Fighting with Fire
While conventional forces have a significant amount of organic fire support, including mortars, cannon artillery and rocket systems, organic fires are more limited within special operations. For example, other than 60 mm and 81 mm mortars utilized within the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, the bulk of special operations comes from the air, in the form of AC-130 series gunships or AH-6/MH-60 minigun and rocket assets. The organic shortfall is most serious in Special Forces groups.
Noting that Special Forces were among the first units “to answer the call in the unfortunate aftermath of September 11 [2001],” Mulholland explained that when the units redeployed to conduct unconventional warfare operations in Afghanistan, they moved forward “without any kind of fires capability.”
“Special Forces does not have an organic fires capability in the system,” he said. “So we went to war without one.”
Initial combat operations in Afghanistan focused on air “fires” delivered in coordination with joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs). The larger coordination of such fires tended to be conducted on a fairly ad hoc basis.
“Overwhelmingly that worked extremely well,” Mulholland observed. “But it was not without cost. The first soldiers that we lost in Task Force Dagger in the early days were two different fratricide incidents. On December 9 [2001], I lost the best part of an A-team to a JDAM. It worked exactly as designed. But that’s a neutral device. It will go where you tell it to go, regardless of who is at the other end of that thing. And the last one I lost in March, in Operation Anaconda, down in the Shahi-Kot Valley, when an AC-130 suffered a malfunction and had drifted off where he geographically thought he was on Earth and, as a result, engaged one of my elements.”
With the legacy of Afghanistan freshly in mind, early 2003 saw new Special Forces taskings for western Iraq, including Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF)—West’s counter tactical ballistic missile mission.
According to Mulholland, those taskings led to the creation of a truly jointcombined fires element, developing new tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), in coordination with the combined force air component commander, for integrated operations in the western Iraq desert.
“We learned from our lessons in Afghanistan and insisted on not just a ‘joint fires’ capability but a ‘joint-combined fires’ capability,” he said. “And I was fortunate to have extraordinarily capable men who were able to create an extraordinary cell of U.S., British, Australian officers and NCOs—world-class—and for the first time strategically on the battlefield allowed us to merge special operations task forces with our friends in the U.K., Australia and other special forces in the Scud/counter- Scud mission.”
Crediting the CJSOTF with “truly strategic ramifications,” Mulholland described how the organization allowed a relatively limited number of ground SOF operators to be hugely successful, adding that it provides a future template now commonly used.
In terms of quantified specifics, he offered that the initial 27 days of OIF saw execution of 393 joint-fire deconfliction with zero fratricide or near-fratricide events.
Moreover, on D+1 alone, three separate Special Forces A-teams were in direct contact with superior forces, one in danger of being overrun, all within a 30-minute period. According to Mulholland, literally within minutes, the Joint Fires Element cell was able to put a two-ship close air support (CAS) element over each team and resolve the contacts.
FIRE SUPPORTERS
In terms of organizational evolution, the forward deployed CJSOTFs were resourced with Army fire supporters as augmentees starting in OIF I. Reinforced by those early successes, Special Forces groups (SFGs) began to be resourced with Army fire supporters as a proof of concept in 2004, beginning with the 7th SFG.
Mulholland noted that over the course of the last five years, the proof of concept was validated and approved. In 2007, every active SFG was authorized a joint fire support element (JFE) based on the Enhanced Special Forces Group BAND III MTOE. At the SFG level, the JFE includes: 1 x 13A major fire support officer; 1 x 131A CW3 targeting officer; and 1 x 13F SFC fire support NCO. Special Forces battalions are authorized: 1 x 13A CPT fire support officer; and 1 x 13F SFC fire support NCO.
He added that Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) has integrated the fire supporters into a joint effects cell that through a joint planning group integrates, fuses and synchronizes lethal and nonlethal fires to achieve the commanders’ desired effects ranging from direct action, close air support, and artillery strikes to information operations, electronic warfare, and civil military operations.
In terms of target development, Mulholland’s overview emphasized that due to the network structure of the insurgent groups usually being targeted by ARSOF, coupled with their often seamless integration into the local population and the preponderance of ARSOF, targets “are derived and pushed from the bottom up.”
A-teams develop and exploit targets that originate primarily from actionable HUMINT garnered from a variety of sources. That intelligence is then cross-cued with tactical, theater and national SIGINT in order to validate and refine the target, with SOF then employing both systemic and dynamic targeting to disrupt insurgent networks by delivering both kinetic and non-kinetic effects on key nodes.
He added that the task of this type of targeting in a counterinsurgency environment requires the precision targeting against key nodes within the insurgent cellular network structure, including: commanders, sub-commanders, facilitators, financiers, and command and control nodes. Working together with host nations, the net effect of successful targeting is to systematically dismantle the insurgent cellular structures, physically and ideologically separating them from the population.
Mulholland then offered sanitized examples of how this process works in the real world.
The first example demonstrated the development of HUMINT through synchronized kinetic and non-kinetic activities to develop intelligence on a target. The scenario is a Special Forces A-team conducting operations from a firebase in a remote valley in Afghanistan.
During a “key leader engagement” by the team leader and local Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) commander in a nearby village, they learn of a nearby village where a man comes from with large sums of money.
During a subsequent medical visit to the village a local female tells a U.S. female health care provider that a Taliban subcommander in the area is actively trying to recruit her son. The A-team interviews the son, and he tells them that he can show them the location of a large number of Taliban fighters. Over the next couple of weeks he also provides the team with the name and location of an individual who carries large sums of money and associates with the fighters. Additionally, he provides a telephone number he saw at the financier’s house, adding that the number may belong to a Taliban leader in the district.
MOVING IN
The team and ANSF then plan and conduct a medical visit to the area where it suspects the sub-commander operates, and employs tactical SIGINT to collect in that area. The SIBINT identifies a conversation between a local Taliban commander and IED facilitator. Additionally, it identifies a Thurya cell phone number.
The CJSOTF then focuses national- and theater-level SIGINT to find and fix the location of the Taliban commander. Once the HUMINT and SIGINT pictures are cross-cued, the A-team conducts a detailed network nodal analysis.
The team then requests the CJSOTF employ joint operational fires against the Taliban area commander, while simultaneously working with ANSF to plan and execute a raid against the Taliban subcommander and C2 node.
After the successful operations, the ANSF establishes a security outpost in the vicinity of the former Taliban C2 node to deny further sanctuary and increase governmental influence and control.
“In reality the conduct of our operations is much more complicated than this illustration, but it does provide a picture of the methodology we use,” Mulholland noted.
A second vignette depicted a dynamic targeting/joint operational fire strike against a senior operational commander for southern Afghanistan. The area of operations was Kajaki, Baghran District, Helmand Province. Tribal and sub-tribal identifications were given as: Ghurgehusht/ Kakar.
In the scenario the CJSOTF-A (Afghanistan) began targeting the Taliban senior commander and his deputy. HUMINT and SIGINT reports indicated that both commanders were planning on conducting a “Taliban Court,” followed by executions of three suspected Taliban traitors who were believed to be providing information to ANSF/coalition forces and the Afghan government. Reports also indicated that the commanders were gathering 200–250 Taliban fighters from Now Zad, Baghran and Musa Qaleh districts to convene the court.
CJSOTF-A developed a target package and requested intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support to find and fix the targets at the suspected meeting site. After obtaining positive identification of the targets through multiple sources of SIGINT coupled with visual indicators, CJSOTF-A requested and received strike approval.
Under the designation of Operation Jang Baz, the CJSOTF-A then directed the employment of 6 x GBU-31 JDAMs, delivered by a B-1B, to destroy the meeting site containing the two high-value individuals.
ASSESSING THE DAMAGE
Initial battle damage assessment (BDA), conducted through Predator observation, revealed the complete destruction of the three targeted structures at the meeting site. Final BDA confirmed that 6 x operational and 29 x tactical Taliban commanders were killed by the strike, along with over 150 Taliban fighters.
In addition to severely disrupting the Taliban’s ability to synchronize operations to defend Musa Qaleh and project violence into Central Helmand, Western Oruzgon and Western Kandahar Provinces, the strike served as a “shaping operation” for coalition forces preparing for future operations in the vicinity of Musa Qaleh.
Shifting focus, Mulholland shared a series of recent success stories, remaining challenges and future goals with the assembled audience from across the joint service fire support community.
“Having enough [USAF joint tactical air] controllers on the ground is an issue,” he acknowledged. “We all know it’s an issue, and it’s tough.”
“As a result, we stood up our own SOTACC [Special Operations Terminal Attack Controller Course] at Yuma Proving Grounds, where we run our own program six times a year to train Air Force controllers, but primarily Army Special Forces and Ranger controllers— and Marine MARSOC. And six times a year we train about 16 students ... as ‘Type 1’ controllers on the battlefield,” he said. ♦