12 January 2006

Fog

It might have come in on little cat's feet, I don't know. It was as quiet as a thief in the night, or an assassin. It must have come in the small hours and was answered by the long low-throated bleeting of the horns from the shipyards down toward 32 nd Street.

The sound woke me and I padded out onto the patio to watch the tendrils of gray wool brush the light poles. Then came the lower, more insistent tone of a merchant ship leaving port, just before what should have been first light.

The fog was thick in the pre-dawn, thick enough that I could not see the spans of the Coronado Bay Bridge, or even the glimmer of the navigation lights that shine to ward off the helicopters.

On the other side of the island is the headquarters of the Navy special operations command. It is an odd mixture of people on this lovely tropical strand. The stately Hotel del Coronado presides on the Pacific Ocean side, and almost in the shadow of the hotel the candidates for the Underwater Demolition School run on the sand, carrying the semi-rigid inflatable hulls of their boats, or telephone poles, eyes bugging out from the strain.

At the school, they say the only easy day is yesterday. There is a fierce attrition rate, or at least their was until the need for special warriors became so great.

There was a seminar about it at the conference, and the hall was jammed with industry people and the curious to hear what they had to say. The Marines have joined the rest of the services, and are setting up their own component organization for the big Special Operations Command at Tampa, Florida. Their Brigadier was there, looking tired.

The moderator said he had command at an Najaf, the Shia holy city. His Marines fought it out with the irregulars of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the cemetery next to the tomb of Ali. The General lost eight kids, and killed more than 1,000 of Sadr's militia.

Next to him was a Navy SEAL with a shaved scalp and large intense eyes. He could have been the advertising character Mr. Clean, if he had come from your worst nightmare, thick neck leading down to massive shoulders shrouded in his dress blue uniform. The Army Green Beret Colonel next to him looked positive wholesome in comparison, wearing a set of broken-in BDUs in the new camouflage pattern.

In the middle of the group sat a man in a business suit with a cowlick and a boyish look. He used to be a SEAL, but got out of the Navy and returned home to help the family business when his father got sick.

In the process, he started his own army, and is building his own air force to go along with it.

You have seen his guys on the television. He has a few thousand of them, now, and the times were right for his product, which is private military training and security services.

He has had some good press and some bad. He is an entrepreneur, after all, and things broke just right for him. Timing is everything.

After Vietnam was lost, times were hard for the Special Warriors. There did not seem to be an application for their unique skill sets, which included Direct Action of the most intimidating kind. Funding was lean for a decade or more, and the primary mission for the Green Berets and the SEALs was conducting mobile training for other nations which were engaged in counter-insurgent operations that the United States viewed with reluctant nostalgia.

The utility of special operations became apparent in the war in el Salvador, and in Columbia, and eventually the warriors won back a seat at the leadership table. The straight-leg Army had always viewed the Green Berets with distrust, thinking them the cowboy branch of the Green Machine. After the first Gulf War, it became clear that there would not again be a great battle of armor against armor, and increasingly the struggles in the world would be fought by small bands of resolute, hard-eyed men.

I met them up close in an operational mission that had nothing to do with me, two years before the first gulf War. The black helicopters swept through a place where I was working, arriving silent as the fog in the night, poised to snatch a tin-pot dictator. It didn't work out, not that time, but the capability was clearly a unique national asset.

Maybe the zenith of special operations came in the hills of Afghanistan. Two hundred special warriors, SEALs and Green Berets, were able to call in the combined might of the Air force and the navy jets, guiding precision munitions from horseback. Small in numbers, the Northern Alliance took them as partners against the Taliban and swept to victory in a month.

It was not like that in the next war. Victory came as quickly, but resistance to the occupation was unanticipated to the Conquerors. There were plenty of troops to wage a war, but far too few to enforce a peace. That is where the man in the business suit came in.

He had constructed a full-up special operations training facility on his family property. He conducted the same training he had been taught by the Navy at Coronado, on this same lovely island. He offered his services to the Government and to other Governments in this strange new world that lacked a single enemy, and had gained dozens. He began to build an air force to conduct parachute training, and did it on-time, which is something Air Force was never able to do with regularity, being a government organization.

His private army was professional in the extreme, lean in infrastructure, and recruited from the ranks of the relatively youthful retired special forces. Hard-bodied men in their late thirties, combat seasoned, and extremely well trained.

They are also paid extremely well, and lack only the authority of a nation state. That is a fact for which we should be thankful. The need for special security is compelling in a place like Iraq, and the man in the suit was there to provide it. Crisp, efficient, and on-time.

I have one of his catalogs. There is a whole line of military equipment, custom-made to exacting specifications. You can get anything you want, and just about any service. The man in the suit even deployed nearly two hundred troops to New Orleans, when the devastation and confusion was at its height.

He never expected to operate in America, he said. It was one of those things where there seemed to be a need at the time, something to bring order out of the fog of confusion. Protect property.

He is far more efficient than the Government, and at least as professional. He says he is scrupulous in his attention to authority, and is under full oversight of the State Department, and fully licensed for the activity he conducts.

I talked to him after the session to see if there was some technology I could provide to help him in his mission. He told me he screens his employees carefully, to avoid deploying unsuitable special warriors under the corporate flag.

They can come and go like the fog. Small footprint. Large impact.

That is a good thing. He says his people are patriotic, and view their service as a continuation of what they had done for the government, only better compensated.

It is an interesting line of work, the private army business. It is unfortunate that there is a need for it. Times being what they are, though, I think the man in the suit is going to do very well indeed.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra