Secret Armies Of The Night

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The increasing faith in special-operations forces (SOF) can be traced to one man: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Since taking over as Pentagon chief, Rumsfeld has repeatedly handed the commandos starring roles in the war on terrorism and pressed his Vietnam-era generals and admirals to abandon old ways of fighting for new approaches that emphasize speed and stealth. That push is only a piece of the larger war he has been waging on old-fashioned military thinking. But the "SOF guys," as they are called around the Pentagon, have emerged as the biggest winners in the Rumsfeld era. The defense chief has set in motion a host of changes that will boost their budgets and swell their ranks in the next five years. And last week Rumsfeld took the extraordinary step of recommending a retired four-star general, Peter Schoomaker, an original member of Delta Force, to be the next Army Chief of Staff. This is the first time in U.S. history that a top commando has been tapped to lead the entire Army and is yet another indication of the Administration's growing reliance on America's secret soldiers. "God love him," said Air Force Colonel Randy O'Boyle, who directed part of the Faw operation. "[Rumsfeld] had the confidence to unleash us on the target."

Some 10,000 special-forces troops saw action in Iraq, the largest such deployment since World War II and three times the number who participated in Gulf War I. From a secret base in western Saudi Arabia, they seized a pair of airfields and scoured the Iraqi desert for Scuds every night for nearly a month. In the east, they secured a port for the delivery of humanitarian goods. And in the south, they fought to keep Saddam from destroying the 1,000 oil wells that are the country's financial future. Teams in humvees and low-flying helicopters rolled into dozens of towns in search of arms caches; riverine squads on inflatable boats cleared mines and other vessels from Umm Qasr harbor; and with help from the Marines, Army Rangers and some locals, a SEAL team freed Private Jessica Lynch from a Nasiriyah hospital.

Special forces were usually ahead of the tip of the spear: as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, secret combat teams zipped into Iraq aboard specially outfitted MC-130 Combat Talon planes that used highways as landing strips, surprising the enemy at its rear. On the road to Tikrit, they fingered Iraqi vehicles fleeing the capital for destruction by M1 tanks. And inside the capital, the elite Delta Force slipped into Baghdad's back alleys and into its sewers to eavesdrop on communications, cut fiber-optic cables, target regime leaders and build networks of informants.