U.S. stealthy war on terror expands, deepens; Special Operations forces take lead
official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans … calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’”
The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.
DeYoung and Jaffe note that the clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” of a terrorist attack but will “take the fight to al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond.”
President George W. Bush used similar rhetoric, vowing to “take the battle to the enemy … and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The elite Special Operations units became a frontline counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the 9/11 2001 attacks.
Obama, however, has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.
Gen. David H. Petraeus at the Central Command and others were ordered by the Joint Staff under Bush to develop plans to use Special Operations forces for intelligence collection and other counterterrorism efforts, and were given the authority to issue direct orders to them. Those orders, however, were formalized only last year, including in a CENTCOM directive outlining operations throughout South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East.
The order, whose existence was first reported by the New York Times, includes intelligence collection in Iran, although it is unclear whether Special Operations forces are active there (see Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast,” 24 May 2010 New York Times).
DeYoung and Jaffe write that Special Operations commanders are pleased with their expanded numbers and funding, but that they would like
