Combat Swimmer (36 page)

During the Carter administration the military hit a low. The Navy leadership made a decision to fund new technology at the expense of the men and money needed to operate them; we called the result “hollow force.” SEAL procurement programs were minuscule compared to those in the rest of the Navy. Often we didn't put a big enough blip on the screen to get noticed. Sometimes, when funding for large programs was reduced, our technology disappeared completely, being absorbed into the overall program reduction.

When I took command of UDT-12 in 1979, I inherited a hollow command. Naval Special Warfare Group One had been forced to consolidate a number of functions under the group's staff that had historically, and correctly, been the responsibility of the UDT-SEAL commanding officers. By the time I took over UDT-12, the consolidation had cost the Teams their control of mission-essential equipment. The equipment was lost because of the philosophy that we needed only enough gear to support the three UDT-SEAL platoons deployed in the Pacific Theater, while the ones in Coronado, preparing to deploy, could share what was left. For example, UDT-12 had only ten of the needed hundred Emerson closed-circuit scuba and twenty parachutes of a similar required number. UDT-11 and SEAL Team One were in like positions because the equipment had been equally allocated by Naval Special Warfare Group One. In other words, we had about thirty of our primary scuba rigs available to support the training of three units, each with a minimum of sixty or seventy people in Coronado at any one time.

By 1980, all special operations forces had similar problems. It's not surprising Desert One was screwed up. There just wasn't much emphasis on special-operations-forces capability in the Department of Defense. In essence, SEALs worked at the lowest level. Their employment was left up to whatever local operational commander they were assigned to—just as in Vietnam.

Within the Navy programming system we were lumped by the surface-force commanders into a funding category with other nonship units such as the Seabees and assault craft units. The group commanders received part of a pie that surface-force commanders divvied up among all the oddball units. We were oddball units.

The point is, not all the money Congress thought it had appropriated for SEALs ever reached our coffers. Our procurement programs for boats and submersibles, though they cost what to us was big money, were peanuts compared to the cost of a ship or plane. I used to tell my bosses we could run our whole program for five years for the price of one F-14 fighter. We always had to take our “fair share” of the routine, across-the-board program cuts mandated by the Navy, but coughing up our “fair share” often meant we lost a whole program. Cutting $500,000 out of one of our programs would essentially kill it. The same amount of money could be absorbed easily in a major shipbuilding program by reducing something like staff administrative travel.

Finally, some admirals thought SEALs were not all that important to the Navy. We needed to be put back in our cages until the next war—but when would the next war occur? For special operations forces, war is sometimes small and fast.

O
ne day in January 1985, I heard from the general who had commanded the Joint Headquarters during Urgent Fury. Calling from his new command, he told me I had to appear with him before a Senate subcommittee reviewing the use of special operations forces in Urgent Fury.

When we testified, we said all the problems we'd encountered in Grenada had been fixed. That was true for the problems we could fix. But the fundamental issue of who would be in overall charge of special operations forces was beyond our “pay grades.” The senators thanked us for our time and told us we'd performed as well as could be expected in Grenada. Then they sent their staffers off to write the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. As the legislation was being drafted, Congress raised a few trial balloons for the Pentagon to shoot at. And the shooting was intense. The Department of Defense did not want Congress telling it how to command its forces.

The Goldwater-Nichols Act had the greatest impact on the military structure since the 1948 legislation that established the Department of Defense. Goldwater-Nichols made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a decision-maker rather than a consensus-taker. It also directed more power to the commanders in chief (CINCs) of the regional war-fighting commands, giving them peacetime control of the forces assigned to them. In essence it codified what we all had known for years—CINCs, not individual services, fight wars. The Navy was the most vocal in opposing the change, but each service chief knew he would lose a lot of clout in the budget process. And he would lose day-to-day decision making about the employment of his forces.

Special operations forces gained a new lease on life through the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, which directed the establishment of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), headed by a four-star officer and with the same stature as the regional commanders in chief. The new SOCOM would have its own money to train and prepare forces for employment by the regional CINCs, but most of all it required that all special operations forces not actually assigned to a regional CINC be assigned full-time to the new SOCOM.

 

In 1987-88, while I was in command of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, the Navy fought hard to keep from implementing the Nunn-Cohen Amendment. Navy staffers had managed to get the authors of the bill to write some ambiguous “sense of Congress” words into the legislation that gave DoD the option to assign SEALs to SOCOM or not.

Almost as soon as the new commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command took command in 1987, he started asking for “his” SEALs. The Secretary of the Navy told him to pound sand, because in the Navy's view SEALs should be exempted from SOCOM. SEALs, the Navy said, were being trained and prepared to support fleet operations, and the Navy didn't need the new special-operations-forces command to tell them how to do it.

The Navy was really afraid of “functional” CINCs generally; they didn't want the assignment of aircraft carriers to an Air Force “CINCAIR” to be the next item on the table. Wanting to squash the notion of functional CINCs, period, the Navy chose as its battleground the assignment of SEALs to SOCOM. But no one was seriously considering establishing a bunch of functional CINCs. The issue was special operations forces and only special operations forces. Congress wanted them to be supported better than the services had been supporting them.

I got caught right up in the fight. I strongly supported putting all SEALs under the new command, and I didn't hide my opinion—not a very popular position with some of my admirals. But I knew putting all special operations forces under one commander was the best thing to do: for the country, because it would provide cohesive organization to the forces and improve their operational readiness; for the military, because it would charge one commander with the responsibility for forces each of the military services found difficult to fit into their core missions; for SEALs, because they would have a commander who appreciated their special support requirements.

Finally, just before he resigned, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger ordered the Secretary of the Navy to put SEALs under the new command. The new joint structure was a done deal. Some of my fellow SEAL officers continued to question the principle of “jointness.” I knew joint warfare was viable and productive. In addition to my experiences at Six, I had a joint force in the Persian Gulf combating the Iranian threat to oil shipping.

 

 

 

The sixty-five-foot patrol boat pitched and rolled as we proceeded slowly just outside Iranian territorial waters. I was in command of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, and I was in the Persian Gulf to see how my troops were doing. In order to do that I went on a night patrol with them.

It was pitch black, as is often the case at sea when the moon isn't shining, and surprisingly cold. Our Furuno surface-search radar turned slowly over the pilothouse. We were looking for Iranian mine-laying ships, which were creating havoc with the oil-transportation traffic going in and out of Kuwait City, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. If there were any radar contacts within fifteen miles of us, the Furuno would pick them up and display a blip on the screen located just in front of the boat officer's position.

We'd seen nothing since we left our base, “Fort” Hercules, a barge anchored on the Saudi side of the Persian Gulf not far from Iranian waters. We'd operated off barges in Vietnam, and it worked well in the Persian Gulf. We had leased two mobile offshore drilling platforms from oil companies in the region and converted them to support our operations. The “Hercules,” the first one finished, supported Group Two forces. The other barge, farther south in the gulf, supported Group One forces.

By early October, Hercules, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Paul Evancoe, was on station, and patrol boats were searching day and night. Tall, well-built, with a dark mustache that gave him an imposing air, Paul had commanded one of our group's special boat units in Little Creek and had deployed with the force we sent in August. He was a well-respected, aggressive ex-enlisted officer with Vietnam experience. Commander Dick Flanagan, a superb SEAL officer who had a lot of combat experience and was in charge of all our forces in the Persian Gulf, gave Paul the necessary “top cover” to carry out innovative operations in the northern gulf.

Paul really had a joint force on board Hercules. For helo support he had a detachment of Army AH-6 helicopters, the same gunships I'd worked closely with when I commanded Six. He had a Marine Stinger detachment for air defense, and Air Force communicators to augment the mobile communications team from Group Two. And civilians from one of our fellow agencies were helping in intelligence support. It was a good setup, which epitomized synergism. Every unit on the barge contributed to the success of the mission.

There were two patrol boats (PBs) in our patrol this night, each supporting the other. The boats looked impressive, sixty-five-foot battleships, and it was no wonder the Iranians were afraid of them. They had a 40mm gun forward and 20mm guns aft, with .50-caliber and 7.62mm machine guns mounted on both sides and a 40mm automatic grenade launcher amidships. The PBs bristled with weapons. At general quarters, ten of the twelve men in the crew manned weapon stations, making the boat a fearsome sight.

In early August 1987, I had deployed this force of SEALs and boats to the Persian Gulf, where we were to assist other Navy forces involved in Earnest Will, the military operation to keep the oil-shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf free from Iranian interdiction. Our part of the mission was to protect the U.S. Navy mine sweepers as they kept the channel to Kuwait clear of mines, specifically in the area around Farsi Island in the northern gulf. We deployed our forces within four days after receiving orders—incredibly fast, given the relaxed alert status we in Little Creek were on at that time. But when I got the order, the men responded. They knew they were going to war.

I was confident in our firepower on this patrol. In addition to the two PBs, two “Killer Eggs”—Army AH-6 helicopter gunships, nicknamed for their egg-shaped fuselage—were on alert on the barge should we need them. I knew the crews—we'd worked together before. In a previous encounter with two Iranian Boghammer speedboats, the Iranians had learned the meaning of American might.

Soon after Hercules arrived in the northern Persian Gulf, Paul received information that the Iranians were going to lay mines in the shipping channel near Farsi Island. The area was a stronghold for the Iranians and supported nearby mine-laying operations. The PBs were conducting routine patrols in the area, supported by the AH-6 gunships. Paul and his intelligence people noted that whenever the Iranians had laid mines earlier, the mine layer had been protected by Boghammer speedboats. Purchased from Sweden, the Boghammers had machine guns and were fast enough to cause problems for our destroyers and cruisers escorting oil ships from the Straits of Hormuz to Kuwait City. The Iranians had proven to be good seamen. So when our guys noticed that the Boghammers routinely met at a sea buoy off Farsi Island, they decided to see if they could catch a mine layer in action.

Paul sent two patrol boats and the AH-6 helos to the general area of the buoy. They got lucky. The AH-6s spotted two Boghammers milling around the buoy, as if waiting for something. The Killer Eggs flew closer to observe. As they did, one of the Boghammers launched a U.S.manufactured Stinger—a shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile—at the helos. That was a bad move. The helos were too close for the Stinger to acquire them, so it zinged past harmlessly and the helos immediately opened fire, sinking one Boghammer and seriously damaging the other. The PBs arrived on the scene, captured some Iranians, and recovered the damaged Boghammer, towing it back to the Hercules for intelligence exploitation.

So far, on this patrol, we hadn't been as lucky as Paul's guys had been in October. We had seen nothing since we left the Hercules at 2100 on November 10. Our plan was to patrol south from the barge for about ten miles, then head east for about fifteen miles until we were just outside Iranian territorial waters, and finally go north about thirty miles to a point just off Farsi Island.

The Iranians' tactic was to launch the mines in the northern Persian Gulf and let them drift south with the prevailing currents. Floating mines had been found out in the Arabian Sea 200 miles to the south. Some hadn't gotten that far before they made contact with oilers or with ships from our own Navy. We weren't looking for mines tonight, though. Our boats didn't have mine-hunting gear. Finding the mine layers before they had a chance to do their thing was our mission.