Secret Soldiers

They rescued Jessica Lynch, helped to capture Iraqi leaders, secured oil fields, stopped saboteurs from flooding the Karbala Gap, worked with Kurdish guerrillas and Shiite opponents and positioned themselves to stop Saddam Hussein from firing missiles at Israel or perhaps using weapons of mass destruction.

They are special operations forces, and since the war on terrorism began, their flexibility and secretiveness have made them a favorite with the Bush administration and with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has pushed for an ever bigger role for special operations.

Even as the president was making his case to the public for going to war, special operations forces were already at work inside Iraq. When Turkey denied U.S. ground forces permission to use its territory, special ops were allowed in anyway. After Jordan and Saudi Arabia publicly restricted U.S. troops from their soil, they still privately let thousands of special operations forces work from their bases.

But if you’re wondering exactly what all those troops accomplished, you’ll probably just have to keep wondering. While more than 600 journalists were embedded with U.S. and British forces, not one accompanied a special operations unit. We know what the Defense Department is willing to tell us about the role such units played in the war, but the bigger question of their effectiveness, as well as many details of their exploits, remains opaque.

Still, special operations boosters couldn’t be flying higher. Last week, special operations forces participated in the capture of Hussein’s chief of staff. The week before, Rumsfeld nominated, for the first time in history, one of their own to be the Army’s top general.

But here are the bigger questions: Is such heavy reliance on special operations really the best way to fight the war on terror? And is a secretive and largely unaccountable collection of troops an appropriate model for the “new” U.S. military?

No one questions that special operations played a vital role in Iraq. According to military sources, some 16,000 special operations forces fought in or supported the war. More than 100 “strategic reconnaissance” teams were moved forward into southern Iraq to act as eyes and ears for coalition ground forces. Senior retired special operations commanders and military sources say that in western and northern Iraq, special operations forces made up only about one-fiftieth of the coalition’s forces, but they were responsible for pinning down 11 divisions, or about half of Iraq’s armed forces.

In the south, the Naval Special Warfare Task Group infiltrated coastal oil platforms, cleared mines, secured oil installations in the Rumaila fields and supported U.S. Marines and British forces. In the west, they quickly secured suspected missile-launching sites, assaulted Iraqi airfields and set up a foothold at the Hadithah Dam 130 miles northwest of Baghdad. In the north, Task Force Viking secured the Kirkuk oil fields, attacked the Ansar al Islam terrorist organization in the mountains near the Iranian border and worked with Kurdish peshmerga.

The super-secret Task Force 20, senior retired officers said, was responsible for the Baghdad area and the most important “high value” targets, including members of the regime and sites possibly housing weapons of mass destruction. The task force had been operating in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq for more than a decade, and in 2002 its forces infiltrated Iraq proper. Commandos established “hide sites” and listening posts, and they placed acoustic and seismic sensors on Iraqi roads to track activity. They penetrated Iraq’s fiber-optic network to eavesdrop on communications.

In many cases, special operations officers said, super-secret or “black” special operators were engaged in missions so sensitive that they needed “white” counterparts, who operated somewhat more openly, to ensure that coalition aircraft and advancing troops did not inadvertently fire upon the secret teams.

In the end, of course, there were no Scud missiles for Iraq to launch at Israel, and there were no weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield. At Hadithah and other dam sites, the U.S. found no firm evidence that Iraqis were preparing to blow them up. In the northern and southern oil fields, Iraqi demolition efforts were nothing like the methodical sabotage by Iraq of Kuwait’s oil infrastructure in 1991. Local forces south and east of Baghdad successfully destroyed a couple of bridges, but the Iraqi command doesn’t appear to have attempted a scorched-earth plan.

What special operators actually achieved on the ground is therefore difficult to confirm. News reports have suggested that “black” special operators slipped into Baghdad’s back alleys dressed as Iraqis. But military sources have insisted these are largely tall tales. Despite rules allowing special operators to kill Iraqi commanders and regime leaders, no known members of Hussein’s inner circle seem to have been killed during the war. Special operations boosters have bragged that Task Force 20 was able to secure most of its target sites before they could be stripped by looters, but it’s hard to know whether this was really important when we don’t know what kinds of sites they were sent to.

Intelligence sources said that special operators also made contact with informants and increased pressure on potentially helpful elements before and after the war. But even here, it is difficult to measure the ultimate effect. In one mission in the southern city of Amarah, intelligence sources say, the Iraqi 10th Armored Division, which the CIA had been “working on” for years, stayed out of the fight. But it’s unclear to what degree that success was the doing of the CIA and special operations, and to what degree it resulted from a clever, but more conventional, war plan that isolated and bypassed the unit.

Rumsfeld’s enthusiasm for special operations remains unchecked by any questions about their effectiveness. “The global nature of the war [on terrorism], the nature of the enemy and the need for fast, efficient operations in hunting down and rooting out terrorist networks around the world have all contributed to the need for an expanded role for the special operations forces,” Rumsfeld said in January.

Rumsfeld has increased the peacetime authority of special operations, and in January he asked Congress to increase the annual budget for special operations by more than 30% to $6.7 billion. He has planned for the number of commandos to grow by roughly 10% over the next five years. Today, special operations is larger than it was in 1991, even though all elements of U.S. conventional forces have been dramatically downsized.

Much of the growth in special operations forces since 9/11 has come in the more secretive “special mission units,” which have been activated and beefed up to get the military more into covert operations and to fight the dirtiest battles in the war on terror. The government declines to even acknowledge the existence of these units. But their growing influence is undeniable.

Perhaps, as military leaders insist, the war on terror necessitates the unprecedented growth in special operations. But much of the secrecy exists to protect allies who themselves covertly cooperate with the United States. It is only a secret in the United States that special operations forces go in and out of places like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Terrorists and others intent on doing harm to the United States certainly know this.

There is no question that the exploits of special operations have led to battlefield victories in Afghanistan and Iraq and have protected American lives. But are they winning the war on terrorism? We have witnessed some spectacular results, but as we’ve seen in Afghanistan, some operations have had the effect of merely dispersing terrorists rather than destroying them.

Perhaps most discomforting, though, is the culture of special operators. Like intelligence professionals, they are attracted to the mystique associated with secret operations. They have a “desire,” as one senior officer told me, “to be clandestine.” Sometimes secrecy is crucial. And sometimes it’s just a way of life -- one that prevents operators from ever having to worry about public and media scrutiny.