Return-Path: <sentto-279987-2156-1001081924-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.1.0) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:20:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 9940 invoked by uid 510); 21 Sep 2001 14:19:06 -0000 Received: from n33.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.83) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 21 Sep 2001 14:19:06 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-2156-1001081924-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.56] by ei.egroups.com with NNFMP; 21 Sep 2001 14:18:44 -0000 X-Sender: fc@big.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 21 Sep 2001 14:18:44 -0000 Received: (qmail 1229 invoked from network); 21 Sep 2001 14:18:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 21 Sep 2001 14:18:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO big.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta2 with SMTP; 21 Sep 2001 14:18:42 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by big.all.net (8.9.3/8.7.3) id HAA17944 for iwar@onelist.com; Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:18:41 -0700 Message-Id: <200109211418.HAA17944@big.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL1] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:18:41 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:Killer.troops.ready.to.fight.new-era.war.AFTER.THE.ASSAULT] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Special operations forces a cut above Killer troops ready to fight new-era war AFTER THE ASSAULT David Wood - Newhouse News Service Friday, September 21, 2001 Washington --- Seeking to ''smoke out'' and ''get'' the terrorists responsible for last week's suicide attacks, President Bush is mobilizing America's own relentless stealth warriors. Behind a screen of aircraft carriers, fighter jets and Marines en route to southwestern Asia, the U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces are being called on for intense, covert, risky operations that U.S. officials say will characterize a new era of war in the 21st century. About 8,000 in number, these soldiers are hand-picked, psychologically screened and physically and mentally hardened. In training, a Ranger instructor says, ''We shred all the veneer a person has, to get down to the core.'' They master their craft of close-quarter combat with the focus and intensity of surgeons. ''They are ready to go,'' Army Secretary John White said Thursday, after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an order authorizing the deployment of special operations units and other Army troops. Pressure-cooker lifestyle Self-confessed adrenalin junkies, these troops consume special rations and unlimited training ammunition. They revel in a brutal, pressure-cooker lifestyle that forges a blinding loyalty to each other and hardens them to the stress and sacrifice of combat. (Hair, advises a Ranger manual, ''complicates good hygiene.'') They don't do peacekeeping or feed hungry children. But they do operate amid moral ambiguity --- practicing, for instance, to intuitively separate enemy fighters from noncombatants, as civilian police SWAT teams do. If a woman is armed and shooting at you, a Ranger officer instructs, shoot back. They are lightly armed, and they operate mostly at night, relying on surprise, speed and shock. They specialize in precisely the kind of missions that seem needed now: showing up where they're not expected and taking the bad guys, as Bush said this week, ''dead or alive.'' ''Highly targeted, a very precise use of violence --- they are really a kind of law enforcement: a global posse,'' said Robert Killebrew, a retired Army planner. Special forces would operate, as they did during the Persian Gulf War, under a screen of strike aircraft and with Air Force search-and-rescue units on standby or in the air nearby. Among their means of arrival: insertion by special stealth helicopters flown by Air Force special operations units, or by special parachutes that enable them to glide 10 miles after jumping so the target never hears their plane. Another technique, called a high-altitude low-opening (HALO) jump, calls for jumping at 25,000 feet or higher to avoid detection and then free-falling to the normal military jump height of 500 feet before popping one's chute. Rangers who jumped under fire into Panama in 1989 during Operation Just Cause carried 115 pounds of gear. Normally, a Ranger squad might carry carbines, an M240 light machine gun and a recoilless rifle. Rangers and Special Forces will excel at missions like hunting down terrorists in remote terrain where they are outnumbered, because they accept the conditions of close-quarter combat, said retired Army Col. Ralph Puckett. ''It's pretty dirty, obscene and dangerous --- and the Rangers accept that,'' said Puckett, who fought in Korea and Vietnam and is the honorary colonel of the 75th Ranger Regiment. ''One of the things that has hurt our nation in the past is that we think we can fight a war surgically with few or no casualties.'' There are about 2,300 Rangers split among three battalions based at Fort Benning, Ga., Hunter Army Airfield, Ga., and Fort Lewis, Wash., with regimental headquarters at Fort Benning. Kentucky unit's area Special Forces are divided into five groups, with about 1,300 soldiers per group. Each group is assigned to a region; 5th Special Forces Group, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., is assigned to the Middle East, and as such would be the first to respond to an operational tasking there. The Rangers, fortuitously, fit perfectly into a new era of conflict that some strategists have long forecast, calling it ''fourth generation'' warfare. In this kind of conflict, the enemy avoids taking the United States on directly, striking instead at American vulnerabilities and then melting back into the shadows. There are no front lines, no battlefields and little distinction between military and civilian. Against the kind of organization fielded by suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, U.S. conventional forces may not be directly useful. Air strikes on Afghanistan, for instance, likely would prove ineffective against dug-in terrorists even if they could be found. And ordinary U.S. combat units, sent to hunt down bin Laden cadres, could fail catastrophically. In 1993 street battles in Mogadishu, Somalia, where operatives of bin Laden commanded mobs against U.S. troops, ''simple handheld weapons used by well-disciplined, small irregular units turned armored vehicles and helicopters into coffins and conventional formations into death traps,'' said Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff, a tank officer and analyst. Eventually, such fourth generation ''irregulars'' will have to be confronted by Special Forces, men willing to take on the world's most vicious fighters face to face. Tough as they are, ''These guys are not street thugs,'' Col. Stanley McChrystal said in 1998, when he commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment and was interviewed for a series on the Rangers. ''These are middle-class kids who want to be in something special. They're not just waiting for the next throat to cut. But yeah, they can fight,'' said McChrystal, now a brigadier general who heads the XVIII Airborne Corps staff at Fort Bragg, N.C. He allowed that Rangers would face ''a steep learning curve'' when they go into action against dedicated and merciless killers. ''We won't be given weeks to get bloodied, and for most of [the Rangers] it will be their first experience in combat,'' he said. That is why their training is so stressful, he said. ''But we can never replicate the horrors they will find in combat.'' Ignored a decade ago The adaption of terrorists to fourth generation warfare was seen more than a decade ago by some analysts, but widely ignored by the Defense Department. ''The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point'' without clear fronts or battlefields, five authors wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989. They warned specifically that terrorists would make use of this new kind of warfare to attack U.S. vulnerabilities. Lacking technology, they warned, Islamic terrorists would ''attempt to bypass [the U.S.] military entirely and strike directly at [the American] homeland at civilian targets.'' The terrorists' goal is to make the U.S. military ''simply irrelevant,'' wrote Army Cols. Keith Nightengale and Joseph W. Sutton, Marine Lt. Col. G.I. Wilson, Marine Capt. John F. Schmidt, and William S. Lind, a civilian analyst. As U.S. bombs fall, the enemy ''will sit with bleeding eardrums and wait for us to come,'' Lt. Col. Eric Hutchings, a Ranger officer, observed in the Newhouse series. ''They will want to separate us from our technology, to pull us into the trenchline. We want to win that fight," Hutchings said. "We want them to know they are facing somebody willing to take this to the extreme.'' ------------------------ Yahoo! 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