Special Operations
Train, John
silliness moves beyond the pomposity of American grandees to just about everywhere. Mrs. MacMann on her last day in the White House peruses the morning newspaper and reads that "a significant...
...Grenada much less so...
...They are true heroes...
...He is even decades removed from the sexual epicureans such as Mailer and Vidal who made it their sport, their inspiration, personal Gnosticism...
...We went for temporary insanity...
...He creates in a satire characters that stick in our minds...
...is, The only thing worse than a FUBAR military operation that you win is a FUBAR operation that you lose...
...The attack on the prison had to be abandoned: all six helicopters involved were damaged...
...Cuba started to build a huge military airport and military training facilities there...
...By the time of Grenada, five years later, many lessons should have been learned, but unfortunately were not...
...For interservice balance, three generals plus other Army officers were injected at various levels...
...Carney was in at the start of an important part of modern special operations: combat air control, which secretly reconnoiters the sites where Delta Force will land, lays out infrared lights that can be activated from the air, and then guides in the attackers...
...Special operations personnel constitute about 2 percent of all men and women in uniform, but since 1980 have suffered more than 37 percent of all combat fatalities...
...When the time came to rescue the medical students at Lance Aux Epines, there were no Army helicopters available, so Gen...
...And finally, Special Tactics units are small teams of Air Force combat controllers who specialize in seizing airports or other landing areas and going on from there...
...Many officers have expressed their frustration with how things are managed...
...President Reagan authorized the operation...
...John T. Carney, Jr., the author, with Benjamin F. Schemmer, of No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan describes both from the inside, but I will focus on Grenada just to show how horribly messed up things can get...
...Why are so many different types required...
...The men who make up our special operations forces are very possibly the most dedicated and best-trained soldiers in the world...
...But for now, No Way to Treat a First Lady is enough...
...Through his binoculars he could see them bustling about the field and the lights of vehicles headed there...
...Consider: 200 Special Forces men and barely 50 Special Tactics men, plus helicopter and ground support, took over the country in three months...
...The Grenada "Flow Plan" involved 95 planned sorties and 117 code-named events...
...From his ship, Col...
...In any event, with reasonable luck the rescue could undoubtedly have succeeded...
...There were many subordinate units: Task Force 124, Marines...
...So much for secrecy...
...And another lawyer, Buckley tells us, triumphed on behalf of "international grain corporations accused of using powdered insect dung to give a popular children's breakfast cereal its distinctive crunch...
...There were any number of timing put-backs, to the rage of the Special Operations Forces, since to them it was important to drop at night...
...Units launched where they weren't needed, didn't find their objectives, and even shot at each other...
...Special Forces are the Army "Green Berets" and associated units...
...And once launched, the operation soon parted company from the Flow Plan anyway...
...four Navy SEALs drowned...
...To this day," Carney and Schemmer write, "[we] doubt that any one person knows how ineptly [Grenada] was planned and executed?' A Marxist government had seized power and tied itself to the Soviet bloc...
...Task Force 126, consisting of F-18 fighters and E-3A surveillance planes...
...Not all, some are as cardboard as those you will find in a novel by Robert Coover...
...Special Operations Forces include Delta Force and the Rangers...
...As the authors describe it: The arrival times in Barbados of the three giant C-5A transports on which Task Force 160's Blackhawk helicopters were carried were changed like eggs being scrambled by a short-order cook...
...Their combat record shows it: they sustain vastly higher casualty rates than the regular services...
...In the Iran hostage rescue attempt they didtheir part of the job, but for many reasons, including both lack of unified command and excessive internal secrecy, that mission failed catastrophically...
...Buckley has a gift...
...Answer: Each works within the culture and skills of its respective service...
...Where would fuel come from...
...The jury was out in under two hours...
...As it happens, Col...
...Afghanistan really has been a success...
...Almost all of the components of the attack ran into trouble because of delays and poor intelligence...
...Sending men ashore from ships is part of the sea culture...
...His outfit was called "Brand X" in the late '70s, until it had proved itself and was declared operational...
...Or supply of ammunition and rations...
...Task Force 121, elements from the 82nd Airborne Division...
...And as the country is beginning to realize, in the fights that we face in coming years, sending special operations men to "kick in the door," as the Marines say, is likely to be the first phase of many engagements...
...Then the helicopter task force commander stated that the planes had to be in Barbados by 5:58 A.M...
...But Buckley does something more with his prose that has the touch of art...
...But in spite of knowing all that had gone before, and having made appropriate doctrinal changes, the command and control performance there has been very weak, as is always possible if one has to cobble together miscellaneous forces for particular missions...
...The Marine colonel replied that he would not, since Marines did not fly Army soldiers in Marine helicopters...
...And the Army special operations forces are the ones best adapted to surviving on land and immobilizing targets ahead of a heavier ground force...
...She was out of the mental hospital in less than three years...
...When some of them made it back out to the control vessel, the Guam, leaking hydraulic fluid from their bullet holes, an urgent message came in from the Navy controller in Washington not to refuel the Army helicopters because they had not worked out the financial transfer arrangements...
...Amazingly, seven months after President Reagan had twice declared on national television that the ten-thousand-foot runway being built by Cuba constituted a threat to our hemisphere, and four days after the prime minister had been assassinated, the National Security Council and the Defense Department had still never requested a usable military map from the Defense Mapping Agency, nor were satellite photographs available...
...Norman Schwarzkopf asked the Marines to fly in the Rangers...
...He has passed beyond the ranks of the great solemnizers of sex who were the bearded and glassy-eyed prophets of sexual revolution in the first half of the last century...
...And indeed, Fidel Castro had sent the former head of the Cuban military mission to speed the defense of the island...
...The U.S...
...Air Force Special Operations units include the so-called "Air Commandos," the 16th Special Operations wing, and the like...
...He can knock heads together and will be held accountable...
...Units were dumped into, for instance, Bagram air field, and told to get on as best they could...
...One capsized and sank forthwith...
...He can write speeches as he has for pols, essays, journalism, satire, and perhaps someday a very fine novel...
...Carney heard the Grenada radio station urging defenders to rush to the airport to fight off the invaders...
...in the living room, in front of guests, on the white carpet...
...Here in 2003, in the last stage of the sexual revolution when all the sex hygienists, sex theorists, and sex maniacs have become almost indistinguishable, Buckley stands atop mounds of unsold Playboys and well-read Starr Reports to say sex is funny...
...However, the State Department liaison officer with JSOC declared in a meeting that the Cubans in Grenada would probably stay in their barracks, thanks to an "informalagreement...
...The right way to describe this category of soldier in general is thus special operations forces...
...Schwarzkopf "exploded, gave the colonel a direct order, and told him he'd be court-marshaled if he disobeyed it...
...Contrary to any kind of good order, this item did not appear on the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization chart, and reported to nobody, which had serious consequences...
...I had a client once...
...One partial explanation may be Secretary Rumsfeld's known aversion fO large forces, which implies assembling the parts willy-nilly, and often not having them properly connected...
...She's a tennis pro in Boca Raton...
...and finally, something called the Caribbean Peacekeeping Force from nearby island republics, mostly to show solidarity...
...After much backing and filling, a Navy admiral was named to head the operation...
...In the end, though, we won, and President Reagan happily pronounced it a "textbook success...
...Yet Buckley's most bountiful source of jokes is sex...
...Task Force 123, Rangers, Delta Force, and Army air crews from JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command...
...Iran has been written about extensively...
...Task Force 20-5, the carrier Independence and its battle group...
...They seem real, occasionally likable, occasionally striking...
...Two Boston Whalers carrying a reconnaissance party were dropped an unbelievable forty miles offshore, even though the radar horizon is about half that...
...What about medical evacuation...
...The Navy's Special Warfare Command has Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) teams, special boat and patrol craft squadrons, and SEAL delivery units...
...Yes, he said "distinctive:' Lawyers get it good and hard in this book, and politicians, and Hollywood's mélange of prima donnas and wheeler-dealers, as do phony idealists, public relations geniuses, and the media...
...The book's description of the blowup is harrowing, much more so than the official report of the August 1980 review group chaired by Admiral J. L. Holloway...
...Then it became apparent that there was no post-invasion planning...
...As a result, things went horribly askew: for instance, Navy A-7 Corsairs attacking what they thought was a Cuban command post blew up a nearby hospital...
...It really is...
...ambassador called for evacuating 600 American students, plus several hundred American tourists...
...she blew her husband's head off with his twelve-gauge Purdey shotgun...
...Members of the previous government were murdered...
...The account of Grenada in No Room For Error continues for over fifty pages of such confusion...
...MacMann on her last day in the White House peruses the morning newspaper and reads that "a significant dinosaur bone had been found in Manitoba that paleontologists said might establish that dinosaurs had become extinct not because of a giant meteorite, but from osteoporosis:' Later her lawyer boasts of the tough cases he has won...
...Instead of landing in darkness with surprise, most of the attacks ended up in broad daylight, under heavy fire, since the Cubans had automatic weapons and antiaircraft guns...
...The plane's crews were first told to arrive at 5:00 A.M., 5:10 A.M., and 5:20 A.M., respectively...
...Scarcely...
...Nineteen men were killed and 123 wounded...
...In one operation the troops, not enjoying a settled supply chain, almost ran out of water and other necessities...
...Specifically, seizing an airfield or landing site in preparation for an air descent is clearly an Air Force job...
...Fortunately, things are infinitely better now...
...The terminology of special operations is far from simple...
...Would it have been overdoing it to make her a skeet-shooting instructor...
...But as it happens, the worst special ops campaign of all time—utterly, colossally FUBAR—was not the Iran hostage rescue, a disaster, but Grenada, which finally succeeded...
...Seven months later an even more radical Marxist regime seized power and imposed a shoot-on-sight round-the-clock curfew...
...A JSOC representative then changed that to "no earlier than 7:00 A.M...
...To preserve security, many of the commanders had not been told what was up...
...Another JSOC change told them to arrive at 6:46, 6:50, and 7:00, respectively...
...Obviously, changing one part meant changing many other parts...
...An excellent and overdue step forward has been creating the Special Operations Command, headed by a four-star general, who can force truly consolidated planning, transportation, execution, supply, and after-action operations...
...The Rangers were flown in...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
