New course for special combat units
WASHINGTON — Not long after Adm. William McRaven oversaw the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, he was put in charge of the nation’s entire contingent of special operations forces and set to work revamping them to face a widening array of new threats as America’s combat role in the Middle East and Southwest Asia winds down.
His efforts to apply the lessons learned from more than a decade of fighting in the shadows of the larger wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have high-level support from a White House and Pentagon eager to avoid large-scale foreign interventions and to encourage allies to assume more of the burden of combating extremism and instability.
McRaven’s goal is to recast the Special Operations Command from its popular image of commandos killing or capturing terrorists and expand a force capable of carrying out a range of missions short of combat — including training foreign militaries to counter terrorists, drug traffickers and insurgents, gathering intelligence and assessing pending risks, and advising embassies on security. Critics emerge
But along the way, the ambitious University of Texas graduate who grew up in San Antonio has run into critics who say he is overreaching, or as one congressional critic put it, “empire building” at a time when the military is shrinking its footprint in Afghanistan and refocusing on other hot spots around the world.
Congress has blocked, at least temporarily, an idea to consolidate several hundred of the command’s Washingtonbased staff members in a $10 million-a-year satellite office here, saying it would violate spending limits on such offices.
At the same time, McRaven also has faced criticism that he is encroaching on the turf of the military’s traditionally powerful regional commanders.
Shortly before leaving the Pentagon, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta granted McRaven new authority to make staffing decisions in the special operations units assigned to the regional commanders.
While they will still have the final say on missions in their region, McRaven will now have the ability to allocate the much sought-after 11,000 deployed special operations forces where he determines intelligence and world events indicate they are most needed.
“I don’t command and control anything,” McRaven said in an interview. “I hope to be able to influence some of their decisions. But I’m not going to move pieces around the chessboard.” Efficiency move
As for the office he has sought in Washington, McRaven couches his plans to consolidate the command’s disparate operations into a new “National Capital Region” office in similar reformminded terms, telling Congress in April that it would “better support coordination and decision-making” with other federal agencies.
Supporters described the plan as an efficiency move for the 373 people serving as liaison officers scattered in dozens of executive branch departments and the intelligence community, as well as members of a legislative affairs office.