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Some spec ops skills being lost, official says

Continued force expansion is the only way to solve the global shortfalls caused by high demand for U.S. special operations troops in the Middle East, a senior Pentagon adviser says.

In addition to those unmet demands, said Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, the concentration of special operators in the Middle East has the effect of diluting the skill levels of some of those personnel, who would normally be assigned to other parts of the world and using different languages and tactics.

“It’s a major reason that we’re growing the force,” said Vickers, referring to the directive in the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. That study called for adding a battalion to each of the Army’s five active Special Forces groups by 2012, an expansion that is ongoing.

Vickers told Military Times editors and reporters June 18 that about 80 percent of spec op forces are deployed to the U.S. Central Command area.

That level of demand is not expected to decrease, even in the face of “significant demand” elsewhere, he said. The latter needs are being only partially met, he indicated, underlining the necessity for growth.

“To build a global counterterrorism network of persistent presence rather than episodic presence, we’re going to need more special operators,” Vickers said.

He said that if the demand for spec ops forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were to decline — “which we see no signs of,” despite the possibility of further drawdown in conventional forces in Iraq — they would likely be redistributed to help meet needs elsewhere.

Vickers declined to be specific about where the shortfalls lie, and said he wouldn’t characterize any of them as a specific unmet demand with a dire consequence.

He also declined to provide many specifics — other than problems maintaining language proficiencies — on the degradation of skill levels and individual qualifications that are a byproduct of the focus on CentCom.

But steps are being taken to address such erosion, he said.

‘Broad mission set’

“Special operations forces have a broad mission set,” said Vickers, a former Army Green Beret and CIA operations officer. “Within specific units or across the force — and some contingencies emphasize some things more than others — we meet readiness for the broad set of missions in a number of ways.

“One is that as you come out of rotations, you do some of the other things,” he said. “The commanders know this and have plans to do this. There are skills that you have to attend to ... and ironically, some of them are less demanding in some areas than you find in the combat zones, but they’re more demanding in terms of operating in different political environments.”

Foreign language proficiency is a particularly demanding skill in which regular practice and use is critical, and its degradation in spec ops teams deployed to the Middle East that are normally assigned to other areas is a problem because, as Vickers noted, the pace of operations is not likely to subside.

But due to the high demand by Central Command, Vickers said, “We’re taking people who had done a lot of stuff in Latin America and are Spanish speakers, and sending them to the CentCom area. And that will continue for some time.”

On top of the challenge that poses, he said, the growing spec ops community must shift direction on which languages are taught in order to reflect current U.S. national security concerns.

“Even with a larger force, we’re going to need more Pashto speakers and Dari speakers and Arabic speakers than we did in the past,” Vickers said. “We’re going to need fewer German speakers and others. So, that transition has to take place.”

One current area of regional growth is in Special Operations Command-Africa, which Vickers said is being stood up in tandem with the ongoing establishment of U.S. Africa Command.

He said he hopes the new command, which will cover the entire continent except for Egypt, will “give us more focus within the command” on tasks that are unique to spec ops forces.

While Vickers does not see a short-term increase in demand for spec ops personnel in Africa, that likely will change in future years.

“If you redistribute your forces globally, Africa will probably get a larger share,” he said.