During a presentation to the Conference of Defence Associations in February, Admiral William McRaven, Commander of the United States Special Operations Command, described the strategic effect that can be gained by the tactical deployment of Special Operations Forces (SOF). With some 66,000 personnel, USSOCOM is clearly a leader, but it cannot operate alone. Increasingly, it is turning to an emerging global SOF network, brought together in part by operations in Afghanistan, to share expertise, best practices and intelligence.
Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, Commander of Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, is developing a future looking document, “CANSOF 2025,” that while preserving his no-fail crisis response capability, shifts the emphasis of Canadian SOF to strategic engagement. He spoke with editor Chris Thatcher about the global SOF network and Canada’s growing role.
With such different national levels of capacity and experience, how do you make this global network work?
Everyone recognizes that no one nation can address all the threats that are out there. So you have to build a network on the blue side. I talk about three things: there has to be a network of the commanders, a communications network to tie them together, and there has to be some common education or school, training norms if you will. I suppose there is a fourth with respect to equipment.
The commanders’ bit is self-evident. If there is a crisis in country X and I don’t know who my counterpart is, it’s hard to cold-call him and get something done. You have to create those relationships with your counterparts around the world. Each of the U.S. geographic combatant commands such as Southern Command, Central Command, Northern Command, etc, has a theatre special operations command, or TSOC, who, like me, tends to be a one or two star general. I connect with the TSOC commanders so that if I am conducting an event in a certain area, there is a guy I can call, our staffs are connected and things move.
Then you need a mechanism to talk. Inside NATO there is a secret network called BICES (Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems) that has a tiny VTC terminal – it’s secure Skype – and I can “skype” with any of my counterparts who are part of that network; that includes 26 countries, not just NATO. We can pass files at the secret level back and forth.
Finally, we need to make sure we are speaking from the same doctrinal text, that we have the same terminology. So within the SOF community we try to ensure we all understand each other’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). And that’s done through the NATO Special Operations Headquarters in Mons; they have a schoolhouse, the NATO Special Operations School, in which I have three members, sometimes teaching, sometimes doing straight headquarters work. That concept has resonated very well with Admiral McRaven, and now the U.S. is starting to export it to other regions around the world. There will be a school eventually stood up in Colombia. Those sorts of schoolhouses help build the networks for all levels, not just the highest.
Since the training and the systems are relatively new, this is very much about personal relationships.
SOF is about people, not hardware. It very much is a people business. Admiral McRaven likes to say, you can’t surge trust. I prefer to say, you’ve got to be present if you are going to build trust in order to gain access. To me it is an equation. So, to build up our own personal network, in the coming year we will gain six more positions outside of Canada: one in Paris because the French are very active in the SOF world – if you need an expert on the Sahel, go talk to the French; one related to Africa Command in Stuttgart; two more to the U.S. to strengthen our relationship; and two to Australia, an operator into 2 Commando, their CSOR (Canadian Special Operations Regiment) equivalent, one into the Australian Special Ops Engineer regiment, the partner unit of the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit. To me, it’s important we expand our networks, because they becomes a combat multiplier.
Relate this to the expansion of Canada Command’s area of responsibility to the entire Western Hemisphere and the Expeditionary Force Command effort to enhance “preparedness” through better use of military attachés and liaison officers?
It matches it exactly. It happens on three levels: liaison officers, exchange of operators and small unit exchanges. If I send an officer to Paris, he goes as my liaison officer. Sharing of intelligence has always been a difficulty but it is much less of a challenge in the SOF world, and I credit Admiral McRaven because he has done a lot to break down those barriers, especially outside of the Five Eyes community.
On joint training, we now do that with a lot of different nations. A great example is the Dutch. Based on a personal relationship with my counterpart, we’ve looked at each other’s capabilities: they are very interested in our unified command headquarters setup because they still have a navy element and an army element and there is a bit of tribalism. At the same time, the Dutch are very skilled in maritime counter-terrorism and there are a number of things that they do that are of interest to us.
Do you have criteria for how you select those you train?
In a lot of ways, they are selected for me by the department through the Global Engagement Strategy. If I’m told these are countries where we want you to engage, we’ll conduct a needs assessment. But the criteria for selecting a country are: the relationship has to be modest, it has to be enduring, and it has to be reciprocal. Even if we build capacity in a country like Niger, we get a lot out of it because we are operating in an environment that is alien to most Canadians, and we learn a lot on the cultural front.
Are there trust issues, though, especially with non-western partners?
You do have to get over cultural impediments, but I credit our CANSOF professional development centre. One of the things they are charged with is cultural awareness training to make sure people do not go in blind, and we do our best to make sure operators are educated before they get on the ground. And with longer running programs like in Jamaica, for example, it’s often a small team with a commander and a second-in-command. Well, the next time we go, that second-in-command is now the commander, so there is always rolling continuity. And you are building up cultural awareness inside the unit.
When I see the training that has been delivered, like we recently provided for Flintlock 13 in Mauritania, I don’t know if it is in our blood but Canadians just seem to get it. We are naturally good trainers. We don’t carry any colonial baggage, we’re not a hegemon or superpower, so nobody feels threatened by us. And the techniques we use courtesy of our training stand us in good stead.
There haven’t been any green on blue incidents in Afghanistan involving Canadians …
Not just Special Forces. At Kabul Manoeuvre Training Centre where they train the rawest of the recruits, that is where the risk would be the highest and we have not had a single incident. I’m not pointing the finger at other countries, I just know our guys are certainly confident and they deliver in a professional manner but they don’t exude any arrogance and there is a bit of humility that is appreciated. You only have to learn a dozen words in somebody else’s language to give them the impression you are there to help.
Is language training increasingly key to this aspect of the global network?
We’ve clearly got interests in this hemisphere and while I can pump out guys who speak French or English to almost any part of the globe, I’m a little weak in the Spanish department. That is why when I sit down with my counterpart from Southern Command, we agree to focus on places like Jamaica and are starting to lean towards other partners in the Caribbean. But we’ve got to build that, so I put a couple of operators on Spanish training this summer. We won’t have a program like the U.S., so we have to target the right NCOs who need language skills to teach weapons classes and so forth in places like the school in Colombia. The flip side of that is recruiting people for their language skills, but that isn’t something I can talk about publicly.
Is there a good example of investment in a partnership that is now paying dividends?
The best example is the CanJet hijacking that occurred in Jamaica in 2009. That was early in our engagement, but the fact that they resolved it themselves and in a manner that did not cause any casualties was a direct measure of success. Subsequently, that Jamaican unit was involved in backing up the local constabulary in the Dudus Coke extradition – a clear measure of effectiveness. We were intimately involved in the development of their basic operator course, which they run now entirely.
We were making headway in Mali training the 33rd parachute regiment. They were the ones sent north to deal with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as they spilled out of Libya, but you might argue that regiment was supposed to be protecting the president, so maybe we were too successful. With larger exercises like Flintlock, you see the progress from exercise to exercise. Certainly, what the U.S. and Colombia accomplished is a great example. Colombia’s army, police and other agencies were working in stovepipes and realized they needed interagency teams at the local level. That model has been relatively successful and could be exported across the Americas.
As you build this global network, are there interoperability issues beyond communications systems that persist in the SOF community?
When we were doing combat operations in Afghanistan there were many occasions where we were completely integrated, and that’s because of similar TTPs, the same tactical level communications equipment, and a shared understanding of how we were going to operate. But that is definitely a Five Eyes thing, though I’d say we are there in thinking with the French.
In Afghanistan there are NATO special operations task groups operating at the tactical level, often a mix of western and Afghan soldiers, and at the International Security Assistance Force level there is the multinational ISAF SOF headquarters to which all of those NATO special operations task groups report. Anything to do with the targeting paradigm of SOF – find, fix, finish, exploit and analyze – is part of that. That model is functioning well, so there is a deliberate effort by NATO SOF HQ in Mons to capture the lessons so it can be deployed in the future.
I mentioned the American TSOCs. Well, NATO recognizes it needs the ability to generate multinational special operations component commands (SOCC) for future NATO missions, and we are part of that discussion. Just as Canada would earmark a battle group, we earmark elements of CANSOF to be part of future SOCCs because that is how we will operate. Admiral McRaven understands that intelligence in a SOF realm comes from all sorts of sources, so you need to have a multilateral, multinational approach if you are going to garner the biggest benefits from it.
As NATO creates this capacity, is there any discussion of the Smart Defence approach for SOF?
Most forces have to deliver everything because it is often about sovereignty. For example, one of the toughest domestic nuts to crack is a ship at sea or an airplane with a hostage situation onboard – that is tremendously complex – and everybody in the community needs that capability. What I find interesting is the willingness to share. The Dutch are very good at maritime counterterrorism and are willing to share; the Norwegians are amazing in the winter warfare environment and we’re happy to learn from them; the U.S. brings the big enablers, the ability to crunch big numbers, and they are masters at this targeting cycle. The U.K. are absolute masters in physical surveillance and close target reconnaissance from their experience in Northern Ireland. And we bring to the table our sniper ability, a skill set that is world renowned. Sharing allows us all to grow and ensure we have those critical capabilities if we are called out for a mission of national importance.
Admiral McRaven has spoken of SOF-developed technology to combat asymmetrical threats. Are there any Canadian examples?
I like to say we are a 70 percent bottom-up driven organization – 70 percent of the really good ideas come from the shop floor. Every unit has its own force development cell, sometimes just one guy, that develops solutions to various problems. My favourite example was the Special Operations RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat). The navy has a RHIB for boarding parties that does 15 knots. But as missions are getting more complex, like the one off Libya or in the Arabian Sea, more is being asked of boarding parties and we recognized there was a requirement for something that performed better. However, it had to be the same size and weight as the current RHIB to fit a ship’s crane. So our guys, working with Kanter Marine of southern Ontario, delivered 8-10 diesel powered boats; should we get a mission that requires SOF operators to project from a Canadian ship, we now have a boat that is capable of making that happen. We have had similar input with the helicopter fleet and the Block 3 CP-140 Auroras. We have a seat at those tables. Sometimes it is just to ensure an aircraft is fitted for, but not with, widget X, so that if we need that piece of equipment we can plug it in. We have a requirement for an armoured vehicle to move our folks around, not necessarily onto an objective but inside a theatre, so there are a number of applications for the TAPV (Tactical Armored Patrol Vehicle) in a SOF environment.
Do you have a new specific vehicle requirement at the moment?
We’re at the very early options analysis stage for the next SOF vehicle. When we came out of Afghanistan, we had an evaluation but we really didn’t find one that was a generational leap ahead of our Humvee – frankly, we like the vehicle; it’s robust and performs well – so we ran it through a repair and overhaul line and I don’t see us seriously engaging industry until about 2015.
Given both the sophisticated and primitive ways in which adversaries use technology, do you approach it differently than other services?
I don’t think it is the technology so much as making sure everybody has the right mindset about technology. We were on an exercise with a rapid set up, and we were getting a download on a screen and were trying to figure out how to get that image back to Ottawa. Folks were saying it could not be done and then one bright guy set up a camera in front of the screen, captured the video on video and beamed it back to Ottawa. Problem solved for that circumstance. So for me, the answer to the range of technologies is making sure we have people who can innovate. We select them to be outside-the-box thinkers.
Extremist organizations have their share of innovators, too, and they know their vulnerabilities. And they have learned an awful lot from us as a result of operations in Afghanistan. We talk about operational security; these guys live and breathe operational security, and they don’t let their guard down because the results can be catastrophic.
The army in particular has been fighting to preserve the enablers it gained in Afghanistan, especially intelligence: how much of that capability do you own and how much do you rely on others? And is there a danger of losing some of your capability as their budgets decrease?
We own everything we need but we don’t own a lot of it. It becomes a sustainment issue after a while. Even when we were in the thick of the fight in Afghanistan, we were going out to the general intelligence community to draw some capacity. Our credibility is our most important asset and key to that is the proper early warning, which speaks to those networks and to the intelligence piece. So I have healthy exchanges with other intelligence agencies in town.
I agree with General Devlin’s concern about losing enablers, and we have been fastidious about making sure that is not the case. We get brilliant support from the defence and intelligence community inside and outside the department. Everything, not just SOF operations, is going to be INT-inspired. So you have to have the capacity. We have all the widgets and people we need, but if we were in a protracted engagement as we were in Afghanistan, then we would have to go back out to wider community to help populate what we call a Special Operations Intelligence Centre.