No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan: The Covert Operation of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan - Hardcover

Carney, John T., Jr.; Schemmer, Benjamin F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345453336 ISBN 13: 9780345453334

Verlag: Ballantine Books Inc., 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The creator and first commanding officer of the USAF's Special Tactics Units reveals the inside workings of the U.S. military's secret special forces, going behing the scenes to provide the latest information on the war against terrorism on the front lines in Afghanistan.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Col. John T. Carney Jr., the founding father of Air Force Special Tactics, was the first commanding officer of any such unit. Originally a six-man team known as Brand X, this elite unit now comprises a group of seven squadrons deployed worldwide. In 1996, Carney was presented the U.S. Special Operations Command Medal for his outstanding contributions to the revitalization of special operations, and, in 1997, he was inducted into the Air Commando Hall of Fame. He is now President of the non-profit Special Operations Warrior Foundation providing full college scholarships to over 360 children of Special Operators killed in service to their country. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

Benjamin F. Schemmer is a West Point and Army Ranger graduate, and a former paratrooper. He is the author of The

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TUNGI, AFGHANISTAN

The first war of the twenty-first century quickly became America's first special operations war. President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism," triggered by the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, began on October 7 when Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced the first U.S. air strikes against forces of the repressive Taliban regime and al-Qaeda terrorists in northern Afghanistan as part of Operation "Enduring Freedom." Within a few weeks they would announce the first two raids by American Rangers and other special operations forces in Afghanistan and acknowledge that small, clandestine teams of American special forces and special tactics units had begun operating directly with Afghan anti-Taliban tribesmen.

Air Force special tactics, Army special forces teams, and Army Rangers, Rumsfeld said, were targeting Taliban forces for long-range U.S. air strikes supporting Northern Alliance troops, gathering on-the-spot intelligence, and conducting unconventional hit-and-run raids on key targets. Soon after the Army-Air Force teams had infiltrated Afghanistan, Navy SEAL units also began operating there.

A brave young Afghan described the role that these special operators played in that war during a fierce firefight in eastern

Afghanistan in January 2002, when an American special forces and special tactics team leading anti-Taliban forces came under such withering fire that his comrades fled the battleground. Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had depressed their antiaircraft guns on the hills and mountains surrounding the U.S.-led troops and were inflicting gruesome losses. But this particular Afghan stayed as the Americans held their ground and Sergeant William "Calvin" Markham, a special tactics combat controller, radioed for close air support strikes to suppress and destroy the enemy weapons. In the midst of this raging and bloody battle, the Afghan flung himself to the ground directly in front of the American sergeant to protect him from incoming rounds. Markham yelled at him, "What are you doing?" The Afghan replied calmly, "Sir, if they kill me, I'll be replaced. But if they kill you, the airplanes will go away."1

Except for such air strikes, however-blurred images of which appeared almost nightly on TV news for weeks after the president's and Rumsfeld's October announcements-little progress seemed evident in the war in its early days.

As American special operations troops in the country increased from "a few" to "less than a hundred" (actually, fewer than fifty by November 4) to "several hundred" (actually, fewer than three hundred of them), TV pundits and op-ed columnists complained that President Bush's war on terrorism had bogged down into a stalemate or "quagmire." TV screens were filled with images of precision-guided bombs-dropped from long-range B-2 bombers flying two-day, round-trip missions from the United States and B-1 and B-52 bombers flying twelve to fifteen hours and some 5,500 miles from and back to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean2-exploding on fuzzily pictured mud huts or barren, rugged terrain, but there was little sign and no word of progress against the Taliban. What would come to be known as "America's first special operations war" seemed to be off to an inauspicious start.

The Washington Post, for instance, headlined on November 2,

Big Ground Forces Seen as Necessary to Defeat Taliban; Bombing Has Left Militia Largely Intact

and reported, "The attacks have not eliminated any measurable number of Taliban troops. Northern Alliance forces have made no important gains against the Taliban . . . a major chunk of the 50,000 Taliban army and much of its arsenal are pretty much intact after three weeks of bombing."3

Dr. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and former armor officer who became director of Boston University's Center for International Relations, noted that ". . . the war's first weeks offer little cause for comfort" and complained about "inflated expectations about the efficacy of air power."4 By the time Bacevich's article appeared in print, however, half of Afghanistan had fallen to the U.S.-led anti-Taliban forces, and it was clear that a new type of war was being fought.

Unfortunately, many observers did not, and could not, appreciate how special operations, special forces, and special tactics teams really operate. Once inserted into Afghanistan's inhospitable terrain, these troops had to make contact with the disparate tribal groups making up the Northern Alliance; establish some rapport in any one of a dozen or more languages-including Tajik, Uzbek, Pastun, Afghan, and twenty-two distinct dialects of Arabic; sort out which tribal leaders might prove reliable allies and which were ruthless warlords out to dismember their rivals and con their American suitors out of better arms and equipment for their own agendas; teach them how to scout out lucrative targets; prove their own ability to support Alliance operations by calling in effective air strikes to decimate opposing Taliban forces; and then persuade them to seize the moment and attack so as to incur minimum casualties. All in all, a difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming process.

That process took weeks. (In special forces training, men are taught that cultivating such bonding with indigenous forces can take months, possibly years.) The speed with which U.S. and Northern Alliance troops learned to rely on each other was all the more striking because special forces teams had not operated in Afghanistan since 1989, although there had been joint training exercises in other Central Asian nations since 1999, including four of the five "Stans" of the former Soviet Union-Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. Furthermore, Afghan tribesmen (like the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan) are notoriously hostile to foreign armies-as Soviet forces had learned from 1979 to 1989, when one hundred thousand of them were finally routed from the country by the Mujahideen after suffering close to thirty thousand casualties.

Although small pockets of resistance remained in most cities as Taliban forces either surrendered or tried to blend into the countryside, by late November all of the Taliban strongholds had fallen in quick succession to Northern and then Eastern Alliance tribal forces-Mazar-i-Sharif on November 9, Kabul by November 13, Kunduz by November 20, Herat, Bagram, and Jalalabad soon thereafter, and Kandahar by December 7. Anti-Taliban tribesmen were often at odds with one another, but all were fighting to regain their country from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban.

Whereas the U.S.-supported anti-Taliban had controlled only about 20 percent of Afghanistan in early November, mostly in the north, by midmonth they controlled half the country. A month and a half later, on December 22, a new interim government was established in the capital of Kabul.5 Three months into the war, by January 2002, anti-Taliban coalition forces controlled virtually all of the country.

Such quick progress was remarkable given how only a few hundred American special operations forces were committed on the ground and the history of our past wars. After the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, four months passed before the United States responded with the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942. It took eleven months to start the land campaign against the Germans with the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, and two and a half years after Hitler declared war on the United States before we landed in France on June 6, 1944-after the British and we had bombed Germany continually for nearly five...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ballantine Books Inc.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345453336
• ISBN 13: 9780345453334
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 334
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar