A Warrior Elite For the Dirty Jobs

Other Special Forces, like the Army's Rangers, are lightly equipped shock troops parachuted in to seize air bases and key installations before the heavily armored main force arrives. The Navy's SEALs (Sea, Air, Land forces) would be stealthily deployed to blow up bridges and ships. The Air Force's First Special Operations Wing (1st SOW) is set up to ferry combat troops in high-tech flying machines that can race undetected in the dead of night. But the most highly visible, politically popular mission of the Special Forces is counterterrorism. The Delta Force is trained to rescue hostages by land, the SEALs by sea.

One major problem is that instead of fusing into a cohesive elite force, this hodgepodge of different units has increased interservice rivalries, in part because of such rapid growth in recent years. The Air Force's 1st SOW is equipped to transport Special Forces; so is the Army's Task Force 160 of the 101st Air Assault Division. The Rangers, 1,800 strong, see themselves as the elite light-infantry unit; so does the entire 198,000-member Marine Corps. The Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Agency, established in 1984 to advise on policy, is run by Marine Major General Wesley Rice. Yet until 1985, the Leathernecks had no Special Forces and historically eschewed their importance. Not surprisingly, the Marines' new experimental unit is studying hostage rescue, something both the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEAL Team Six have been working on for years.

Impatient with the organizational snarl, some Congressmen want to establish the Special Forces as an entirely separate service. Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine is pushing a plan that would carve out all of the Special Forces missions performed by the military and put them under a new civilian-run agency, reporting to the Secretary of Defense, that would control and deploy the units.

The bureaucratic tangle that engulfs the Special Forces is at least partly a result of their rocky evolution. They come from a proud and fiercely independent heritage. The Army's Rangers take their name from Rogers' Rangers, the New Hampshire militiamen under Major Robert Rogers, who skillfully used the Indians' tactics of stealth and surprise against them during the French and Indian War of the 1750s and '60s. From the irregulars under Francis Marion (the "Swamp Fox"), who harassed the British in the Revolutionary War, to Brigadier General Frank Merrill's Marauders, who bedeviled the Japanese in Burma during World War II, old-time American fighting men often proved adept at unconventional warfare.

It was Kennedy who elevated elite units to matinee-idol status. He built up the U.S. Special Forces, first organized in 1952 during the Korean War, and popularized the green beret many commandos had already informally adopted as their symbol. The Green Berets' role was counterinsurgency: to defend freedom by helping developing (and pro-Western) nations ward off Communist-backed guerrilla movements. The great test was to be Viet Nam. But as the war escalated, counterinsurgency was shoved aside as the U.S. resorted more and more to conventional tactics of massed firepower. Special Forces were increasingly miscast, used as garrison troops defending lonely outposts in the jungle.