An example of the kind of challenge they faced came in 1982. The 5th SF Group at Fort Bragg had been given the assignment to support the recently created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) — which two years later became CENTCOM — in its planning for Southwest Asia. Iran was then a major focus. According to the conventional wisdom, the Soviets could possibly roll down through Iran, grab its warm-water ports, and of course, its oil, thus affording them the strategic position to control the flow of all oil out of the Cuff. The RDJTF's mission was to make sure that did not happen.
Operating in Southwest Asia meant deserts, of course, but as a consequence of the chaos after Vietnam, no one in Special Forces had desert training.
Jim Cuest, then the 5th Group commander, tells the story:
The 5th was a big group. In 1982, we had fifty-four A-Detachments, but our entire training budget was only $350,000. Major General Joe Lutz, the commander of the JFK Center, told me, "I want you to train your group to go to war in the desert."
"Yes, sir," I said. "I'll do that."
But when I started checking into the realities of desert training, I realized that nobody in SF had actually trained there. I told General Lutz that we needed a site in the desert where we could start training the troops.
"We don't have any money for that," he told me. "But go ahead and do it, and we'll find the money somehow." And he did.
So we got started.
I sent a major and a couple of captains out west, and they found a post near Fort Hauchucha, Arizona, near Tombstone, where the local desert matched up pretty closely with the deserts in the Middle East; it was the harshest desert we could find. We then put a training unit out there.
At the same time, I commissioned a desert study, which concluded, "In Vietnam, the engagement range for the enemy was usually fifty to three hundred meters. In the desert, it starts at fifteen hundred meters. To fight there, you need bigger, more accurate weapons."
Other important conclusions: First, you must prepare yourself psychologically to operate in such a strange and hostile environment. Second, mobility is a must. You need a vehicle. You can't just walk in the desert very far and survive; the rough terrain nears you out. And you need something to carry water, equipment, and survival gear. In most other operational areas, we carry all this in rucksacks. But not in the desert. Third, you must be able to navigate by the stars, like ships at set. And then you also must know how to camouflage in the desert, how to estimate distances, how to make expedient repairs on vehicles and other pieces of key equipment (its a long way bach to your support).
Then we got the group together, and I told them right up front: "Most of you are veterans of Vietnam, where — unfortunately — we fought in the jungle. Now you're going into the desert to learn how to fight there, because you don't know how. That means we're going to have to shift the total thinking of the group."
We trained for seventy-six days, and the guys learned how to survive and navigate. Navigation is damned difficult. You either have a haze, which keeps you from seeing far enough to orient yourself, or if it's clear, everything appears far closer than it actually is, and when you get off the post, it's really harsh. We had a lot of trouble getting accustomed to navigating in the desert.
After four weeks of orientation and general learning, we put them out in the desert in A-Detachments, and took everything away from them — no food, no water — and they had to survive for two weeks. Live or die, it was up to them. (Of course, we had our own outpost to watch them.)
After they'd been out for a while, somebody came up to me and said, "You know, the guys out there look like that movie, Quest For Fire" (where cave-men roamed around a desert trying to survive.) He was right; they did. In the daytime, the sun was so hot they stayed under shelter, and when they had to go out, they tied rags around their heads, like Arabs. They hunted and traveled at night, with homemade spears, slingshots, anything they could get. And they hunted anything they could find — porcupines, birds, snakes.
Special Forces are very cunning. After they came back in, they told us, "As we wandered along the wadis, we kept seeing these little holes. 'What the hell are they?' we kept asking ourselves. And it finally dawned on us that they were rat holes. And that meant rattlesnakes were going to come out at night and hunt them. And that meant we could get them both.
"I don't know how many rattlesnakes we killed and ate, but we depopulated some of those areas."
After we found out about the rat holes, we always put guys in areas where there was a good supply of them.
The same thing went for water. We always put the guys in areas where they could find it. Before they went out, they'd study maps, which showed where they could dig down and get water; it would seep up under dried streambeds. In some places, little springs trickled up, but they had to be careful about these, because some of them were alkaline.
After we'd been doing this for a while, we realized we needed vehicles, not only for the reasons already mentioned but to use as weapons platforms for. 50-caliber machine guns and TOWs. Our area studies had convinced us that any enemy with the potential to hurt us in the desert would be mounted on vehicles — or, in some cases, camels.
We needed vehicles, but there was no money And since We couldn't get anybody to give us anything, we took our own trucks, painted them desert brown (for camouflage), and cut their tops off. We had to do that so the trucks could be easily dismounted — but also so we could mount the weapons and have 360-degree observation on the move. In the desert, you need to see in every direction — especially for protection against surprise or helicopters.
"Cut the tops off very carefully," I told our mechanics. "If we ever have to turn one of the trucks back in, we can just set it down and weld the top back on, and nobody'll ever know."
Sometimes we went to the Property Disposal Yard (the PDO yard) and picked up vehicles the army was throwing away or selling. We would take three or four broken-down and beat-up vehicles to a place our mechanics and maintenance people had set up out in the desert, and rebuild them ourselves. We cut two or three vehicles in pieces, and welded the good pieces together to make one workable truck.
A lot of people thought we were nuts, hut it was just Special Forces ingenuity once again.
The payoff came when we went on an exercise a year later with some elite Arab units, and it turned out that we were more at home in their desert than they were. We could navigate in the desert. We could live in the desert. And they couldn't. They didn't know how to live and fight there. In fact, we had to give them water. This gave us a great deal of confidence.
After the exercise, we asked them, "How do you guys get around in the desert when we're not here?"
"Oh, we get the Bedouins to help," they told us.
NEW LIFE
By the late 1970s, Special Forces funding stood at one-tenth of one percent of the total defense budget (it is now 3.2 percent) — and even this was an improvement over their earlier share of the pie. Training, tactical mobility, and optempo[18] suffered; and there was no significant modernization.
18
Operational tempo — A measure of the total demands placed on a military unit, typically the number of days per year the unit is deployed away from its home base or station.