War Plan Will Shift to Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan

A recent news article reports that the U.S. will shift the burden of the Afghan War to its Special Operations Forces or SOF.  Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, recently surprised many with the statement that U.S. combat forces would start to transition from a combat role to an advisory and assist role in mid-2013 - at least one year earlier than scheduled. However, what was not said is that the nation's Special Operations Forces (SOF) would remain fully engaged in both a counterterrorism role and advisory role in Afghanistan. SOF has as a number of core missions and these include Direct Action (DA), Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Counterinsurgency (COIN), and Counterterrorism (CT).  Because SOF trains for these mission sets it is well-suited for the "stay-behind" missions of providing advise and assistance to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and yet still have a capability to hit selected high-value targets or terrorist threats.

More interesting bits of information are revealed in the news article.  The shift to SOF would still require some conventional forces to remain in Afghanistan - to include some transportation, medical care, communications, and intelligence units. The plan also calls for the creation of a two-star command to oversee the entire Special Operations effort in Afghanistan.  Currently the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A) is headed by a one-star; while ISAF SOF and specialized direct action units have their own commanders.  In addition, ISAF Joint Command (IJC) currently commanded by a conventional three-star would be passed to a Special Operations officer.

One particular sentence in the article caught my attention:

"Senior Pentagon officials involved in the planning acknowledge that a military effort with a smaller force and a more focused mission could be easier to explain to Americans who have tired of the large counterinsurgency campaigns of Iraq and, previously, Afghanistan".

There are some in military circles who believe that the large counterinsurgency effort (or population-centric COIN) was not true counterinsurgency in the classic sense.  Rather they point to earlier counterinsurgency campaigns that required a smaller footprint but utilized specially-trained military units to "advise and assist" indigenous or host-nation units in the counterinsurgency campaign.  Some have also called this "combat FID".  This is probably the type of counterinsurgency that we should have been doing all along.

Read the news article by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt in "U.S. Plans Shift to Elite Units as It Winds Down in Afghanistan", The New York Times, February 4, 2012.