Question 29e

The Real Reason Why McRaven’s At SOTU

The reason Admiral William McRaven, the Commander of the Special Operations Command, deserves the extraordinary and public recognition he’ll get tonight is not — I repeat not — because of his role in planning and commanding the DevGru SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden last year. 

Surely, McRaven merits accolade for an excellent, precise special operation of the type he studied and wrote about. But Operation Neptune’s Spear will go down in history as a textbook op because of its target, UBL, and not because of any particular or paranormal activity undertaken by the combatants.

Cynically, here’s there because a re-election seeking President Obama needed a face to associate with the triumph that marked bin Laden’s death, a true accomplishment, and a tough call for a young President.  

Leon Panetta could have filled that role.  And McRaven is shy. By nature and by design. He once told a reporter that he really wanted JSOC to be “left alone to do our thing.”

However I think that the reason why this shadow warrior gets to sit in the FIrst Lady’s box is because he transformed the way the US combats violent extremism, from, basically, 2002 until today. 

Actually, he invented that phrase “Combating Violent Extremism,” when the Obama administration wanted to broaden the concept of the Bush Administrations “War On Terrorism.”

McRaven, in one form of another, either wrote the plans for or had some role in executing every major offensive counter-terrorism tactic that significantly degraded the Al Qaeda network.  As Task Force Commander in Iraq, he and Gen. Stanley McChrystal and intelligence chief LTG Michael Flynn fused intelligence and operations and got inside the insurgent information loop at precisely the right moment, turning the streets of Baghdad into a Valhalla of special operations.  Upon taking over as JSOC commander in 2008, McRaven set out to institutionalize the revolutionary warfare techniques that made the Command so successful in Iraq.  

All this sounds like cheerleading.  He did come along at the right moment…at a time when the only thing that was actually working was JSOC….and he has proved himself a masterful bureaucratic force multiplier.  

JSOC does basically five things.  It kills people — hopefully bad people. It steals things that are really hard to get. It collects intelligence.  It dabbles in the occultist word of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, spoofing them, disabling them, rendering them safe.  And it penetrates deep into enemy territory to destroy targets that are critical part of information links during war — think of the relay stations for China’s satellites.  

Neptune’s Spear aside, there is a lot that JSOC does that the public will never know. When JSOC does make the news, it’s generally because people messed up — they participated in the torture of detainees in Iraq in 2002 — or because of a once in a life time op that must because of the nature of the target be made public.  

But 4,000+ people work in silence, always in silence, doing other things that even the most grizzled critic of the Command would acknowledge are essential to national security.

Since 9/11/ JSOC has become one part of the government that actually works. It gets along better with its counterparts at the CIA.  It has improved information sharing.  It has (of course) expanded its turf. It is more responsive to Congress than ever before. Everyone who wants to be anyone in the U.S. military now wants a tour through Fayetteville and Pope AFB. 

As the leader of this  force of secret squirrels, McRaven has shown his chops as a commander. But his real contribution has been the way he figured out how to defeat disrupt and dismantle terrorist networks using intelligence, technology and teamwork.

The story of special operations forces is hard to tell, but McRaven has reason to think it is a very good one, one that Americans can be proud of, and McRaven’s presence ought to honor all who cannot be named.