting here with Joseph Trevethik, a freelance journalist with the War Zone. Thank you for listening to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. We are back with Joseph Trevethic, journalist, freelance journalist at the War Zone.

Right before we broke, Joe, you were telling us that this stuff is obtuse and confusing by design, just trying to figure out who the chain of ownership on this plane is incredibly confusing. So is that part of how this stuff stays secret is by creating a bizarre, wall of bureaucracy around it and paperwork? Yes. It's a double-edged sword, of course, because it is a military plane, which means that when it crashed, there had to be an accident report. It's an odd arrangement, because the reason why it's done this way is to conceal it,

and therefore, if you see it, you don't really know what it's doing. So even if you see it, you don't really know what it's doing, because it's hard to track down who owns it and who's who it's working with and the rest of it. But like I said, you know, there is a, there was a public accident report. And the amusing thing, of course, is that the accident report itself says very clearly in unredacted portions that the report itself was abridged, that the accident investigators could not go into great detail about the operational narrative because it was so secret. So they were like, we can sort of tell you about the crash and we can tell you

who was on the plane because we need to, but we can't really tell you what it was doing. This all feels very Cold War. This feels like the same kind of hoops that people would have to jump through to get documents during the Cold War, and the same kind of strategies to keep things hidden. There's have been a lot of this since,

basically since the war on terror started after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and contractors have been a really important part of how these wars have been prosecuted abroad, and these complicated arrangements of either government-owned and contractor-operated systems, or contractor-owned and-contractor-operated systems, what they refer to as go-co and cocoa,

has been key to basically performing these operations in no small part, because there just aren't enough special forces to do all this and still keep it under the radar. Mark. Right. That's another really interesting component to this story. You know, these people are kind of stretched thin right now, these soldiers. And one of them just died in Somalia, in a raid, a Navy SEAL, right? What happened there? The details are still emerging. There have been a number of anonymous sources who have told the Associated Press and Reuters varying details about this. But as best we know, a team of Navy SEALs worked with, a group of Somali National Army troops to raid a safe house west of the capital Mogadishu. When they arrived on the scene by helicopter, a firefight broke out and one seal died, and at least two others were wounded.

Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group there, who's actually an Al-Qaeda franchise since 2012, said that they had wounded and killed a number of government and foreign fighters in their own statement. But so far we don't know how many Somali troops died, and it's not clear how many al-Shabaab fighters died, or whether this raid resulted in the death of the target or targets. So there's a lot that remains unknown. But it seems to have involved a very small number of American special operators working with a group of Somali troops, and which, you know, for years now we've been training

their elite forces as well to be able to conduct these operations. That's a, you know, part and parcel of the whole procedure, you know, special operators train local forces to be able to do these operations themselves. That's one of their key jobs. Special operators typically think of themselves as the tip of the spear, right? It seems lately that they have become the whole spear, though. How do they feel about that? Do we have any idea? They're worried about that. There was just a hearing before the Senate on May 4th, where the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, pretty pointedly said that his troops were, as he put it at their sustainable limit. He, you know, no one ever wants to say, oh, my guys can't handle this. You know, we can't do what we need to do. No one's ever really going to go. before legislators and say that. They may say that there is a concern about that happening in the future,

but no one wants to go out and say, we can't perform our job. But using that phrase, sustainable limit, it was pretty clear cut in that he felt that his guys were being employed pretty seriously and that it wasn't necessarily going to work forever and that at some point something had to give. And that's probably true. Special operations forces are traditionally some of the most ready forces who are available to go at a moment's notice into very complex situations in a very austere environments with very little support. They're trained to do that. The units are designed to do that.

What happens, unfortunately, is then they become the go-to. and if you are trying to avoid large-scale ground operations or even large-scale air operations, you often find yourself relying very heavily on these troops to perform these missions, and there's only so many of them. They need downtime. You know, there's a very high burnout rate among these units. You know, they routinely hold various retreats for them and their families because the divorce rate is so. high. I mean, there are serious potential morale problems in the community, but they take their job

very seriously, and they're always ready and willing to go. And so the thing is, they're never going to turn down a mission, but they also need to know that the bulk of the United States military is there to help pick up the slack. And, you know, you've started to see that a little bit in Iraq and Syria, where increasing numbers of conventional troops have been deployed, albeit very quietly because there's a lot of very negative connotations around this phrase boots on the ground and one of the biggest things has been that special operators

somehow magically don't count. You know, the joke has always been that special operators are sneakers on the ground and therefore you don't have to mention them. But you have seen more conventional troops both training people in Iraq and Syria and more recently you've seen a lot of them deploying

to provide artillery support like traditional artillery support with how it serves and guided rockets on the ground. And that's occurred both in Iraq and in Syria now, where the Marines have set up an artillery fire base north of Islamic States de facto capital in Raqa to provide support for the ongoing operations around that city and probably any ultimate assault into the city proper by Syrian forces. This feels like war creep to me. Like we have missions that we want to go on. And because of the, we have the special weapon that when we use it, it allows us to not talk about it. my off base?

No, and this has been one of the bigger concerns is that when you have a force who is designed to both be available and be discreet, that there is a running concern that you will be inclined to use them, and we may be seeing that. What's also important to point out is the United States is actually dramatically more transparent than many of its allies on this front. If you were to ask, and I have asked before, if you were to ask, ask the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense or the Canadian forces headquarters about their special operators and their special operators activities, they have a blanket policy of never

saying anything ever. They have a canned response that says we do not talk about special operations forces at all. And that has led to that becoming an even more of a concern in those countries where public advocacy groups and transparency organizations. often cite the fact that there is this blanket policy as a concern that then the government is waging war without a public debate. And in America, it feels like we know just enough about them to make them cool, like they're superheroes.

I kind of feel like that's how they're presented in the culture. Without a doubt. And there is a big debate about the pros and cons of doing that too. You know, special operations sells. Everything is special operations. Everything is special operations. Video games, movies, you're never going to see a movie unless it's some weird thing based on a true-to-life story about some guy from a truck company. You know, it's just not going to happen.

You know, you see movies about Navy SEALs. That's what happens. And, you know, it's odd because, like I said, there is a, you know, there are a lot of very conventional troops deployed around the world. fighting various levels of conflict. You know, none of this officially being wars, but, you know, they're fighting and in danger. And so it is not just special operations, although the special operations community does have an outsized role for sure, especially in places like Somalia and in Yemen and in Afghanistan, where the overall American troop commitment has shrunk.

One last question for you. Do you think that any of this will come back to bite America? America and its allies in the ass. Is there a downside to conducting war this way? The belief, of course, is that you do this so that that doesn't happen. You know, one of the reasons why we've arrived at this place is because big, major public interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan really burned the United States, both in the court of public opinion and among the domestic popular opinion. know, when people think of a big foreign policy mistakes, the big wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

are high on that list. You know, people generally do not remember those things fondly. So, you know, and this isn't, you know, this isn't Trump or Obama or anything. This is an American government position by and large that finding a way to talk less or downplay the nature of deployments has been key. and, you know, I've reported on this issue in the past, and there's a, you know, it goes beyond now just boots on the ground. Boots on the ground has already become such a laughable sort of euphemism because it never gets used. You know, nothing has ever boots on the ground. No one never admits that there being boots on the ground.

You know, nothing is ever a military deployment. There's never a war going on. No one's ever fighting anywhere. No one's ever in a country permanently. You know, everything is temporary operations that last. multiple years and, you know, short-term engagements that still don't have a foreseeable conclusion or a overarching guiding strategy. And there's got to be some give and take. Yeah, America doesn't want to be involved in large-scale ground interventions where we get bogged down for years on end

with no end in sight and, you know, thousands of Americans troops are committed. But you can tell me how long we've been fighting in Afghanistan. And, you know, we've changed the name of that. You know, it's no longer Operation Enduring Freedom. It's not Operation Freedom Sentinel, which very pointedly was because it was transitioning from a combat mission to a non-combat mission. And for a non-combat mission, you know, we're dropping a fair amount of bombs. including that really big bomb, and people are dying.

So, you know, yeah, at some point there's going to be some real, real serious questions if there haven't already been those questions. The problem is always, if you can keep it obscured, how much is any of that talk going to sort of move the proverbial needle? You know, people don't know enough to be outraged. You know, people, we drop the Moab in Afghanistan. people were shocked to find out we were still fighting in Afghanistan. I mean, that was how far that had gone.

You know, people had completely forgotten about that conflict. You know, I don't know whether that will come back to bite anyone in the ass. Maybe in a just world it would. I really hesitate to say one way or the other. But there are definitely serious questions to be asked about conducting war. Let's just call it war in this war. in this way. Joseph Trevethic of the Warzone.

Thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, who also wrangles our guests. It's produced by me, Bethel Hopday. If you like our show and want to support us, please leave us our rating and review in iTunes.

It helps other people find the show. And go back and listen to our archives if you'd like. there's plenty there. Join us next week for another episode. Thanks.