At Fort Bragg, LTC Marcus Steinmann (pseudonym) was working temporarily in the SWCS Battle Lab, waiting to begin his study at the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, in summer 2002. The former special warfare training battalion commander was Diemer’s pick to lead the Army Special Operations Task Force (ARSOTF) of JSOTF-North. Steinmann had impressed Diemer when he was the J3 operations officer for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF)-Bosnia, and Diemer knew he could readily command all of the Army special operations troops in Afghanistan as a part of the larger JTF. As it turned out, both 10th SFG officers served admirably on Mulholland’s JSOTF-North staff. Their experience in Bosnia proved most helpful in preparing for the land campaign in Afghanistan.
On the morning of 11 September 2001 Chief Warrant Officer (CWO) Vincent “Vince” Garvey (pseudonym) was receiving his parachute at Green Ramp, one of the runway accesses at Pope Air Force Base, directly adjacent to Fort Bragg. As a member of the 7th SFG that is focused on Latin America, his company was preparing to board an Air Force transport plane to make a training jump on Fort Bragg. One of the company’s master sergeants asked the jumpers if they had heard the news about New York City. Garvey ran to his parked pickup, pulled the truck alongside the parachute-laden soldiers, and turned up the volume on his radio. The Special Forces troopers listened in stunned silence to the news broadcasts. The jump was cancelled, and Garvey and the rest of the company went back to their barracks anticipating orders to fight somewhere in the world. Orders came soon but only for a few 7th SFG soldiers on 28 September. CWO Will Sherman (pseudonym), the operations officer for B Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th SFG, told Garvey that he had been handpicked—“by-name selected,” in the reverseorder jargon of the military—to join A Company, 1st Battalion, 5th SFG, that was scheduled to leave for CENTCOM’s theater of operations. Three other sergeants from 7th SFG accompanied Garvey but for other assignments. The desired qualifications set for those three sergeants were exceptional: school-trained Special Forces sniper or close-quarter battle specialists or former service in one of several select special operations units. Garvey was the only member from the 7th SFG augmentee group who met all of the prerequisites.
5th SFG = CJSOTF-North, Fort Campbell, Kentucky
As COL Mulholland watched the televised reports of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, he realized his 5th SFG “would be players” in whatever retaliatory action the United States undertook. Based at Fort Campbell, the 5th SFG was trained and equipped to fight in the deserts of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. They had done field exercises in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and around the Persian Gulf region. When Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization emerged as the 9/11 culprits and their connection to the Taliban government was established, Mulholland felt “it was apparent we’d be going into Afghanistan.” His immediate problem was what he considered an “information deficit.” Before 9/11, neither his unit nor SOCCENT in Tampa had any operational interest in Afghanistan. SOCCENT was responsible for planning and conducting all special operations in the CENTCOM theater of operations. Mulholland was certain that his boss, MG Lambert at USASFC, would soon place the 5th SFG at the disposal of RADM Bert Calland, the SOCCENT commander, as part of the “expedition to Afghanistan,” as it was initially called.
By 14 September 2001, the organization of the Afghanistan expedition SOF had not been established. Doctrinally, in wartime, SOCCENT was to turn its headquarters into a JSOTF headquarters to direct the attached SOF units from the Army, Navy, and Air Force in combat. The 5th SFG would become a subordinate component of the JSOTF, called the Army Special Operations Task Force (ARSOTF), managing the Army elements of the task force. “Initially, the JSOTF in the north (eventually Karshi Kanabad, or K2, in Uzbekistan) was to be sourced and structured for combat search and rescue (CSAR). Thus, an Air Force officer was to be in charge. However, since K2 was to be converted into a base that would also support UW operations, the differences in Army combat service support and structure or “size, weight, and cube” had to be factored, otherwise disruptions to the air movement schedules could have delayed combat operations for weeks or months. LTG Brown, the USASOC commander, agreed that K2 should be built not only for current CSAR operations but also to support a fluid transition to follow-on combat operations. Brown convinced the SOCCENT planners that Mulholland should be put in charge, said MG Lambert.
Despite COL Mulholland telling the SOCCENT staff that his unit lacked the staff and equipment to perform all of the doctrinal duties expected of a theater-level JSOTF, it became moot with LTG Brown’s recommendation. In Tampa, RADM Calland regarded his command responsibilities as “AOR-wide,” meaning SOCCENT had to oversee special operations not only in Afghanistan but also throughout the CENTCOM theater AOR that covered all the Middle East and Central and Southwest Asia. “What made sense,” Calland recalled, “was multiple JSOTFs.” He directed the creation of several subordinate task forces to prosecute the coming campaign. That afternoon, U.S. Navy Captain (Capt) Randy Goodman, SOCCENT’s J3 operations officer, responded to Mulholland’s query about the JSOTF by simply saying, “You’re it.” The 5th SFG headquarters had been “tagged” to command all SOF that would fight inside Afghanistan—at least for the time being.
For the help he now needed for his unique mission, Mulholland turned to COL Mike Findlay, Special Operations Command, U.S. Joint Forces Command (SOCJFCOM), Norfolk. Findlay immediately dispatched a joint training team to Fort Campbell to train the group staff on how to function as a JSOTF and provided computer hardware on loan to install a secure local area network (LAN). Having taken command only two months earlier and with no experience in setting up a JSOTF base, Mulholland welcomed the JFCOM help.
In the absence of planning guidance from SOCCENT, Mulholland put four A detachments (ODAs) into the 5th SFG’s isolation facility (ISOFAC). While the Special Forces A teams did not know what their missions might be, inside the closely guarded ISOFAC, they could openly study the available classified data to learn more about the geography, the population, the culture, their enemies, and their possible allies in Afghanistan—the Taliban resistance elements. The teams quickly discovered that there were no maps of Afghanistan available in normal U.S. Army stocks. Being resourceful, they called various defense organizations, including the Land Information Warfare Activity, from which they obtained old Soviet-era military maps they could use for tactical planning. After his Pentagon briefing, MG Lambert, the Army Special Forces commander, told LTC Carl Hooper (pseudonym) at the 5th SFG ISOFAC to “Climb on the tanks and trucks and hang on when the dam breaks and the Northern Alliance sweeps into Kabul.”
Figure 23. SOCCENT map dividing Afghanistan geographically.
To prepare for future operations, the 5th SFG staff analyzed the ethnic and geographic makeup of Afghanistan and divided the Texas-sized country into five major sectors. It later reduced this number to three and, finally, to two. The northern sector included the vast Hindu Kush mountain range, itself the size of Kentucky, and all lands to the north and northwest. The southern sector was the area south of the Kush, which also had formidable chains of mountains as well as arid high deserts. When Mulholland proposed this north-south division during a telephone call to the SOCCENT J3 (operations officer), Navy Capt Goodman told him that his command was now designated JSOTF-North. Mulholland was to focus solely on the northern half of Afghanistan, above the east-west highway between Herat and Kabul, which ran roughly along the 34th parallel. When Mulholland asked who was going to run special operations in the other half of the country, he was told that SOCCENT intended to form a second task force, JSOTF-South, from the headquarters of NSWG-1, San Diego, California.