Ashley's War

Uncle Sam Needs You
Two years before Ashley White ran off the helicopter in Kandahar, Afghanistan, U.S. Special
Operations Commander Eric Olson had an idea.
Working from a second-floor office in the headquarters of the U.S. Special Operations Command
(SOCOM) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, Admiral Olson had spent years studying the
ever-changing battlefield in what had become the longest war in American history. Twenty-first-
century technology, advanced weaponry, and instant communications radically altered the modern
battleground, offering fighters more real-time information than ever before. But specific pockets of
what Olson called “micro-knowledge”— meaningful, detailed intelligence about a region’s people,
culture, language, and social mores—remained out of reach to American forces. He wanted to change
that.
Olson was a groundbreaker in his own right. The first Navy SEAL to be appointed a three-star, then a
four-star admiral, he was also the first Navy officer to lead the Special Operations Command. It was
a position widely considered to be among the most important—and least-known— jobs in America’s
fight against terrorism.
SOCOM’s creation in 1987 ended a bruising Washington brawl that pitted special ops supporters in
Congress and the special operations community against senior military and civilian Pentagon leaders.
The military leadership viewed the command as a needless drain of resources from America’s armed
forces, of which special ops formed just a very small part, less than 5 percent of America’s military
men and women. As a distinct culture that favors small units over large forces and independent
problem solving over the formal, traditional military hierarchy, they were viewed with deep
suspicion by much of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. America’s first special operations
teams were created in World War II for missions that rely on the kind of nimble, secret, surgical
actions for which large-scale, conventional forces are ill-suited. Their portfolio was always intended
to be utterly different from that of traditional ground forces. In his 1962 speech to West Point’s
graduates, President John F. Kennedy reflected on the new geopolitical landscape that gave rise to
special operations forces:
This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins—war by guerrillas,
subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of combat; by infiltration instead of
aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It
requires—in those situations where we must encounter it—a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly
different kind of force, and therefore, a new and wholly different kind of military training.
Over the years, special ops forces were subject to boom-and- bust cycles as conflicts escalated and
ended. They played a heroic and prominent role in World War II, when special operations teams
parachuted into German strongholds, scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to destroy
enemy gun positions, and dropped behind enemy lines to liberate American prisoners of war from a
Japanese prisoner of war camp. In Korea special ops units ran raids and ambushes, but soon
afterward saw their budgets and their numbers shrink. They once again bulked up to join the fight in
Vietnam, running small-unit reconnaissance missions far behind enemy lines and working with and
training local South Vietnamese fighters, but by the late 1970s, the force had again been whittled
down to near extinction. In the era of Cold War confrontations, their style of fighting was seen as a
mismatch against the Soviets, who were rapidly building up conventional forces.
Everything changed in the 1990s with the successful use of special operations forces in Operation
Desert Storm and the rise of modern terrorism by non-state actors like Hezbollah and, toward the end
of the twentieth century, al-Qaeda. After the attacks of 9/11, the subterfuge, speed, and surprise that
were the hallmark of special operations moved its forces front and center in the war against terror. By
2010 SOCOM could draw upon people, technology, dollars, and equipment that its founders
wouldn’t have dared imagine twenty years earlier. During that period, in the latter half of the post-
9/11 war in Afghanistan, Eric Olson’s Special Operations Command demanded a great deal more of
its fighting men and women than ever before.
Olson was the quintessential special ops man. Slight in build and large in presence, he is the model
“quiet professional” that Special Operations Forces style themselves after. Those under his command
described him as “a cerebral officer,” unusual for his tendency to listen more than he speaks. He had
seen plenty of combat in his long career; a highly decorated Navy SEAL, he received a Silver Star
for leading a team through Mogadishu’s streets to rescue injured soldiers overcome by Somali
fighters in the battle popularly known as “Black Hawk Down.”
From the start of the war, Olson believed that America was never going to kill its way to victory in
Afghanistan. “We have to learn to think our way through this fight,” he would say. To do that, “we
have to understand it better.” For some time, Olson had been thinking about “the whole yin and yang
of modern warfare capabilities.” As he saw it, “concepts that may at first appear to be opposed to
each other may in fact be parts of the same whole,” and he had come to believe that the United States
was out of balance, too tilted toward the hard side of war and not devoted enough to what he viewed
as its softer side: the knowledge-based war.
Part of the problem, Olson felt, was that the military’s incentives—its systems, programs, personnel
policies, promotion paths—all rewarded hard skills over deep knowledge. He believed that even the
most knowledgeable members of the military’s elite special operations teams in Afghanistan—
experts who had studied the geography, history, and language of the region and had become
comfortable in the environment—even they were missing a huge chunk of intel about the enemy they
were fighting and the people they were there to protect. Some of the most crucial information, Olson
believed, was hiding within a population to which special ops forces, nearly a decade into the war,
had virtually no access: the women.

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Uncle Sam Needs You

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