Jim Garamone at the DoD News
offers the below piece:
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2017 —
Special operations forces are relevant to most operations the U.S. military is
involved with and are a good return on the investment, the commander of U.S.
Special Operations Command said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado yesterday.
Fox News reporter Catherine
Herridge interviewed Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III for the forum and he used
the occasion to debunk some myths about the command, which is based at MacDill
Air Force Base, Florida.
“We are not the world’s cop,
we are not a panacea, we don’t do anything by ourselves and we aren’t doing
things that aren’t highly supervised, there is no off the reservation
activities,” Thomas said.
But special operations forces
have been at the heart of most operations against violent extremism, he said,
and have been key to turning the tide against the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria and al-Qaida wherever these groups raise the ugly heads.
“We are relevant to most if
not all the national security challenges,” the general said.
The command consumes about 2
percent of the DoD budget and has about 2 percent of the personnel in the
department. Some 8,000 special operators are in 80 countries around the world.
The question he gets most
often -- and Herridge asked a version of it -- is whether special operations
forces are being overused or overextended? “We are actively trying to work our
way out of a job, whether that be in Afghanistan or against ISIS,” he said.
In Afghanistan, the general
said, “we’re anxious to finish there. We’re anxious to win.”
Not the Time to Relax
That said, Socom is working
with indigenous forces, proxies, allies and conventional U.S. forces to
leverage special operations capabilities.
Thomas stressed that the
force is having successes, but now is not the time to let up on the pressure
being placed on enemy forces. He said the lesson from the Osama bin Laden
operation in 2011 was, as good as it was to kill the al-Qaida leader, “if you
don’t dismantle the whole network -- if you don’t address the ideology -- you’ve
just killed one guy.”
The territory that ISIS
controls is shrinking by the day and Syrian Democratic Forces are closing on
Raqqa, the so-called capital of the ISIS caliphate. Thomas said he does not
know if ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is alive, but if he is not dead “there
is not a safe place for him on this Earth. We absolutely dismantled his
network; everyone who worked for him initially is dead or gone. Everyone who
stepped to the plate following [him] -- dead or gone. Down through a network where
we have killed, at a conservative estimate, 60,000 of his followers -- his
army.”
Baghdadi declared the
caliphate and placed his army on the battlefield “and we went to war with it,”
the general said.
Mosul has been liberated, but
it is still “dicey” in the old city, he said. There are still pockets of ISIS
fighters in Tal Afar and in western Iraq. “We are pursuing these people as hard
as we can to affect the physical aspect of the caliphate while we deal with the
harder part -- the ideological basis of it,” he said.
Coordinating Authority
Socom is the DoD coordinating
authority for transregional terrorism and has been for going on two years, the
general said. “This was a role and process that didn’t exist,” he said. “It
tied together our disparate DoD efforts.”
Previously, Army Gen. Joe
Votel would handle special operations in the Central Command region, and Marine
Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser would handle Africa Command and Navy Adm. Harry
Harris would handle Pacific Command. “They were good, focused activities but
without any synchronization at the DoD level,” Thomas said. “We were thrust
into that role.”
He said he is not sitting at
MacDill moving special operators around the globe, but the change enables the
command “to agitate or drive an assessment at the senior DoD level of what are
we trying to do, how well are we doing it, and what do we need to change in
terms of strategy and resourcing.”
Previously, the only person
in the department who could do such a thing was the defense secretary.
He said his mission
objectives from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have changed. “It used to be
'Defeat ISIS,'” he said. “It is now, 'Annihilate ISIS.' [Mattis] put a
non-doctrinal term out there to amp up the volume a bit, and we all got the
message.”
Thomas wants Socom to be more
agile and more networked.
He said the command has its
eyes on Iran and its stated goal of building a Shia crescent through Iraq and
Syria into Lebanon. Iranian officials are all throughout that area now, the
general said, adding that they bear special attention.
ISIS is trying to export its
“brand” through the world and they seized on Libya as a failed state, which,
with its gap in governance could serve as a foothold in the region. In fact,
ISIS leaders declared Libya a province in the caliphate, he said, and at its
high-water mark in the country had around 2,000 fighters in and around the
seaside city of Sirte. “They don’t exist anymore,” Thomas noted.
Special operations forces worked
through proxies and surrogates to eliminate the ISIS threat in that area, he
said. Still, the general said, Libya is another place that bears watching as
some of the fighters escaped to southern Libya and are looking for a time and
place to return.
The command is also invested
in deterring Russia and there are special operators working with all the
nations bordering Russia, Thomas said. “The people [of those nations] enjoy
their freedom and want to keep it,” he added.
Korea
Herridge asked about the command’s
work on the Korean Peninsula. Thomas objected to the argument that there is no
military option against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as he continues to
build a nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. “There is always a
military option,” he said. “That’s why you pay $600 billion a year. It is an
ugly, ugly option, but you cannot play elements of power and then discount that
there is no option."
“People say that Kim Jong Un
can only put a warhead the size of the Hiroshima bomb on a missile,” he
continued. “That’s not comforting to me. Everything I am hearing … is that he
and the regime are inextricably tied to their nuclear program.”
For the future, the general
wants Socom to be able to give decision-makers more options to choose from when
a crisis develops. “My biggest concern is the need to transform,” Thomas said.
The general spoke of a senior
private industry executive who visited the command and told him that though the
command is getting the right people and prototyping new capabilities well, “you
suck at deep learning.”
Note: In the top U.S. Air Force
photo taken by Tech. Sgt. Angelita Lawrence U.S. Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas
III, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, salutes after placing a
wreath on a memorial in remembrance of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
Day on April 25, 2017 at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. Anzac Day i marks the anniversary
of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces
during WWI.
In the above U.S. Navy photo taken by Seaman Richard Miller Army Lt. Gen. Raymond A.
Thomas III, commander of, Joint Special Operations Command, participates in a
riverine demonstration with members of Special Boat Team 22 at the Naval Small
Craft Instruction and Technical Training School in Mississippi on March 12, 2015.
