Failed Military Innovation and Elite Units

• In Event: Technological Advancement and Employing New Tools in Foreign Policy

Abstract

We are currently in the “Age of the Commando” – a period that began in the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when special operations troops and Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officers led the US military invasion of Afghanistan. As the Pentagon struggled to shed its Cold War mentality of deploying large numbers of troops, supplies, and equipment to the region before initiating combat operations in the remote Asian nation, special operations forces seemed to be tailor-made to wage the unconventional war America found itself fighting. For the first time, special operations forces were not only the main effort in a major military campaign – they were the only ground force engaging enemy formations in Afghanistan. Two months after the combat operations commenced, Afghanistan was liberated after Taliban and al Qaeda resistance collapsed.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cited the performance of special operations troops to validate his plan to transform the US military into a more lethal and agile organization. In the following years, US special operations units continued to find themselves at the forefront of the war on terrorism, first spearheading the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then later fighting in a variety of global hotspots. They trained foreign troops in Colombia and the Philippines, conducted raids in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, and rescued hostages in Afghanistan and on ships in the Indian Ocean. Observers noted that America’s special operations forces had become Washington’s preferred “force of choice” to fight America’s global war against transnational terrorism.

Since 2002, special operations forces have almost doubled the number of personnel in their ranks, seen their budget triple, and received new legal and bureaucratic authorities that dramatically expanded their global presence and the types of missions they can perform. Senior special operations leaders have been promoted to the highest levels of the military and now routinely hold positions that had been previously reserved for officers with more traditional military résumés.

These elite forces now enjoy unprecedented political support and bureaucratic confidence, and they have harnessed this newfound power to expand their organizational influence, increase their budget, and gain additional administrative powers through new legal authorities. Using an extensive collection of primary source documents, a newly-developed data set, and the theoretical literature on civil-military relations and military innovation, I argue that these developments have undermined long-standing norms in American military professionalism and civilian oversight, which contributed to the failed war in Afghanistan and led to ineffective security assistance efforts around the globe.

Author

• Stephen Michael Grenier, Johns Hopkins University