U.S. Orders Covert Military Action in Mideast

(by FOXNews.com)

The Pentagon has approved a broader range of secret military operations against militant groups in the Middle East and Africa, officials said Monday, according to a published report.

The New York Times said Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, signed a directive in September authorizing Special Operations troops to conduct surveillance missions in such countries as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia.

The document says the goals are to “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” militant groups, including Al Qaeda, and “prepare the environment” for future attacks. The Times said the document does not authorize offensive action.

Anonymous U.S. officials cited by the Times said the order does allow for intelligence-gathering missions in Iran, which could lay the groundwork for possible military action if tensions between the U.S. and Iran continue to rise.

The directive, called the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, does not describe specific missions, although the Times said it had withheld some details in response to Defense Department concerns over U.S. troop safety.

Some of the covert military operations that followed the secret order have been reported.

These include a September 2009 attack by helicopter-borne Special Operations Forces on a car carrying one of east Africa’s most wanted Al Qaeda militants, Kenyan-born Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan.

According to Reuters, Central Command has been positioning Reaper drones at a base in the Horn of Africa. Officials told the news agency the drones can be used against militants in Yemen and Somalia, and even against pirates who attack ships traversing the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

“They (the drones) are part of it but it is much broader than that,” one U.S. official told Reuters of the order.

U.S. Orders Covert Military Action in Mideast

How to turn the tide in Afghanistan

(By Eric Blehm)

This week, we reached a grim milestone in Afghanistan: 1,000 U.S. troops killed since the war began in 2001. It is a sober reminder of the cost of the conflict, and every new military casualty will test the patience and resolve of the American public. But it’s another casualty list – the unknown number of Afghan civilians killed in our operations there – that is much more central to the ultimate outcome of the war.

If we want to win – defeating the Taliban and dealing a decisive blow to Al Qaeda in the region – our troops must pursue a new strategy to minimize them. Specifically, we should borrow a page from two unlikely people: a little-known military officer and the world leader nobody today seems to trust, Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Last week, President Obama appeared to smile through clenched teeth during his press conference with Karzai. Because, behind the carefully crafted scripts of the media spectacle remains a deeply troubled conflict – one aggravated, more than any other factor, by civilian casualties.

These are the realities on the ground: Our military forces are being prodded to succeed at one intersection, then hobbled at the next by difficult restraints on the rules of engagement. Meanwhile Karzai continues his broken-record mantra that civilian deaths cause the greatest
rifts between the Afghan public and U.S. forces operating in his country.

On that, he is correct: These deaths (there are no accurate reports, but estimates range from the thousands to tens of thousands since October 2001) of innocent men, women and children are emotionally charged recruiting tools for our insurgent foes. Each accident is a roadblock to victory.

Today, as we idle at a crossroads, it would be wise to glimpse at a page from history written just nine years ago, to reflect upon the mission of the first Special Forces A-team to infiltrate the dangerous southern part of the country, which is still the heart of the Taliban movement today. Then, an 11-man team of Green Berets joined Karzai, at the time an obscure statesman who was also an aspiring guerrilla leader attempting to foment a rebellion among the Pashtun in the Southern Provinces.

It was no-man’s land for these soldiers: They were literally surrounded by Afghan tribesmen who were on the fence as to whether to join with the Green Berets sided with Karzai or to remain aligned with the Taliban. The team’s only hope for success was to win over the population. They did so in large part by safeguarding the innocent.
How? The captain of this team of seasoned noncommissioned officers was Jason Amerine; he and his team worked hand-in-hand with Karzai before authorizing air strikes.

And it worked. During a three-week campaign of heavy bombing throughout southern Afghanistan, not a single civilian was reported to have been killed or wounded by air strikes authorized by this team. There were many ambiguous situations that could have held tragic results had these Green Berets not been able to cross-talk with their Afghan counterparts – including that key guerrilla leader, Karzai – and dispatch spies to verify the activities and locations of the enemy.

Does that mean Karzai had veto power over American targets? Did it mean that our forces were paralyzed while waiting for approval from our Afghan allies?

No, but there was a shared stake in the outcome – and, as a result, a stronger foundation for trust.

Last year, when I interviewed Karzai while researching the story of this team’s mission, he called Capt. (now Lt. Col.) Amerine “the best American military representative I ever worked with.” He added, “Had it been anybody else, things might have gone terribly wrong.”

The two men had a shared responsibility, a shared accountability, for every single U.S. bomb the A-team authorized in southern Afghanistan during its mission. Had one of those air strikes accidentally killed civilians, Karzai would have been just as accountable – since he himself had confirmed the validity of the targets.

Flash forward. Today our military is fighting for the future of Afghanistan and American security. Our citizens are risking their lives. They are fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, sons and daughters. And they dread the horror of making a mistake, of killing civilians or even each other.

After nine years of carrying the load and taking the blame for every civilian casualty, it’s about time that American forces incorporate the Afghan military leadership at a higher level, so that they share at least part of the responsibility or burden of blame when things do go wrong.

After all, we are both fighting for Afghanistan’s future.

Blehm is the author of “The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan.”

How to turn the tide in Afghanistan

Robots to rove Marine firing ranges

(By James K. Sanborn)

The Marine Corps will begin testing a humanoid target in July that can zip through ranges and mimic the behavior of insurgents, foreign fighters and civilians in a combat zone.

Dubbed “Rover” by its maker — Australian-based Marathon Robotics — the autonomous targets can run in packs, providing Marines with real-world scenarios that require them to track and engage multiple “fighters.”

It could be some time before Marines have them in their sights, but foreign militaries have already deemed the device useful.

The Rover’s greatest strength as a training tool comes from its random, but “intelligent” behavior, according to its makers. Using sensors, it can change direction to avoid objects and scatters for cover when fired at.

“This provides mobile targets that move in realistic ways,” said Alex Brooks, CEO of Marathon Robotics. “It forces people to concentrate in ways that you don’t have to with static targets.”

Rover stands at nearly 6 feet and consists of a torso mannequin perched atop a carriage produced by Segway — maker of the two-wheeled vehicle preferred by mall cops everywhere. Rovers can scurry at almost 8 mph and operate in heavy rain and temperatures between 32-120 degrees.

With its critical components armored to withstand repeated beatings from 5.56mm and 7.62mm ammo, it weighs in at a hefty 330 pounds. The replaceable torso target can take hundreds of shots before being changed.

Rover’s onboard sensors can also distinguish between kill shots to the spine or brain and a nonlethal hit. This forces troops to develop quick, but accurate, fire.

The robots, designated “Robotic Moving Target Systems” by the Marine Corps, were first authorized for testing in late 2009 by the Defense Department’s Foreign Comparative Test Program. Marine Corps Systems Command will begin testing eight “Rovers” this summer, using $2.5 million already allotted for the program. A training range has yet to be designated.About seven years ago, Brooks said, the Australian Defense Force approached his company looking for a better target. Marathon Robotics built one on a Segway platform because it was widely used and had already proven itself durable.

In 2008, the ADF procured a number of the robots for use at a sniper training range in Western Australia and has used them ever since.

Rover, unlike target systems that use tracks or cables to move, can be added to existing urban terrain trainers on Marine installations without any modifications to the facility. Because the robots can roll just about anywhere, they can simply be turned on and let loose.

“If demonstrated effective, I believe every Marine could be afforded the opportunity to engage this system,” wrote Capt. Geraldine Carey, a Marine Corps Systems Command spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

Robots to rove Marine firing ranges

Making the Afghan Special Forces

(by Sean D. Naylor)

CAMP MOREHEAD, WARDAK PROVINCE, Afghanistan — Here on the outskirts of Kabul, a single Special Forces A-team has been charged with a responsibility unprecedented since the Vietnam era: creating an Afghan Special Forces organization from scratch.

The establishment of the Afghan National Army Special Forces, the first members of which graduated from their qualification course May 13, is part of a larger trend toward a more traditionally “indirect” counterinsurgency approach on the part of elite Afghan units trained by U.S. Special Forces. The 7,000-strong Afghan Commando Brigade — the country’s premier infantry force — is expanding beyond its core “direct action” mission set aimed at killing or capturing insurgents and now conducts disaster relief operations and what the military terms “key leader engagements” with tribal and village elders.

The Commandos and ANA Special Forces are also gaining trained information operations soldiers under the Afghan Information Dissemination Operations program while a plan to develop a special operations civil affairs program is in its infancy.

But it is the ANA Special Forces program — to which Army Times was granted exclusive access — that is the biggest indicator of a strategic shift in the role played by Afghanistan’s burgeoning special operations forces. The establishment of the ANA SF is intended “to create an indigenous special operations force capable of countering enemy efforts head on, at the lowest level possible: the Afghan tribal and family subsystems,” according to a slide briefing given to visitors at Camp Morehead. “These teams will surpass any coalition force in terms of access and placement within the population.” In other words, the ANA SF is being created to deny the insurgents the easy access to the population they currently enjoy in many places.

U.S. and Afghan officials familiar with the program predict that the creation of a force modeled explicitly on its U.S. Army namesake will have a major impact on the war, allowing Afghan troops and their coalition allies to exponentially expand their “village stability operations” (previously referred to as the Local Defense Initiative and the Community Defense Initiative), whereby special operations forces train villagers to defend their own turf against insurgents.
Afghan cultural barriers

But to make the ANA SF program a success, U.S. Special Forces trainers must break through several Afghan cultural barriers. The program also requires a pause in the creation of ANA Commando battalions, or “kandaks,” and entails stripping the Commandos of some of their best leaders.

The ANA Special Forces program was the brainchild of Brig. Gen. Ed Reeder, said Col. Don Bolduc, the commander of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan. Reeder, a career Special Forces officer, was commander of Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan until March and exercised overall control over most U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan that were not part of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command task force.

“His vision was to develop a force very similar to U.S. Army Special Forces to deliver the same type of expertise within the Afghan Army to be able to do this population-centric mission,” Bolduc said, adding that after International Security Assistance Force commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal signed off on the program, the final decision to create the ANA Special Forces was taken by the Afghan government.

“The ANA SF will provide a significant contribution to the village stability operations program, which is inherently focused on an Afghan solution to Afghan problems at the lowest level,” Bolduc said.

“

The population is the center of gravity in the COIN [counterinsurgency] fight,” and ANA Special Forces will be Afghanistan’s “true population-centric SOF capability,” said Maj. Jeff James, who heads the company, or B-team, at Morehead responsible for running the training courses for both ANA SF and the much larger Commando Brigade. (In order to embed with U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan, Army Times agreed not to identify special operations personnel below the rank of lieutenant colonel — unless specifically cleared — or specific units and home stations.)

James said he received the order to create the Afghan Special Forces — with core tasks of internal defense, special reconnaissance and direct action — in December, while still in the U.S. preparing for deployment. With a speed unusual for defense programs, the idea is becoming reality.

While Reeder’s planners at CFSOCC-A (pronounced SIF’-sahk-ay) drew up a task organization for a notional Afghan Special Forces unit, James gave the mission to turn that concept into trained Afghan special operators to one of his operational detachment-alphas, or A-teams, Jan. 5. The first class of the ANA SF qualification course was set to begin March 6, giving the team, which arrived at Morehead the last week of January, only eight weeks to develop a program of instruction, organize the physical infrastructure at the camp and organize itself for the task ahead, all while deploying from the home station. “The biggest challenge initially was the timeline,” said the A-team leader, a 32-year-old captain from Boerne, Texas.

Following a recommendation from CJSOTF-A, the Afghan Ministry of Defense decided to recruit the first two classes of ANA Special Forces candidates exclusively from the Commandos, a direct action force only three years old but widely regarded as the most capable, professional element in the ANA. This would ensure that ANA SF candidates — all volunteers — were already well-trained in direct action, so the U.S. trainers could focus their efforts on instilling the skills required for internal defense and special reconnaissance, the B-team commander said.

This also allowed the U.S. instructors to limit the length of the first two classes to 10 weeks. Future classes, recruited from across the ANA, will be much larger — about 300 compared with the roughly 80 in each of the first two classes — and will undertake a 15-week course.

Of 145 Commandos who volunteered for the first class, 68 failed to make the cut after a one-week assessment and selection course. Of the 77 who began the qualification course, 69 remain. On May 13 they received their Special Forces tab (which will sit on top of their Commando patch) and be formed into four A-teams of 15 soldiers each, one of which will be held back to form an Afghan cadre to help train the next class. Each team will be considered fully mission-capable at that point, but they will not be considered “Special Forces qualified” until they have completed a 26-week “on-the- job training” period during which each ANA A-team will be partnered with a U.S. A-team and required to successfully perform a series of tasks. Only at the end of those 26 weeks in the field will they receive the tan berets that distinguish them as ANA Special Forces soldiers. Longer-term plans call for the creation of 72 ANA Special Forces A-teams, grouped into four kandaks, under an ANA Special Forces group headquarters.

The U.S. and Afghan leaders familiar with how the first ANA SF class has performed speak very highly of the program’s potential. “What we’re seeing now in training has been nothing but superb,” Bolduc said.

“This ANA SF — that’s a grand slam out of the ballpark,” said the command sergeant major of the B-team overseeing the training, a 43-year-old on his fifth Afghanistan tour. Once the ANA SF teams are operational, instead of an American working with villagers, “It’ll be an Afghan who might mediate a tribal dispute, and he’s a Special Forces team leader or team sergeant who’s adept at these cultural nuances, and he’s an Afghan,” he said.
Potential ‘game changer’?

Asked whether the new force had the potential to be a “game changer” in the struggle against the insurgents, Lt. Col. Donald Franklin, commander of Special Operations Task Force-East, which is based, like Bolduc’s CJSOTF-A, at Bagram Airfield, answered, “Sure.”

“What they’ll bring is that small team in the hinterlands meeting with and talking with the locals about the government and how to connect with the district,” ultimately connecting villagers with the government at the provincial and national level, said Franklin, who is on his third Afghanistan tour.

The generals who head each of the regional commands in Afghanistan are keen to get their hands on the ANA SF, the command sergeant major said. “Every one of them want this ANA SF product, and I think a year from now they’ll be screaming for it even louder … because they’re going to see the performance on the battlefield,” he said. “This is the right answer.”

Afghan officers familiar with the ANA SF program were equally enthusiastic. “If we get an ANA Special Forces unit, it’ll be a lot better for Afghanistan,” said ANA Col. Mohammed Naim Majeedi, commander of the 6th Commando Kandak, adding that it would be best for the U.S. Special Forces cadre members to train their ANA counterparts as they themselves had been trained, because the Americans would not be in Afghanistan “forever.”

“You’ll see the results of producing Afghan Special Forces within two years, inshallah,” said the leader of one of the first four teams to be trained in the program.

The ANA Special Forces are designed along U.S. lines. Whereas the basic building block of U.S. Special Forces is the 12-man A-team led by a captain, with a warrant officer and a team sergeant rounding out the leadership team, the equivalent Afghan Special Forces unit is a 15-man A-team led by a captain, with a first lieutenant executive officer and a team sergeant underneath him. Like U.S. A-teams, the remaining members include two each of the following: medical sergeants, weapons sergeants, engineer sergeants and communications sergeants.

The Afghan teams will also have two intelligence sergeants (U.S. A-teams have only one), plus an information dissemination sergeant and a civil-military operations specialist. Original plans to have an Afghan National Police representative and a religious officer on each team had to be postponed due to bureaucratic difficulties in the case of the former and a dearth of religious officers in the case of the latter.

Franklin, commander of the battalion responsible for standing up the Commandos and the ANA Special Forces, said creating the SF teams was “probably” the more difficult challenge, because of the cultural barriers to such a force in Afghanistan. “This is a warrior society,” he said. “When you start talking about creating an ANA SF and changing a mindset to get to the indirect approach … it is a long process to get guys to think differently about how to approach a problem.”

Rather than focusing strictly on basic skills, the U.S. trainers say, they concentrate on developing adaptive leadership and critical thinking on the part of the students. “Starting from Day 1, it’s been a complete overhaul of their mind and the way they think,” said the team sergeant of the A-team training the Afghans.

The U.S. team made three members of what the Americans said was the best of the four nascent ANA SF teams available for interview. Based on their comments, it seems that at least some of the Afghans have already internalized the differences between the direct-action approach of their former unit and the indirect mindset associated with Special Forces.

“The Commandos have three words: bravery, speed and power,” the Afghan team leader said. “But in Special Forces, before you show your power, your bravery or anything else, you’ve got to think about it. You’ve got to use your mind. … You’ve got to think through the ramifications.”

“Most missions in the Commandos were aggressive: Go after a bad guy … [and] detain him if possible; if not, just shoot him,” the Afghan team sergeant said. “This was a killing game. When I came to Special Forces, I learned there were other ways to solve problems.” As an example, he said, sometimes it is better to ask the insurgents “to join the government” than to just attack them.

“In Special Forces, I can learn so many other ways besides fighting the bad guys,” the team sergeant said. “We can do lots of other things besides fighting,” agreed the civil-military operations sergeant.

As evidence that the adaptive thinking mindset was taking root, Franklin cited the example of an ANA SF candidate who, given the task of infiltrating a nearby village undetected in order to conduct “close target reconnaissance” — essentially monitoring an individual’s movements unseen — during a recent training exercise, took it upon himself to show up in a construction worker’s outfit to make himself less conspicuous.

From the perspective of the U.S. trainers, the toughest challenges involved closing the cultural gap that existed between the officer candidates and the sergeants so that they could work closely together. The ANA still suffers from a Soviet-style mindset that discourages initiative on the part of noncommissioned officers and leads officers to adopt an elitist attitude. At first, officer candidates in the course didn’t want to live with or even stand in formation beside their NCOs, the U.S. A-team leader said. Ten officers — all members of the Pashtun ethnic group — dropped from the course because they couldn’t cope with what the Americans were pushing them to do, he said.

But by borrowing the U.S. Special Forces qualification course tactic of stripping all identifying insignia away from the candidates and referring to them only by a serial number for the first few weeks of the course, eventually the U.S. trainers were able to break down this attitude. Now, “if one of my guys gets sick, it’s as if one of my own arms hurts,” the Afghan A-team leader said. Having gotten the officers to view their NCOs with greater respect, the U.S. trainers then had to teach the sergeants to make decisions for themselves without waiting for an officer to give them an order.
‘Not a free minute’

The students spend three of the 10 weeks on training specific to their individual military specialty (such as intelligence or weapons) and the remaining seven training as a team, including a month of small-unit tactics and three weeks focused on critical thinking and advanced skills. The students’ day starts at 6 a.m. and continues until late into the night, the U.S. team’s senior communications sergeant said. “There’s not a free minute in our training schedule,” the team sergeant said.

The first two weeks of training included two hours of map reading instruction every night, the U.S. A-team leader said. “Some guys couldn’t even read the map” when they began the course, his team sergeant added.

Another challenge for the U.S. trainers has been the Afghan government’s insistence that the new force be ethnically diverse, which conflicts with the requirement that all the candidates be volunteers, the B-team leader said. While most studies estimate that the Pashtuns, from whom the Taliban and other insurgents draw the vast majority of their personnel, are Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, with about 40 percent of the population, Pashtuns are underrepresented in the ANA, and thus also in the Commandos and the ANA Special Forces. “We didn’t get a lot of Pashtun volunteers,” the U.S. A-team leader said.

By contrast, the Hazara minority, which accounts for an estimated 18 percent of the population, but which is more highly educated than the Pashtuns, represents about 38 percent of the first ANA SF graduating class. “The Hazaras blew every other ethnicity away in terms of IQ,” the U.S. A-team leader said. “They’re great students,” his team sergeant said. “They learn quickly.”

The diversity requirement meant that soldiers who might not have made the cut for the first class were otherwise included. “It really makes it tough to create a Special Forces [organization] while having policies like this,” the U.S. A-team leader said. But he acknowledged that some degree of diversity — and particularly Pashtun inclusion — was a necessity for achieving victory in the Pashtun south and east, where the war is largely being fought. “It would be hard to send a Hazara team down south,” he said.

In the short term, the organization paying the highest price for the formation of the ANA Special Forces is the Commando Brigade, which will see its size capped — at least temporarily — at nine kandaks in order to free up resources to create the ANA SF. “The bill payer to build [ANA] Special Forces was the 10th, 11th and 12th Commando Kandaks,” said the U.S. B-team leader, who added that establishing the ANA SF will cost the Commandos some of their best officers and NCOs.

These losses were keenly felt by Majeedi, the commander of the 6th Commando Kandak. “I am worried because in the past two to three months, they took 30 of my best officers and NCOs,” he said. “The officers who replaced them are not as professional, experienced or qualified,” he added, citing as an example a new company commander who had lost two personnel killed in action and three wounded in a battle the previous week.

The U.S. Special Forces soldiers whose job it is to fashion raw ANA soldiers into adaptive, creative Afghan special operators remain undaunted by these problems. “There’s going to be lots of potholes and bumps along the way,” the B-team command sergeant major said. “It’s not going to be easy. But if this were easy, we’d be doing something else.”

Making the Afghan Special Forces

Taliban bomb rips through Australian patrol

AUSTRALIA has suffered its first battle casualties in Afghanistan’s restive Kandahar province – three special forces troops caught by an exploding roadside bomb.

The Diggers cheated death when a large roadside bomb ripped into their Bushmaster armoured vehicle during a reconnaissance patrol with local police in the northern area of the Taliban’s home province.

The men were airlifted to the Kandahar Role 3 trauma hospital and are expected to be back on duty within several days.

“It was a pretty savage strike but our people will all be OK and they will be returning to duty in [the war] theatre,” Defence boss Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said.

The casualties came at the end of a week when Australian special forces killed another three Taliban commanders in Oruzgan province.

They include two bomb makers, Mullah Jalil and Abdul Malik, who have been responsible for numerous attacks against Coalition forces.

So far 11 Australians have been killed in action and 150 wounded during the Afghanistan campaign.

ACM Houston also revealed that Australian forces would be working even more closely with the US when the Americans become the “senior partner” in Oruzgan province after Dutch forces leave later this year.

“We will see a heavier American participation in Oruzgan,” he said.

Australia’s best trained elite troops are already under the direct operational command of Coalition commander US General Stanley McChrystal and a small band of Perth-based SAS soldiers are at the leading edge of the American “surge” in Kandahar province.

Another former Australian SAS commanding officer, Brigadier Gus Gilmore, is the commander of General McChrystal’s special forces cell in the war-ravaged country.

ACM Houston said Australian Chinook helicopters would also be engaged in the Kandahar offensive.

But it is the highly trained Australian secret soldiers who will be vital for General McChrystal’s Kandahar push, where he wants to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.

“If we are able to change the circumstances in Kandahar city, deny Kandahar city to the Taliban, that will take a lot of the impetus out of the insurgency. It really will,” ACM Houston said.

Australian and Afghan forces in Oruzgan uncovered more than 124 weapons caches between November and April.

In the past month alone they have found 55 caches containing up to 200kg of explosives.

The defence chief said he was still waiting for the recommendations of the Director of Military Prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade, following the deaths of six civilians, including five children, in February last year at the hands of Australian commandos.

Taliban bomb rips through Australian patrol