Heroes are not supermen

William McRaven's excellent book Special Operations deserves a few more words of praise. McRaven, a Navy SEAL, develops a rigorous hypothesis about special operations:

• Special operations forces (SOFs) succeed when they achieve "relative superiority" quickly.
• As a corollary, the longer it takes to achieve relative superiority, the greater the risk of friction (in the Clausewitzian sense) gumming up the works.
• Achieving relative superiority depends on a combination of simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose. (I recommend reading the book for exact definitions of these terms, but you get the idea.)
• As another corollary, SOFs don't need to get 100% marks in every aspect to succeed. The combination needed to achieve relative superiority in a particular operation is what's important.
• Consequently, as elite as they may be, SOFs are best suited to particular missions that have a focused target and short duration.

That's the first chapter, in a nutshell. The rest of the book uses eight case studies to test the hypothesis. Some of the case studies, such as the raid on Saint-Nazaire and the hostage rescue at Entebbe, are well-known. Others, like the Italian frogmen who infiltrated Alexandria harbor to sink British warships, are far less famous. All should provide good tests of McRaven's hypothesis.

At the end of each case study, McRaven asks how well did the SOFs in question achieve relative superiority through the six factors (simplicity, etc.) he argues are the critical factors. McRaven is willing to admit when the theory might not fit the facts: for example, the Americans who rescued POWs in the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan did not have time to rehearse the operation, calling into question the "repetition" part of the theory. To his credit, McRaven doesn't try to gloss over where the theory may not work (though he does adjust it somewhat in the concluding section).

Someone involved in special operations for a living can use McRaven's ideas as a scorecard for any planned mission. How fast are we going to achieve relative superiority? How well does the operation rate on the measures of simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose? Are the mission objectives limited enough so that we can use these elements to our advantage, and then get the hell out of Dodge?

Citizens can use McRaven's book to better understand what the SOFs do well, and by extension, what they're not well suited to do. SOFs are trained and equipped, as elite forces, to excel at tasks like rescuing hostages, sabotaging warships, and gathering intelligence. They are not, despite their elite status, capable of taking and holding terrain in the fashion of their less elite but better-suited infantry counterparts.

For example, when even smaller armored vehicles appear on the battlefield, as they did in the St. Nazaire raid and the Grenada invasion, SOFs may lack the anti-tank firepower to deal with them. Since they're traveling with as little equipment as possible, to maximize their speed in reaching objectives, SOFs can't linger alone at the objective while enemy forces mass to counterattack. The only reason that the German glider troops that attacked the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael succeeded was that the rest of the Wehrmacht was hurrying to reinforce them.

We often hear the phrase "heroes" to describe American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. While we want to give credit to the bravery and ingenuity of soldiers, we don't want to expect too much of them, whether they are veteran elite forces or reservists just called up for duty. McRaven's book dispels much of the confusion generated by the mystique of special operations forces. We should treat the phrase "heroes" with the same skepticism, when it implies asking American soldiers to do too much for too long, in missions for which they were never suited in the first place.

Comments

[Dave]

McCraven only wrltes about a very narrow aspect of SOF i.e. Direct Actlon. Special Operations is so much broader when you consider the long duration and indirect operations of UW and FID conducted by SF and Civil Affairs and PSYOP forces. The citizen would do well to understand that Special Operations entails so much more than what McCraven writes

[Dave]

McCraven only wrltes about a very narrow aspect of SOF i.e. Direct Actlon. Special Operations is so much broader when you consider the long duration and indirect operations of UW and FID conducted by SF and Civil Affairs and PSYOP forces. The citizen would do well to understand that Special Operations entails so much more than what McCraven writes