Guerrillas in the Mist: what the Pentagon can learn from the Green Berets

In America's wars against the al Qaeda terror network and Iraq, few military organizations play as central a role as the US. Army's Special Forces. Founded a half-century ago, these "Green Berets"--named for the distinctive headgear they have worn since the Kennedy administration, when the Pentagon dispatched them to fight insurgents in South Vietnam--serve as military trainers, political advisers, and unconventional warriors around the world. The iconic image which has emerged from the Afghan conflict remains that of a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha--a real life "A Team"--riding into battle on horseback as if a 19th-century cavalry charge, but equipped with 21st-century weapons and satellite communications gear.

But not much is really known about these elite soldiers, who call themselves the "quiet professionals" Special operations exploits rarely make the headlines except when they succeed or fail spectacularly. Military historians, too, tend to focus on conventional forces and battles. U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson helps to fill the resulting void with Masters of Chaos, which offers a rare glimpse inside the secretive world of the Green Berets and their recent adventures. The book pieces together stories from such colorful characters as Chief Warrant Officer Randall "Rawhide" Wurst, whose service record reads like a briefing on the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, to provide a gripping, if sometimes anecdotal and incomplete, history of Special Forces.

The Green Berets patterned themselves after the clandestine and guerrilla forces that operated during World War II, such as the commandos of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of today's CIA) who conducted missions behind enemy lines and fomented insurgencies in places like Greece after the war. Unlike the Army's Rangers, who trained principally as light infantry "shock troops," the Green Berets focused on unconventional missions, such as training another country's military. The Army's involvement in Vietnam began with the Green Berets, who served as advisers to the South Vietnamese military and later branched out into unconventional warfare missions--the nature of that war making it perfectly suited for such a force. But after America's military withdrawal in 1973, the Army refocused its attention on Europe and the conventional battle it thought it would eventually have to fight there.

Indeed, the Army turned its back on unconventional warfare almost entirely, which nearly meant the end of the Green Berets. But special forces rebuilt themselves as fighting forces, honing their edge in hotspots like El Salvador and the Balkans. Despite their battlefield prowess, the Green Berets have lacked two things essential for any government program--institutional muscle and political support. The Army's top generals nearly all come from the traditional branches of infantry, armor, and artillery. Very few "snake eaters" go on to earn the four stars of a full general, although the Army's current top general grew up in the special forces and once commanded the secretive "Delta Force"--which may explain some of the attention these units command today. Second, the special forces lack a visible political constituency oil Capitol Hill, a problem exacerbated by the relative (and necessary) invisibility of their work.

The most valuable parts of Robinson's book cover the exploits of the Green Berets in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the secret role that a few Special Forces soldiers played in helping the FBI defuse al Qaeda's millennium attacks on the United States in late 1999 and 2000. That mission, classified until now, paired Middle East specialists from the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Ky., with FBI agents working the case in Los Angeles. In part, this was necessitated by the FBI's acute shortage of Arabic speakers. The result was the first counterterrorism mission for Special Forces on U.S. soil in history, which put Green Berets into FBI offices to interpret and analyze Arabic-language materials and translate surveillance of al Qaeda operatives. Federal law prohibits military personnel from being directly involved in law enforcement, so the Green Berets never actually participated in surveillance efforts or other field work. An alert guard on the U.S.-Canada border gets the credit for stopping the actual attack on LAX on the eve of the millennium, but the FBI credits the Green Berets with helping to get the intelligence to dismantle the entire operation.

Before the U.S. campaign in 2001, historians called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Nevertheless, the nation that repelled both British and Soviet invasions fell in just a matter of weeks to a ragtag coalition of Green Berets, Pashtun militias, and Northern Alliance rebels. But the U.S. military also stumbled in Afghanistan, failing both to find al Qaeda's top leadership and to establish lasting order throughout the countryside. For those tasks, it appears, a more robust force must be used. Robinson ascribes the failure to find Osama bin Laden, at least in part, to the shifting loyalties of Afghan fighters working with the U.S. military, but it's not clear that this is the full story. The lack of resources, specifically conventional U.S. forces on the ground, played its part in letting bin Laden slip through America's fingers.