“Fighting soldiers from the sky, Fearless men who jump and die…” These are the words of the “Ballad of the Green Beret,” written and originally performed by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler, and they capture the essence of what being a Special Forces soldier is all about. Their official motto, “De Oppresso Liber,” Latin for “to liberate the oppressed,” is their primary goal in all things they do. Although the term “Green Beret” is what the public may know them as, they prefer the term “Special Forces,” and refer to themselves as such.
Origins of the U.S. Army Special Forces
It all began in 1947, when President Truman signed the National Security Act into law, which authorized the creation of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The latter had a mandate to collect and analyze foreign intelligence, and provide briefings for the president and his advisors.
Over time, as the CIA started to get involved in military operations abroad, it became necessary to have a military unit dedicated to carrying out these operations, which culminated in the creation of the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group in 1952. Prior to this, the United States and Great Britain used Special Forces troops quite frequently in WWII – the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the British Special Air Service (SAS) were responsible for numerous covert military actions in the course of the war, but 1952 would be the first official Special Forces unit attached to the military, not a particular intelligence agency.
President Kennedy and the Expansion of the Special Forces
The 1950s saw the creation of other Special Forces units like the Navy’s Sea-Air-Land (SEAL) teams and Air Force commando units, but like the Army’s Special Forces, they were small in scale with a budget to match. The period of the late 1950s and the 1960s saw turmoil in many places of the Third World as China and the Soviet Union sponsored communist insurgencies against local and Western colonial governments across East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Numerous failures by the CIA to act as counters to these insurgencies made Kennedy turn elsewhere for the solution.
Funding was expanded for all Special Forces across all of the military’s branches. Chaos was brewing in Southeast Asia around this time, and Kennedy did not hesitate to begin deployment of these men in the hopes of fighting the Communist threat. The added funding and need for more Special Forces resulted in many unqualified men becoming Green Berets and SEALs, something that took away from the “special” aspect of the Special Forces – many years later, General Schwarzkopf, who had bad experiences with Special Forces soldiers in Vietnam, would go out of his way to keep them away from Desert Storm and Desert Shield.
In the years after Vietnam, military budgets were cut and Special Forces found themselves fighting with the numerous other branches of the military for funding, which resulted in rivalries across the various branches, and threatened to go against the unified nature of all the armed services.
Special Forces and the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986
This Act of Congress, sponsored by Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative Bill Nichols, addressed the problem of a lack of joint unity in the U.S. Armed Forces by creating a unified set of commanders-in-chief along with a chairman, who was the principal military advisor to the president and his national security staff. However, this Act did not address the status of the Special Forces units, who were merely under the shadow of the Department of Defense. None of the major branches wanted to take ownership.
This was rectified later with the Nunn-Cohen amendment in 1987, which created the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or just SOCOM). SOCOM would have command over all of the Special Forces units belonging to the Army, Navy, and the Air Force. The Marines were the exception to the amendment since they had already invested heavily in their own Special Forces units.
Organization and Structure of SOCOM
SOCOM headquarters is located near Tampa, Florida at MacDill Air Force Base. It is unique in that it is funded separately from the other branches; it owns, equips, trains, and deploys its own troops; its area of operations is the entire world, and not just certain regions; and finally, it is the smallest command in the military.
The four parts of SOCOM include: USASOC, NACSPEC-WARCOM, AFSOC, and JSOC. A discussion of these is outside the scope of this article, but the USASOC, or the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, includes the U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets), as well as a host of other elite army units.
The next article will include an overview of the training regimen the men of the U.S. Army Special Forces undergo in order to become a Special Forces soldier.
Sources:
Clancy, Tom and Gresham, John. Special Forces. NY: Berkley Books, 2001.
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