All right, Shel, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Nick Terse.
He's a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and new senior editor at Alternet.org.
His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he's the editor of.
And he also wrote The Complex about the military, industrial, everything else in the world complex.
This most important article we'll be discussing today is called Uncovering the Military's Secret Military at War in 120 Countries.
It's under Tom Englehart's name as the TomDispatch piece is run.
You know how it is at antiwar.com and the archives there or at TomDispatch or as it says here at Alternet.org as well.
Welcome back to the show, Nick.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
And this is such an important piece.
I'm sorry to bother you.
I know it must be annoying as hell to be you and have me bugging you day after day for weeks on end to come on the show and talk about this piece, but I just can't let it go.
I need to know everything that you understand now about the Special Operations Command and the extent of their warring around the world.
I guess I'll just give you the floor and give us the basic summary to start maybe.
Okay.
Well, basically what I tried to do in this piece was to dig in.
I wanted to know where the U.S.
Special Operations Forces were operating around the world.
Of course, we know that they're, you know, in the hot spots, Afghanistan, Iraq, the mercury conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia.
But I knew they were operating elsewhere.
The question was where and in how many countries.
Now, last year, the Washington Post reported that during the Bush years, Special Operations Command had put elite forces in about 60 countries around the world.
And then when the Obama administration came in, they said that this had been increased to 75.
So that number still seemed a little low to me.
Looking at the numbers of troop deployments around the world and, you know, digging in as best I could into Pentagon data.
So I decided just to go to Special Operations Command and talk to a colonel there, Colonel Tim Nye.
And, you know, I just peppered him with questions on it.
And he told me that I was right, that the number 75 was low.
That in reality, the Special Operations Forces are in about 70 countries on any given day.
But by the end of the year, they'll have been in 120 countries.
Wow.
This is kind of an elementary question.
But then again, I don't know that much about the internal workings of the military at all.
Can you help explain the difference between just SOCOM and JSOC?
The difference between the Special Operations Command and the Joint Special Operations Command?
Sure.
The Special Operations Command is the umbrella force.
They have within it, you would have the Army's Green Berets and their Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Commandos, the Marine Corps Special Operations Teams.
And one component of SOCOM is JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command.
Now, this is, you know, it's a secret subcommand and their primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists.
So that's basically Delta Force then?
Well, it's the SEALs, it's Delta Force.
And they operate, you know, they're a semi-autonomous agency in that they answer to the president.
And, you know, John Noggle, the counterinsurgency advisor to General Petraeus, who's becoming the CIA director in a few weeks.
He's called JSOC an almost industrial scale counterterrorism killing machine.
And this is really, you know, it's the president's own private army.
He gives them directives, they kill on his behalf around the world.
And so the rest of the Special Operations Command, they're answerable to what the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense, but JSOC has a direct line to the White House.
That's it?
That's right.
And the rest of Special Operations Command does, you know, has other functions that they carry out, training missions and things like that, that are generally, if not above the board, they're a little more visible than what JSOC is up to.
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of just silly, but I have an anecdote from the 1990s, a guy I knew who was Marines force recon, and knew a bit and told me a bit about the history of the remaking of a special forces after the hostage crisis and in Iran and the failed Delta raid and all that.
And what he told me about the Delta Force guys was that they called Bill Clinton, Bill.
Look, Bill, here's what we can do for you, etc, etc.
Where that they were completely outside of the chain of command in every way that you can imagine.
You know, like even being that disrespectful, because what else is he going to do?
They're his guys, and they're all he's got.
Yeah, I mean, that's a bit of hearsay, but he seemed pretty sure about the anecdote when he passed it on to me.
Well, I mean, it makes sense, because, you know, you talked about the failed, it was the 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, and, you know, end up with a helicopter crash and a number of dead special operations forces.
And because of that, Congress stepped in and they said that there needed to be some sort of unified command.
This couldn't happen again.
So they created a special operations command.
It was finally established in 1987.
And, you know, what had been these very small, fragmented elite units within each of the services were brought together, put under a four-star general.
They had their own stable budget, a single home, and the command has grown exponentially since then.
And this is, you know, they've become a real power player in the Pentagon, and they wield a lot of influence.
So, you know, being able to call the president by his first name, it sounds like it fits with the model they've adopted there.
Well, and then since September 11th and Donald Rumsfeld's reign as Secretary of Defense, there is a whole other kind of separate revolution, right?
Yes, you know, this was a real taking-off point.
Since 9-11, SOCOM's baseline budget has almost tripled.
It's gone from a little over $2 billion to over $6 billion per year.
And if you add in the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's actually quadrupled to almost $10 billion.
And at the same time, its number of personnel deployed abroad has jumped fourfold, and they're looking to expand every year from here on out.
All right, now, when you say 70 countries on any given day that SOCOM is in, 120 at least by the end of the year, and there's only, what, 193 countries in the world now, including South Sudan and independent Kosovo there?
That doesn't mean Cheney-style secret assassination teams in 120 countries, really, does it?
No, I mean, SOCOM performs an entire range of activities.
There are the high-profile assassinations like the Bin Laden raid.
There's low-level targeted killings that we see in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen via drone strikes, sometimes by teams on the ground.
There are capture and kidnap operations.
Some of those have come to light in Somalia.
They run kick-down-the-door night raids now.
According to the outgoing head of SOCOM, they run about 12 night raids a night, maybe in either Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They run joint operations with foreign forces in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
They have training missions with indigenous partners all over the world, and these are going on on a constant basis.
Right, I mean, that's really the thing.
This is like a School of the Americas on wheels, as they go around making clones of themselves in all the allied states.
That's right.
The satellites, I should call them.
All right, wow.
It's Nick Terse, and he's at Alternet and at TomDispatch and Antiwar.com, uncovering the military's secret military.
It's under Tom Englehart's name at Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Nick Terse from Alternet and TomDispatch.
He's the author of The Complex and the editor of the case for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And we're talking about this extremely important article, you've got to read it, uncovering the military's secret military.
And where we left off, we were talking about, well, it's in one of the titles of this thing, 120 countries, the Special Operations Command operating in 120 countries.
And now, to narrow it down a little bit, can you tell us, best you can tell, where the Joint Special Operations Command is operating and, you know, actually at war with people as opposed to just training Dutch troops or whatever?
Well, we know that JSOC right now is working in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.
We can be sure of that.
Then there's also, say, you know, in the Philippines, there are U.S. advisers who have been out in the field since, you know, just really just after 9-11.
Now, they apparently, or they supposedly don't take part in kinetic operations, as the military calls it.
They don't actually fire their weapons, but they're with troops in the field.
Personnel have been killed in part of that secret war that's going on.
So, you know, it gets a little murky after the wars that we know are going on.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry for jumping around back and forth so much, but I want to get my head around just how much it's grown since September 11th, percentage-wise or something.
I think you really portray in the article a situation where the Special Operations Command has really taken on a brand new kind of era of dominance over the military's culture and its mission.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you know, when I talked about how they were set up, you know, in the late 80s, you know, they were made autonomous in ways that, you know, make them similar to, say, a department within the Pentagon.
For those who don't understand, a department would be like the Department of the Army.
So, you know, they're equivalent to, say, the entire Army or the entire Navy or the entire Air Force.
They wield this type of clout, and they have a commander who has that type of weight within the Pentagon.
So they're able to, you know, bend things to their own way.
They have their own funding that's not contingent on the other service branches.
So it's a separate funding stream.
And Congress, I mean, they just love Special Operations Forces.
They eat this stuff up.
You know, we saw the SEAL mania that came out after the Bin Laden raid, and all these news reports about Superman, you know, within the Special Operations Forces.
Congress loves this.
I think it plays well back home.
And, you know, they're happy to, even in a time of fiscal austerity, supposedly, to pump more and more money into Special Operations Command.
Well, and then, you know, they talk about the self-licking ice cream cone and all these things.
There's all these different kinds of analysis of the politics of this sort of power.
But, I mean, that means, really, if their role inside the Pentagon is that powerful compared to the other branches, then that determines the future of the wars America fights, not just them, but the future of the policy.
You know, they influence that themselves to a great degree, no?
Yes, you know, that's right.
And they're even having, I mean, you can even see their effects in places like, you know, the type of technologies that will be used in the future in war fighting.
They've already, there are acquisitions departments that are within the Pentagon that each service branch has, but SOCOM has their own.
And now they're able to shuttle money into, you know, cutting-edge technologies and fringe research, things like they're working, they're putting money towards projects like electronically beaming messages into people's heads or stealth cloaking technologies for ground troops.
And through their own funding stream, you know, they've been able to purchase a lot of specialty equipment.
They've increased their purchases from small contractors, the people who dabble in these specialized weapons.
It's jumped six-fold since 2001.
So they really do wield a lot of power now.
Well, it reminds me of this article I read by Crotchley or Fred Reed one time about how the biggest problem with the military is all that self-esteem and how they really just believe in themselves.
In fact, probably the more gadgets they get, the more fancy new technologies they have, the more it reinforces how, you know, their own belief in their ability to just, you know, completely make things the way they want.
I think probably a lot of promises were told to George Bush before the Iraq war about their capability.
Certainly somebody, if not Robert Gates, told Barack Obama, oh, yeah, don't worry, it'll be days, not weeks in Libya, you know?
Exactly.
I mean, I think a lot of times these guys believe they're at their own height.
They create this propaganda, and then they sell themselves on it, and that's why victory is always just around the corner.
And then, you know, ten years later, it's still just around the corner.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we used to get a lot of, you know, like in the heyday of the first couple of years of the Iraq war, we'd get so much email at antiwar.com, even from soldiers in Iraq, saying, you know, we're doing the right thing, we're winning out there every day, and you don't know the first thing about it.
And I would always answer them back, yeah, but whose side are you on?
Who are you fighting for?
Do you know much about the Supreme Islamic Council and whatever?
And they never really knew that.
What they knew was they were winning their battles every day, but they never understood the politics of who they were fighting for over there.
And you can see the same sort of thing here with a bunch of Delta guys who probably don't, you know, even care much about the politics of Pakistan, who have this great drone program and these great, you know, raids, where they go in and get just the guy they're looking for, they claim, and whatever, when actually they're tearing Pakistan apart.
They're setting us up for a huge crisis in the short-term future here.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the vision that these guys have, the lens that they look through, it's just so circumscribed, so small.
You know, they see and think that they're accomplishing their mission without any conceptualization of what that means on a broader level.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you mentioned Somalia there, and, of course, there's Jeremy Scahill's recent report for The Nation about the JSOC running a secret prison there with the CIA and being much more involved in the war in Somalia than we've known about in a while.
I mean, it was clear that they helped with the Ethiopian invasion in the first place back in the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 there, but it seems like with the al-Shabaab rebels and all that, there's nothing that can happen there except matters getting worse and American forces escalating more and more.
Yeah, I mean, it's a common scenario, and it certainly looks like it's going that way.
I mean, Scahill's report was fantastic.
It shows that there's at least a black site that's set up in Somalia.
It looks like JSOC is also operating a network of secret prisons in Afghanistan right now.
There's at least one, but possibly as many as 20.
Of course, because these are black sites, we can't be sure of how many there are.
I mean, we were told that these were all being shut down when the Obama administration came in, and now we start to see little glimpses, cracks within the veneer here to see that there's still some sort of secret prison system going on and that JSOC is intimately involved in it.
Now, what about Libya?
Do you have any information about JSOC on the ground there?
It's been unclear what JSOC's role on the ground is.
There were reports just this week that there were drone strikes being carried out in Libya.
Of course, it's never clear as to who's carrying those out.
If it's CIA or JSOC, they both have their own drone fleets, but I would imagine that it was probably JSOC.
There were JSOC troops from the Air Force who were flying missions over Libya, doing coordination.
I imagine there's a good chance that they also put some JSOC air controllers on the ground, at least in the first days of the U.S. air campaign there, because to call in airstrikes, you really need forward air controllers, people on the ground to call these in, especially when you're supporting a rebel force that doesn't have a lot of sophistication when it comes to that.
Yeah.
Whoa, and that one's just getting started, too.
Bad deal.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your work on this article.
It's a really great one.
I hope everybody goes and reads it.
It's called Uncovering the Military's Secret Military.
It's under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com.
It's also at TomDispatch and Alternet.
This is Nick Terse.
Thanks again.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
