Navy wants commando ‘mothership’ in Middle East

The United States amphibious assault ship USS Ponce sails through the Suez Canal in March 2011. If retrofited as “the mothership,” the vessel could accommodate smaller high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEALs

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Craig Whitlock

Jan 28 2012

The Pentagon is rushing to send a large floating base for commando teams to the Middle East as tensions rise with Iran, al-Qaeda in Yemen and Somali pirates, among other threats.

In response to requests from U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, the Navy is converting an aging warship it had planned to decommission into a makeshift staging base for the commandos. Unofficially dubbed a “mothership,” the floating base could accommodate smaller high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEALs, procurement documents show.

Special Operations forces are a key part of the Obama administration’s strategy to make the military leaner and more agile as the Pentagon confronts at least $487 billion in spending cuts over the next decade.

Lt. Cmdr. Mike Kafka, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command, declined to elaborate on the floating base’s purpose or to say where, exactly, it will be deployed in the Middle East. Other Navy officials acknowledged that they were moving with unusual haste to complete the conversion and send the mothership to the region by early summer.

Navy documents indicate that it could be headed to the Persian Gulf, where Iran has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for much of the world’s oil supply. A market survey proposalfrom the Military Sealift Command, dated Dec. 22 and posted online, states that the floating base needed to be delivered to the Persian Gulf.

Other contract documents do not specify a location but say the mothership would be used to “support mine countermeasure” missions. Defense officials have said that if Iran did attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, it would rely on mines to obstruct the waterway.

With a large naval base in Bahrain, and one or two aircraft carrier groups usually assigned to the region, the Navy has a substantial presence in the Persian Gulf and surrounding waters. Adding the mothership would do relatively little to bolster U.S. maritime power overall, but it could play an instrumental role in secretive commando missions offshore.

The deployment of the floating base could also mark a return to maritime missions for SEAL teams, which for the past decade have spent most of their time on land in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other details of the project became public Tuesday when the Military Sealift Commandposted a bid request to retrofit the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport docking ship, on a rush-order basis.

Until December, the Navy had planned to retire the Ponce and decommission it in March after 41 years of service. Among other missions, it was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea last year in support of NATO’s air war over Libya.

Instead, the ship will be modified into what the military terms an Afloat Forward Staging Base. Kafka said it would be used to support mine-clearance ships, smaller patrol ships and aircraft.

The documents posted by the Military Sealift Command in December, however, specify that the mothership will be rebuilt so that it can also serve as a docking station for several small high-speed boats and helicopters commonly used by Navy SEAL teams.

Among the vessels listed are Mark 5 Zodiacs, inflatable boats that can carry up to 15 passengers and can roll up into bags, and seven-meter-long Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats, which can carry an entire SEAL squad.

SEAL teams also deploy from regular warships, but most vessels in the Navy’s fleet must patrol or move around on a regular basis. A mothership can stay in one spot for weeks or months, effectively serving as a floating base for commandos as they monitor coastal areas or prepare for amphibious operations.

The U.S. Special Operations Command has sought a transportable floating base for several years, saying that a mothership would expand the range of commando squads operating from small speedboats, particularly in remote coastal areas.

Defense officials said the Ponce will serve as a stopgap measure until the Navy can build a new Afloat Forward Staging Base from scratch. In budget documents released Thursday, the Pentagon said it would fund that project starting next year.

The floating base also could be suited to the coast of Somalia, a failed state that is home to an al-Qaeda affiliate and gangs of pirates. A mothership there would give SEALs or other commandos more flexibility in missions such as Wednesday’s rescue of a pair of American and Danish hostages who had been held for months by Somali pirates.

The term “mothership” is also commonly used to describe a vessel used by Somali pirates. After hijacking a large container or cargo vessel, pirate crews often turn it into a floating base to extend the range of their skiffs or speedboats far into the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf.

U.S. military officials declined to say what prompted them to give the Ponce a sudden new lease on life. But contract and bidding documents underscore the urgency of the project.

One no-bid contract for engineering work states that the military was waiving normal procurement rules because any delay presented a “national security risk.” Other contract bids are due Feb. 3. The Navy wants the conversion work to begin 10 days later on the Ponce, which is docked in Virginia Beach.

The Pentagon’s Official Death Squad: The Dark Heart of the Regime

Πηγή: Republic Magazine
By William Grigg 

05 September 2011

“We’re the dark matter,” an unidentified Navy SEAL told Dana Priest and William Arkin of theWashington Post, referring to the

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). “We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.”

Historian Nick Turse, who has spent years investigating covert military operations, describes JSOC as “a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal `kill/capture’ campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA director David Petraeus, calls `an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine.’”

Since the 9-11 attacks ten years ago, JSOC’s ranks have grown from about 1,800 troops to roughly 25,000, according to Priest and Arkin. Although it grew out of Delta Force with the encouragement of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the force bears the unmistakable imprint of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who directed counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to “slip out of the grip” of the Washington bureaucracy – and, significantly, the leash of congressional oversight and accountability – McChrystal improvised a joint operations matrix that includes every acronym in the military and Homeland Security lexicon – CIA, NSA, FBI, and other three-letter agencies familiar only to the initiated.

Priest and Arkin write that McChrystal “also began salting every national security agency in Washington with his top commandos. In all, he deployed 75 officers to Washington agencies and 100 more around the world.” In addition, JSOC personnel have been assigned “a bigger role in nonmilitary assignments … including tracing the flow of money from international banks to finance terrorist networks….” They are also involved in “psychological operations” — that is, official propaganda campaigns that are also referred to as “military information operations.”

JSOC officers deployed to U.S. embassies overseas are concealed within civilian agencies. In combat they do not wear rank insignia or carry identification. Interestingly, personnel operating in this fashion meet the definition of “unlawful combatants” as expressed in Supreme Court rulings (such as the 1942 case Ex Parte Quirin, dealing with Nazi saboteurs captured in the United States) and executive branch policy decisions made during the Bush administration.

As investigative reporter John Grant pointed out in>CounterPunch, the purpose of discarding identifying documents and rank insignia is to “avoid accountability” — that is, for the military officials and policymakers whose orders they are implementing. Significantly, JSOC is organized in a cellular structure very similar to the one employed by terrorists and insurgents: By being compartmentalized in this way, those who are captured can only compromise one or two of their comrades, while protecting those in leadership echelons.

McChrystal, characterized by several analysts as displaying quasi-sociopathic traits, authorized JSOC cadres to conduct brutal interrogations that included practices that can only be described as torture. Among the facilities used by JSOC for that purpose is the notorious Camp NAMA (Nasty Ass Military Area) in Iraq, where torture was officially sanctioned and carefully concealed, according to a detailed investigative report by>Esquiremagazine. Military interrogators at Camp NAMA wore civilian clothes with no rank and used cover names. In addition, the task force itself would frequently change its official designation. Grant notes that “McChrystal bragged to his teams at Camp NAMA (Nasty Ass Military Area) that the Red Cross would never visit their compound, which it never did, despite a number of accusations of torture.”

Between 2004 and 2007, 64 soldiers attached to McChrystal’s JSOC command were disciplined for abuse of detainees. Captain Carolyn Wood, an operations officer with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, filed a sworn affidavit in 2004 testifying of the existence of a document called TF-121 IROE, which supposedly authorized JSOC’s Task Force 121 to employ abusive methods of interrogation. Despite demands by Congressional investigators and several activist groups, the Pentagon refused to release that document. This meant that JSOC’s compartmentalized scheme worked perfectly: A handful of underlings suffered trivial sanctions, and their superiors – all the way up to Gen. McChrystal and his patrons, Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney – were protected.

According to military affairs analyst James Petras, “McChrystal’s rise to leadership [was] marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions…. The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance.”

One example of JSOC’s handiwork was March 15 , 2006 slaughter of an Iraqi family in a village called Ishaqi.

A diplomatic cable unearthed by the WikiLeaks whistleblower group describes how a “Multinational Force” (MNF) unleashed a 25-minute fusillade of small arms fire that was followed by an air strike that demolished the house. Ten unarmed civilians – including five small children were massacred in the assault. An autopsy conducted days after the assault found that the victims – including a five-month-old infant – were shot in the head.

This is just a snapshot of the JSOC’s global killing apparatus at work, according to Nick Turse: “In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of

high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once `special’ for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.”

With America on what amounts to a permanent war footing, that “industrial-strength killing machine” is the refined essence of the government that presumes to rule us.