Special Operations and Strategy
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Special Operations and Strategy

James D. Kiras

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eBook - ePub

Special Operations and Strategy

James D. Kiras

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About This Book

James D. Kiras shows how a number of different special operations, in conjunction with more conventional military actions, achieve and sustain strategic effect(s) over time. In particular, he argues that the root of effective special operations lies in understanding the relationship existing between moral and material attrition at the strategic level. He alsopresents a theoretical framework for understanding how special operations achieve strategic effects using aunique synthesis of strategic theory and case studies.

This study shows how the key to understanding how special operations reside in the concept of strategic attrition and in the moral and material nature of strategy. It also highlights major figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Hans Delbrück, and Mao Zedong, who understood these complexities and were experts in eroding an enemy's will to fight. These and other examples provide a superb explanation of the complexities of modern strategy and the place of special operations in a war of attrition.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars with an interest in special forces and of strategic and military studies in general.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2006
ISBN
9781135989880

1
Special operations and great raids

Mount a sudden strike on their doubts. Attack their haste. Force them to constrict their deployment. Launch a sudden strike against their order. Take advantage of [their failure] to avoid harm. Obstruct their strategy. Seize their thoughts. Capitalize on their fears.
(The Methods of the Ssu-ma1)
On the evening of 27 February 1943, six Norwegian saboteurs infiltrated the Norsk Hydro plant near the town of Vemork and demolished the only equipment in Europe capable of producing heavy water in quantity. Originally utilized in the plant as a more efficient means of producing fertilizer, heavy water was also essential for atomic fission research. The action against the Norsk Hydro plant, better known to history as “the Telemark raid,” has all the hallmarks of a quintessential special operation. It prevailed where conventional force could not be applied, in the case of the Royal Air Force (RAF), or had failed previously. The raid also was approved at the highest policy or strategic decision-making levels. In addition, using minimal force and guile, the saboteurs efficiently and economically succeeded in denying German access to resources central to atomic bomb research. The strategic effects of the raid have been couched in unequivocal counterfactual terms: had the plant not been so severely damaged during the raid, the Nazi atomic bomb program might have unlocked the secrets to nuclear fission before the Allies. According to at least one author “the very course of history depended on whether or not the mission succeeded.”2
Yet the raid was only one action among many designed to deny the Germans their source of this material. Within five months of the attack, the equipment destroyed during the Telemark raid was repaired or replaced and Norsk Hydro resumed production of heavy water. In mid-November 1943, a wave of mixed US Army Air Force (USAAF) heavy bombers visited the target, disrupting heavy water production but not destroying available stocks. The final German attempt to acquire heavy water from Norway was denied on 20 February 1944 on Lake Tinn, where Norwegian saboteurs sank a ferry that was transporting heavy water and production equipment to Germany. Other events affected Nazi attempts to develop the atomic bomb, including the haphazard manner in which the German atomic research program led by Walter Heisenberg was conducted, the decision in that program that graphite was an impractical moderator for neutrons, and accidents that occurred during experiments with heavy water reactors.3 Placed in its context, the Vemork raid was a paragon of courage and military prowess but was not, in and of itself, independently decisive.
This work argues that the root of strategically effective special operations is an appreciation for how special operations forces (SOF) perform in extended campaigns by inflicting moral and material attrition in conjunction with conventional forces. For a variety of reasons, special operations and how they achieve strategic effects have not been well understood. Special operations are often discussed in campaign or general military histories as a footnote to the major battles. The few works that examine the effects of special operations at the strategic level are prone to limit their investigation of the subject to one type of activity: individual direct action missions, or raids. Focusing on “great raids” makes sense methodologically as they are overt events of limited duration, meaning that source material is often plentiful and well defined.4 Although useful in understanding the details of individual events, such studies do little to explain how a number of different special operations, in relation to other more conventional political and military actions, achieve and sustain strategic effect(s) over time. In addition, a majority of authors have made exaggerated claims regarding the strategic effect and outcome of the specific special operation.5 Strategic effect results from success in overcoming improbable odds to accomplish a difficult, but important, single mission. The mission’s importance, reflected in approval from cabinet or executive level authorities or the character of the target itself, is proof positive that strategic effects are intended and achieved. In contrast, where special operations fail or have been chronically misused, the culprit is identified as “limited” conventional minds unable to grasp the value and limitations of a significant and finite resource as SOF. Direct causal linkages are sound logically but undercut the complex interaction among and between the moral and material factors that comprise strategy.
Special operations, including “great raids” or “decapitation” strikes, have been depicted as individual actions designed to end hostilities in one blow. In addition to being “self contained acts of war,” special operations are also postulated as independently decisive acts as well. Lengthy and costly attacks against the fielded forces of an adversary are replaced by direct targeting against a discrete “center of gravity” of an enemy. The complex interrelationships that comprise strategy, including the dynamics that exist within and between competing systems, are simplified to a metaphorical “shot to the brain” delivered by special operators and/or the latest technology. In fact, special operations could be considered the ultimate realization of doctrine of preemptive war if the “shot to the brain” is done early enough. The author of a draft paper on the future roles and missions of the Special Air Service (SAS), written at the end of the European campaign, suggests for example that: “it might be considered politic (if Foreign Office diverged from its present appeasement policy) to cause future Hitlers and Mussolinis to disappear before they became a public nuisance.”6 Decapitation strikes are appealing precisely because they compress the vertical and horizontal dimensions of strategy into a single flat line in which actions, unburdened by friction or imperfect knowledge and unimpeded by political considerations, achieve their effects against an enemy system in a preordained manner. Special operations misuse has resulted, in large part, because political and/or military leaders could not resist the appeal of an apparently simple, direct and low-cost solution to difficult strategic problems. Combined with the lure of a “free lunch,”7 the danger of theories such as “strategic paralysis” is that sometimes they get put into practice. As in the case of the famed “Dambusters Raid,” more than half of the attacking force, including a number of veteran aircrews, did not return from the mission because a group of Air Staff planners viewed the German war industry in terms of “critical nodes” whose destruction would cause the entire system to collapse. This is not to say that individual audacious acts should not be undertaken but that a coherent framework that guides their use, one that capitalizes on their intended and unintended consequences as well as their limitations, be developed that accounts for the enduring nature and changing character of strategy.
The key to understanding how special operations improve strategic performance resides in the concept of strategic attrition. To comprehend strategic attrition, one must understand that the nature of strategy consists of complex moral and material interactions that exist between two or more competing, adaptive adversaries. Theories of annihilation, or strategic paralysis, suggest avoiding prolonged material damage and inflicting moral damage through indirect strikes or maneuver against an identifiable center of gravity. Attrition, in contrast, is widely understood only as the extended material erosion of combat power in sustained offensives over time. As with strategy in general, however, attrition also contains a moral dimension. Although special operations are useful tactically in the whittling away of adversary material resources, their strategic impact will be negligible if this is the only purpose for which they are used. SOF exist only in limited quantities, and often fight against vastly numerically superior forces, so they are in danger of losing a struggle based entirely on material attrition. Special operations can inflict disproportionate moral damage, in conjunction with strikes against material resources, by virtue of their ability to accomplish what was previously thought impossible. This can take the form of improving conventional military performance or eroding the moral resolve of adversaries through material strikes against lines of communications and/or sanctuaries. The cumulative effect of a number of special operations focused against an enemy’s moral and material vulnerabilities, in conjunction with conventional operations, is a more rapid and less costly dissolution of an enemy’s will to fight than by conventional means alone.
Understanding the theory behind a complex phenomenon such as strategy is relatively simple compared to implementing it in practice. By extension, knowing how special operations improve strategic performance does not translate into immediate and continuous special operations success. Even in a campaign of attrition such as the one waged in Normandy during the Second World War, where the purpose to which armed forces were used was well understood, special operations played a marginal role despite considerable success elsewhere. Factors such as personalities, internal bureaucratic competition, shifting operational and political priorities, and the actions of the enemy contribute to the uncertainty and friction that can thwart even the best-laid plans or immaculate strategic vision. The “art” of strategy for the practitioner is incorporating all instruments of military power, including special operations, into a sufficiently flexible approach to achieve political goals as efficiently as possible. In order to be used more effectively, however, special operations must be better understood within the context of the nature of strategy.

Definitions

A primary reason why special operations have not been well understood historically is definitional in nature. Defining special operations appears to present few challenges, as one can start by describing the characteristics of “regular” operations and then compare the differences.8 Special operations can be viewed as a subset of regular operations9 or anything beyond conventional operations, as in “that class of military (or paramilitary) actions that fall outside the realm of conventional warfare during their respective time periods.”10 Too broad a definition, however, opens the door for gross interpretation. For example, given the criteria above, the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen in occupied areas of Europe during the Second World War could be considered “special operations.” Their atrocious activities, as well as those of their associated Sonderkommando (or special commandos),11 were paramilitary in nature and certainly “outside the realm of ” regular military operations in this century (or any other).
In other works, special operations have been characterized to suit the case studies discussed. For example, the definition “[a] special operation is conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative”12 unduly limits discussion to individual direct action missions, or “great raids,” whose strategic effects tend to be overstated.13 There is no scope in this definition for any other type of special operation, including counterinsurgency activities, much less the cumulative effect of different types of special operations over time. Tailoring the definition of special operations to case studies can be taken to the extreme, especially when the term “strategic” is added to lend weight:
[S]uch strikes can be called strategic special operations. These are secret military or paramilitary strikes, approved at the highest level of the US government after detailed review. Executed in limited time and with limited resources, they seek to resolve through the sudden, swift, and unconventional application of force major problems of US foreign policy.14
Although this definition seems innocuous enough, it was constructed to allow discussion of the 1962 Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored “Bay of Pigs” with military special operations.15 Therefore, almost all covert and clandestine direct action activities of intelligence agencies or other paramilitary forces also must be considered as special operations.16
Special operations are not merely unconventional in character. Another defining trait, beyond unorthodox approaches, is that special operations fill a void that is unachievable conventionally and there is an elevated political or military risk associated with their failure.17 In addition, special operations should be defined according to their intended effect: improving conventional military performance. Although special operations have been called “self-contained acts of war,”18 their primary military utility is to improve the military performance of conventional forces while achieving other strategic effects by targeting enemy vulnerabilities. Special operations are therefore defined throughout this work as:
Unconventional actions against enemy vulnerabilities in a sustained campaign, undertaken by specially designated units, to enable conventional operations and/or resolve economically politico-military problems at the operational or strategic level that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with conventional forces alone.
For the purposes of this study, the actions that comprise the spectrum of special operations conform to four of the nine “tasks” identified by the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM):
• Counterterrorism (CT), offensive measures taken to prevent, deter, preempt, and respond to terrorism … missions include, but are not limited to intelligence operations, attacks against terrorist networks and infrastructure, hostage rescue, recovery of sensitive material from terrorist organizations, and non-kinetic activities aimed at the ideologies or motivations that spawn terrorism;
• Special reconnaissance (SR), reconnaissance and surveillance actions conducted as special operations in hostile, denied or politically sensitive environments to collect or verify information of strategic or operational significance, employing military capabilities n...

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