Angry Planet - We need to talk about the Special Forces

Episode Date: July 6, 2017

U.S. Special Operations forces worked and fought in more than 130 countries across the world in 2016 alone (hyperlink source). In 2017, America’s elite troops are doing even more (hyperlink source). From East Africa, to the Middle East and beyond, U.S. operators are more than just the tip of the spear, they’re the entire vanguard. That’s not necessarily a good thing. This week on War College, Tim Lynch – a retired Marine and former contractor in Afghanistan – walks us through his experiences in Afghanistan where he had a front row seat for U.S. Special Operations Forces boldest experiments. According to Lynch, America’s elite troops aren’t always great at their job, often misunderstand Afghan culture and sometimes pick fights when they should be building bridges. By Matthew Gault Produced 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. I'm not saying that they didn't learn lessons and get more effective later. I'm just saying that they didn't, and the one guy that did, Jim Gant, got crucified. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Gull. This week we're going to talk about the U.S. Special Operations Forces, the Army Rangers, the Green Berets Delta Squad, and of course the Navy SEALs. These are the premier teams of America's global war on terror, the elite tip of the spear that keeps America safe and helps it win hearts and minds. Here to help us understand America's Special Operations Forces and their role in its various wars is former Marine Corps officer Tim Lynch. After retiring from the Ring Corps, Lynch spent seven years in Afghanistan as a contractor. And during those years, he visited every province in the country and gained a working knowledge of Afghan culture. He wrote about the experience and continues to write about the military as website Free Range International. Tim, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, no worries, Matt. Thanks for having me on. So you had a front row seat for the Afghan war and also, the U.S. Special Operations Forces role in it. And it's my understanding that these elite soldiers come into a country, they learn the culture, operate with precision, and minimize civilian casualties, that they are, in fact, the best at what they do. Is that right?

That is what they say, yeah. Well, what did you see? Well, I didn't see that. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not specifically trying to dog on special forces specifically. I mean, I had problems with our entire effort in Afghanistan, but the one thing

that you can't say is that they've develop some type of a culture where they have cultural appropriateness and sensitivity and are able to learn how to operate in an environment. I mean, because because, as I pointed out in my post, I'm just posting on stuff that they've published. I mean, you're running around coast, bare-chested. I can't imagine a more culturally toned-depth thing to do. And along with some of the videos that in the 60 Minutes thing, I mean, that was granted seven

years ago. And so my whole point has been that they don't do that. They didn't in Afghanistan. I'm not saying that they didn't learn lessons and get more effective later. I'm just saying that they didn't. And the one guy that did, Jim Gant, got crucified. It was pretty obvious to me that nobody else was interested in duplicating his methodologies, which I would contend work. All right. Well, let's back up. And I want to give the audience a little context on you and then kind of dive into what you just said there. You said a lot of interesting things. And I've read games. wife's book, American Spartan, actually. So we can talk about that a little bit. What was your Marine Corps career like? When did you go in? When did you retire? I went in. I actually was six years in the Navy as a corpsman before joining the Marine Corps.

And I had joined the Navy specifically to be a seal, something which I don't have color vision. So I can't pass a dive official. That was never going to be on the table. And I signed a six-year contract. I was done in 85, in October of 85, I was at Marine Corps OCS. and I went through the Basis School. What fortunately was a got an infantry officer slot. I had a great 15 years in the fleet and reinforce,

but, you know, between deploying and coming back and teaching mostly at Quantico. I had an excellent time. I enjoyed it thoroughly. And what was your, what was the nature of your contract work like in Afghanistan? What were you doing out there? I started out as the project manager on the American Embassy Security Force for the bridge contractor, which was a, it was a very strange world back then in 2000. 2004, 2005. Once that contract was up and running, I didn't like it myself working at the embassy.

And I branched out in security work and then from there into aid work. And so at my last four years there, I was entirely on the implementation side. And again, we were direct implementers. We were not, we did not have gigantic compounds. We did not have armored cars. We did not have Western security guys. We provided our own security. We wore local clothes. We drove local vehicles. And we were, you know, we were, you know, we were. the kinetic areas never had never failed to complete a project never that sounds a lot like what the dream mission of the of the some of the special operations forces is supposed to be right like they're supposed to go in and wear local clothes and make those kinds of relationships and that's not what that's not what you saw no no that's what they did when they first came into 2001 and 2002 and many of the people that were in this uh the same job i was were former special forces guys and

that's exactly in canadians that's exactly what they said but by the time you got big army in there and you started with two concurrent operations you've got enduring freedom which is hunting terrorists and you've got ISAF which is supposedly standing up and pacifying the country and enduring freedom guys they would they would just keep on doing these high profile night raids and inside of people's a.O that had no idea they were doing there and left them with the fallout this happened time and time again and if you look at the most recent study from the from the army on on green on blue deaths,

you know, Afghans shooting Americans, the number one reason cited is is hostility generated by night raids.

My contention was it never worked because you never seem to dent the Afghan leadership. It doesn't seem to work that way

to me. And so I was very, I was very negative about that, although I've got to say, it's not like those guys don't know what they're doing

when they pull off a raid. I mean, they're awfully good at it, but they rarely, they rarely inflict casualties, but when they do, it's invariably the wrong kind.

And it's, And it was a consistent bone of contention with the Afghans to this day. And I just don't think it was wise. From my perspective, looking at, I was on the outside. What do you mean by it was the wrong kind of casualties? What are the right kind of casualties? Right kind of casualties would be an armed guy that you're going in to get. It would not be an armed neighbor or a teenage boy or somebody else who's rushing out of the compound with a rifle

because you're in the middle of the Pashtun Hill country. And that's what people do at night when they start hearing gunfire. Those are the wrong kind of casualties. And we don't know how many of those were inflicted. Estimates go from several thousand, which, you know, from humanitarian organizations to what you can piece together from Pentagon reports. And they admit to, you know, inflicting casualties at time that were not appropriate. They hit a compound right down the road from me in Angah where they shot a member parliament's son and some other guy that was responding to the thing. It was right. I remember that clearly.

And the local people were pissed. They were closed the road throwing rocks for days. and for guys like us that are out there, that's not good because I can't move around when the locals are that hostile, even though I try not to look like an American. I'm not fooling anybody once I step outside my car. Right. I want to paint the pictures for the listeners here just a little bit, and I want you to correct me if I screw any of this up. But in various parts of more rural Afghanistan, it's kind of like these small enclaves or communities that are almost like little fortresses, right? where a whole family, like a whole extended family and community lives.

It'd be clan. It'd be clanned with multi-jet different families comprising in that area. Yeah. Right. And those clans typically are responsible for their own security. So that's why, you know, a prime minister's son would be there with a rifle. And if someone comes in the middle of the night, then they're going to respond. Right, right.

Member of Parliament, just a... Oh, member of parliament. Yeah, my apologies. The female member from Nangar. But yeah, that's not an unrealistic. assumption, oftentimes, I have to admit, they're neutralized by our guys who are that good, that they won't shoot them, but they'll just disarm them, which is, you know, I'm not saying that the SF guys don't know what they're doing. I'm saying that the specific incidents I cited

they sure as hell didn't seem to, and that the overall tactics weren't working. I mean, they didn't help out anybody as far as you can tell from what you see today in Afghanistan. And we're going to be there a long time. But yeah, that's just, that was just my take on it. And so as unpopular as it is to start dogging out as SF guys, particularly for somebody that joined the Navy to be a seal that was never going to happen. I don't want to be perceived as just like, you know, a dump in negatives on these guys. But when they first showed up in the helmet, they offer a reward for former Taliban.

And all those guys had gone home and turned in their weapons, right? And the first thing that happens is like the local guys, they like, they just, grabbed two orphans. I'm not kidding you. Teenage orphans off the street of Gresh and Thelman said, these guys are Taliban and nobody figured that out until they got back to Gidmo, where I understand they didn't want to leave. They never had it so good. So you start with that and then you start with the raids that happened in Mywand in 2003 where you're taking out your shooting leaders. They're dying in captivity due to interrogation techniques that were inappropriate. Granted, all this stuff got fixed. All of it got fixed. But what the Afghan, what we just said,

and report the Congress is we want Afghanistan to be where the Taliban have laid down her arms and are sort of cooperating in the level of violence is down. That's where it was in 2003 before we started cranking up the enduring freedom operations trying to get al-Qaeda and high-level Taliban guys. I don't understand why we did that because it's very difficult to trace. Let's talk about Jim Gant then because I think this really speaks to, I think his story specifically really speaks to what we're talking about because he had a very, he was a special forces guy. He was Delta, right? Yeah, no, he wasn't a, wasn't a Delta guy.

He had a couple of teams, and when he was bought back in, just as Petraeus was coming in, right around that time frame, he was given National Guardsmen, and I think one other SF guy that he selected, to go out into Coonar Province and try to live amongst the tribes and get some cooperation at that. Right, so, explain, he kind of had a pitch. she had written this document about how he thought we should be conducting the war in Afghanistan and how we could win it. Right. And tell us a little bit about that. Okay, so basically what he was saying is something that is a theme of mine in the blog. He cannot provide protection to the people unless you're there with him.

You know, just patrolling the village at night going back to the Fob isn't working. It was a well-worn concept because of the Iraq surge. But he wanted to go into these villages and actually live with him where essentially he's turning over his safety to his guys to what would be perceived, particularly in Kuhnard provinces, in a bad guy tribes. And so he had built a relationship with one of the elders, a very powerful elder in the Muhammad tribe. He moved in with the Muhammad tribe,

had his now wife with him, you know, and right off the bat, he's doing things unconventional. He patrols like they patrol. They don't have body armor. He doesn't have body armor, which in the mountains of Kuna is smart. He dumps machine guns on these guys in the Overwatch position is not supposed to do that.

But he basically goes in with his tribe. He gets so tight. tight with him that he then goes on to go to the Safi tribe and Chowke. This is where the Army's been getting his ass kick for 10 years. Not at that point. Yeah, about seven. Chow Kay and moves in with those guys, which to me was unbelievable. You know, I went all over Afghanistan, but I would not go near Chowke anywhere near

that particular tribe because, I mean, they were bad, bad frigging noots. And he goes in there and gets those guys. He has elders from Nagahar and from the other side of coming in and asking them how they can set that up. And I think what he's doing is working. Unfortunately, having his, is a girlfriend with him, not allowed. He's given away an ordinance to the Afghans that he shouldn't be doing, according to protocol. He's got an alcohol, but everybody did out there. I'm not going to get too concerned about that. And he basically gets busted. And it's damaging how they bust them. They say he was not cognizant of his own men's own safety because he allowed him to patrol like Afghans did.

I would tell you that's safer than being up in those mountains and body armor. But that's just my personal experience, you know. But to be honest, I know Jim. I saw Jim and Ann when they were coming through. I saw him at the Taj. I'm particularly fond of him. And I think that that was the way to go. It duplicated what we were doing on the reconstruction side.

Do you think that his wife was a reporter? Do you think that that made leadership nervous too? No, I think the fact that he was out there, that she was even out there. that they didn't know. She wasn't any reporter. She was a prominent reporter. And I think, yes, I think yes, that's going to make things different if she got, you know, somehow her body turns up in the middle of Koonar up there in a Chalka district. That's going to raise some heads. But her experience was no different from, you know, I was, I was working on you, Alibad. I had a place called a Taj. You can see all this in the, if anybody's

followed the blog. It was lots of internationals there to include an MIT Fab Lab run by a PhD student named Amy's son. And she would tell me the same thing after her and the MIT girls got together with the Nangar University girls. She said, you know, if anything you want to know, just ask these girls. They'll tell you everything. So the fact that Anne was sitting there getting some very valuable insights from the women was consistent with my experience. I mean, having females around in the reconstruction business certainly augmented our situational awareness and allowed us to move safer. All right. You are listening to War College. We are talking with Tim Lynch about special operations forces in Afghanistan and kind of Afghanistan in general, we will be right back after a break.

Hello, welcome back to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. We are on with Tim Lynch, former Marine Corps officer and a contractor for seven years in Afghanistan. We are talking about special operations forces in Afghanistan and what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. So right before the break, we were talking about women kind of giving you, you know, human intelligence and that's something that I have heard from from other people that have been there, that the women that were serving along as interpreters really helped give everyone's situational awareness. So is there anything that special operations forces are doing right in Afghanistan that you see? Well, well, the one thing they've done right is the trend of the Afghan

commandos, the Afghan special forces. The people of Afghanistan hold them in very, very high regard and they're essentially acting as the fire department for Afghanistan. You know, when things get heated in the helmet and they're down there. When the ISIS acts up, they're in the Nangahar. They're very proficient, they're very good. They have special forces, trainers with them, embedded with them to access all the enablers America brings the aircraft and now artillery's over there too, I note. So yeah, they do that very well.

But, you know, but again, I've got to believe there's not that many of those guys doing it. And those guys that are doing it are guys that have learned the bitter lessons from the guys in the past. So one thing in American military is not is averse to learning lessons. And Special Forces guys adopt faster than most. So, yeah, they're doing a great job at that. All right, this kind of begs the question to me then. Are the special forces stretched then? You know, these are supposed to be the elite warriors.

There's not supposed to be many of them. But they're, you know, if they're training and they're doing most of the nighttime raids and they're effectively, you know, fighting the war, is there a worry that we're going to, we're just not going to be able to train as many of them as we need? Yeah, well, that's, that is certainly something that's been in the press. I have no insight to offer on that. I would imagine were I the Special Forces guys,

I would be shunning mostly national guardsmen into Afghanistan, particularly out of Utah. They're very proficient at that kind of thing. While you save your heavy hitters for all the work they're doing in Syria, in Iraq, and we don't know what they're doing. And in Africa, too, Somalia. And so, who knows? Are they stretched thin?

They've got to be stretched thin. Particularly the support guys, the Task Force 160 helicopter guys. I mean, they can't have a ton of those. But yeah, they're stretched thin. So my point about what they're doing right is with the Afghan commandos, because they are stretched thin, I don't think you've got like an enduring freedom, American directed counterterrorism thing. I think the Special Forces guys are doing. what the commanders are thinking they ought to be doing.

And that's a whole different thing than night raids if you follow me. Because they don't have enough. I can't imagine they've got enough capability to be doing that over there now. Why don't you like the night raids? What's your criticism of the night raids? For years I would hear from my friends as they rotated in there. Like, Timi, you've got to hear the traffic between the local Taliban and the guys in Quetta. Or do guys pick your Pakistani city.

you're sure are they're panicking because they're getting their hammered and to which i said yeah but you know they seem to be gaining momentum everywhere i'm not too damn sure that that's that's right and it sort of takes away from the afghan's ability to run a little i oops on her own if if they they're not stupid people and if they think that's what they they want to be hearing is panic calls back and forth i bet they can generate a lot of them and they might not all be legit and i'm sure there's ways of differentiating the wheat from the chaff you know i mean i know we're good at this kind of stuff, but I never saw on the ground any indication that stripping out these senior guys slowed down a momentum anybody, anybody anywhere that I was aware of. So it sounds like we're just

fighting this war all wrong, in your opinion. Yeah, I would, yes, I would go back to 2003 and say, just leave it like it is. You know, if you wanted to put an enduring freedom presence in here, it needed to be a lot smaller than it was. But once, once you had Bogram, I mean, once you had, had been a lot in cornered and everybody was running all over the country. You know, in comes all this headquarters in Biogram, and once a headquarters gets set up, it's got to do something. And they start doing things, you know, I would contend that that mission pat Timonon was nonsense, driving all around the villages of Coates and like clearing them and saying, oh, this village is clear.

Jeez. I mean, because that's a basic misunderstanding of what it is you can expect to see and what is you're going to see. And it's just a waste of time. It's, it is, it's battlefield geometry. It's not focusing on any particular enemy or any capability or degrading anybody in any significant way. So what do you think is going to happen in the immediate future? You know, we're talking about sending 4,000 more soldiers there, right?

Right. That's, in my opinion, I'm a longtime Afghanistan watcher. I don't think that those 4,000 soldiers are going to make a huge difference. What's your opinion on that? Well, you've got a good-sized training element down in the helmet. You've got another good-sized training element in Nangar. Now you've got the 80-second airborne flying in artillery and quick response units. Okay.

So now you've got another battalion that's going to be sitting out there in the helmet, who's just nothing but quick response, which means I think the Marines are going to be getting out. And as the 101st airborne have done in action, obviously, because they took cadgies. They're going to get out and they're going to offer their enablers and try to keep this thing alive. under the guise that the longer this limps along, the more likely it is a Taliban are going to opt for some kind of mixed power sharing type ending to this thing. The Taliban did not have the strength to win.

They're not going to win. I think that's what we're going to do is to string this along. And if you listen to the Pentagon, you listen to General Dunford, like it was on the National Press Club last week, he'll sit there and say this is part of an overall strategy to support countries that are having problems with extremism and we'll help them out to try to drive it down. But, you know, nobody's talking victory.

I think that's what you're going to see. I think we'll be there for years. And it will be artillery units and grunts out there. And every once in a while, you're going to lose a fuel. It's just, it's inevitable. That sounds a lot like what the Taliban strategy is, right? Just stay there and eventually the invaders will leave. It's exactly right.

Yeah. But they keep on screwing up like they did with that bomb in Kabul. that one that went off outside of the green zone. They keep on doing stuff like that, and it's just going to be negative pressures. Plus, you've got Taliban fighting Taliban in Harat last year, in Gresh this year, Taliban fighting al-Sach fighting Taliban. So there's all kinds of scenes you can be playing

if you're going to sit out there and do the white game, quite frankly, and I haven't always felt this way, but as I understand what it is, as I believe I understand, what is they're doing. I say the odds are that eventually we can peter, this thing out like that, but it's a long haul. And what you can't afford is to get a unit surrounded and annihilated, whether that's a squad, a baton, I don't think they could do it to a company. But if they catch like a baton and wipe them out, you're going to have a hard time

keeping America people there. And that's what they're going to try to do. That will be the Taliban strategy. So it's basically keep this thing going and avoid high profile military disasters. It's exactly right. Odds are over time, if you believe the Rand Corporation, odds are you're going to win. What about outside influences like Pakistan? People that are lending material support to the Taliban. See, that's, and again, you've got to operate under the assumption, and this is the only assumption I can make, that Madison, Tilderson and Dunford, they know what they're doing. It's not like they don't know, right? Everybody knows. The question is, is what are we going to do and how is this going to go forward? and it's strictly a diplomatic issue.

There's nothing on a military side that can be done, right? So that's diplomacy. And we've got to see how the heck that shakes out. Because I'm not so sure after all these years of watching the ISI that one hand necessarily knows what the other is doing. I think there's factions inside there, and they've got problems controlling that. That is my feeling. I think you're absolutely right.

Yeah, that's not an original theory. I mean, obviously. But yeah, it would be interesting. But there's got to be pressure there. There's got to be pressure applied. The only thing we have in our advantages, without so much manpower in there, the logistical tail that they've been feeding on now for 17 years is growing a little bit smaller and hopefully one would assume more efficient.

All right, Tim Lynch, thank you for coming on War College and telling us about Afghanistan and America's Special Operations Forces. So we really appreciate it. Hey, no, I appreciate you having me on. I have a great day. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedek.

Matthew Galt hosts the show and Wrangles the Guests. It's produced by me, Bethel-Habte. Thanks for listening.