Mark Mazzetti’s much talked-about piece in the New York Times this week on the clandestine deployment of special operations forces throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility reminded me of a few points I had noted in DOD’s recently updated Joint Operating Concept (JOC) for Irregular Warfare, released earlier this month.
The new JOC, produced under the direction of SOCOM commander Admiral Eric T. Olson and JFCOM commander General James Mattis, is intended to “articulate how the joint force must operate to counter irregular threats and to guide force development, materiel and non-materiel capability development, and experimentation.” To do so, it outlines in broad terms “how the future joint force will conduct operations, when directed by the President or Secretary of Defense, to prevent, deter, disrupt, and defeat non-state actors, as well as state actors who pose irregular threats.”
With respect to counterterrorism operations, the JOC anticipates the following:
The focus of joint force operations will be to first identify and understand the terrorist networks’ leadership, affiliate groups, local organizations, radicalized individuals, and supporters and enablers, and then undertake continuous action as part of a global counterterrorist network that utilizes a broad set of interagency and multinational partner capabilities. Counterterrorism activities may be undertaken either before, or concurrently with, [foreign internal defense] and COIN activities, and long-term success will normally require sustained follow-on efforts to build partner-nation capacity to address residual threats and prevent their resurgence.
All in all, this tracks pretty closely with Mazzetti’s description of the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force (JUWTF) Execute Order, reportedly signed by Gen. David Petraeus last September, which authorizes the deployment of U.S. special forces in friendly and unfriendly countries throughout the CENTCOM AOR to “build networks that could ‘penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy’ Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to ‘prepare the environment’ for future attacks by American or local military forces.” American soldiers are, of course, already engaged in this sort of activity in Yemen and elsewhere; some of the apparent controversy surrounding the classified order stems from the fact that Iran could become a target of clandestine military surveillance teams.
Given that the principles of the September directive are articulated elsewhere in unclassified doctrine, though, it would be difficult to interpret the JUWTF order as a new and alarming manifestation of senior commanders’ “expansive interpretation of the military’s role around the world.”
Even the CIA, on whose turf the new directive threatens to encroach, seems unconcerned. “There’s more than enough work to go around,” spokesman Paul Gimigliano noted blithely in the New York Times. In a later report, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic explained further:
There was little opposition to the expansion from the CIA’s leadership, which was content to handle its traditional portfolio without having to resort to the type of paramilitary activities that, when revealed, invited intense scrutiny from Congress and the public.
Finally, it’s important to recall the strategic purpose of these efforts — that is, to identify and stem threats early on, and thus hedge against the need for the intervention of a larger number of U.S. forces later down the road. Like the JOC says, “it is preferable to deal with incipient threats and the conditions that give rise to them.” With all the challenges facing the military in the greater Middle East, you can’t blame CENTCOM for getting an early start.
