Danger Close

2. Integrating the Special Forces—Close Air Support Team

The fall of Mazar-e Sharif, especially the speed and totality of the Taliban ’s collapse there, came as a major shock to many people around the world. It was a badly needed morale boost for anyone yearning to see justice meted out to the Taliban and al Qaeda. It also silenced those critics claiming the Rumsfeld-Franks strategy was doomed to failure. More important, though, it showed the world there was something significant in marrying Special Forces and air power with a seemingly insignificant force like the Northern Alliance. After years of losses, the Northern Alliance seemed unlikely to pull off such a stunning victory on their own, so obviously SOF teams and air power must be key parts of that victory. Military leaders realized that somehow air power, particularly in the form of CAS, was the great catalyst in this equation, but exactly why was not clear. Many observers ascribed the success to technology and weapons that had emerged in the previous twenty years. Precision guided munitions , which made their public debut in Desert Storm, got a lot of press, and the U.S. military had integrated them into routine CAS operations, but the wider public wasn’t aware of this prior to Afghanistan. In fact, so much had been done in this area that some observers believed the big revolution in Afghanistan was simply guys on the ground with laser pointers designating targets for precision weapons. New weapons weren’t the only part of the revised CAS picture, though. Even the so-called dumb bombs gained new importance because they were now being dropped by highly accurate aiming systems that could be relied on even in close quarters. Extraordinary new advances in reconnaissance had also done a great deal to transform the airground team. Satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles significantly increased what soldiers and airmen could see and how quickly the images could be sent to them. Various means of monitoring energy emissions across the electronic spectrum helped troops know what sorts of units or weapons systems were out there and where they were located, and cosmic radar sets could detect and help identify units and weapons moving 2. Integrating the Special Forces— Close Air Support Team 26 Danger Close on the ground. But for all their glitz and sex appeal, new technology and gee-whiz weaponry were not the real secret to what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. Some perceptive observers realized that what was really different about recent events in the war was a new operational concept. So the question of the day was how to identify that concept, how to harness it, and how to make it work on a routine basis. The natural tendency is to ascribe great capability to technology or weapons, but in reality the most important factor is how you use that technology or weaponry. A critical level exists in warfare between the tactical level—“the grunt’s eye view”— and the strategic level. Known as the operational level of warfare, it might best be thought of as how military organizations conduct business—their mode of fighting, how they integrate various combat arms throughout the theater, their organization and logistics, in short, how they translate tactical level capability on a day-to-day basis into strategic level success. It is the operational level that often spells the difference between success and failure. What most people think of as doctrine is really the codification of concepts or modes of operating at the operational level of warfare. At the operational level in Afghanistan, what the Coalition was doing had never been done before; moreover, it hadn’t even been anticipated, and so the secret to recreating what had happened at Mazar-e Sharif was to figure out what had worked there and weld it into an operational concept that could be applied across the theater. One problem with knitting normal SOF operations into a theaterwide operational concept was the challenge of applying air power to routine SOF techniques on a massive scale. Essentially, because Special Forces travel very light, their primary heavy weapon across this theater was going to be CAS, and that meant substantial air power. The difficulty was not that SOF personnel were unfamiliar with controlling CAS. SOF teams often called in airstrikes on specific targets, and CAS is always available as a last-ditch defense, so all SOF fields receive some level of CAS control training, and some fields, particularly combat control teams, receive more than others...