Authors: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
In 2003 General Stanley McChrystal took command of JSOC and over five years oversaw its evolution into a speed-sensitive, data-driven, high-value targeting machine. Insurgents would be targeted, then targeted again, until they were captured. Each raid yielded new information that produced the next set of targets. The results were astounding. Raids on terrorist homes, weapons depots, and safe houses that had taken days to plan in 2003 required, by 2010, mere minutes. In August 2004, JSOC had overseen 18 night raids in Iraq over the course of a single month. By August 2006, it was 300.
McChrystal uses a civilian analogy to describe the JSOC evolution from specialized force into an organization directed and shaped by the power of its network: “We started the war as the greatest booksellers in the world and ended as Amazon.com.” America’s premier raid force had morphed into a ferociously organized, streamlined organization powered by data from across the United States government and had fought to become as adaptable as its formidable enemy, the al-Qaeda network.
Responsibility for the tactics and planning of missions moved downward to ground-level commanders as the pace of raids surged. No longer could Delta, Green Berets, and SEALs—the most “special” guys of special ops—handle all the workload. As McChrystal put it in 2014, “when we started going at a faster and faster pace, it just wasn’t sustainable to have some guys that weren’t hitting targets, so suddenly they said, ‘Rangers, you take this target, Army Special Forces, you take that target,’ which caused everybody to be hitting targets on their own.”
Rangers, who began the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as the “little brothers” of special ops—the typically younger guys who supported more seasoned, elite units on big operations—now became central to their success. The Rangers matured in their assignments; their competence, sophistication, and confidence grew in turn.
McRaven succeeded McChrystal at JSOC in June 2008, and he built on the ever-increasing agility and nonstop operational tempo his predecessor and mentor had instituted. But like Admiral Olson, Admiral McRaven, the author of
Spec Ops
, a book filled with case studies in special operations warfare, felt certain they weren’t getting the whole job done if half the population remained out of reach.
For his part McChrystal, now in charge of the whole American war effort in Afghanistan, still felt stung by a review years earlier of an operation that had cost hearts, minds, and allies. His men had raided a compound and followed what they thought were strict, careful, and culturally sensitive procedures: they hadn’t searched the women and instead had ushered them into a different part of the compound before moving through the house searching everything—including the women’s quarters. “We got the feedback later that said ‘you dishonored the women,’” McChrystal remembers. “How?” he and his men had asked. They had never even come close to them. The answer that came back stunned McChrystal: It doesn’t matter, he was told. You went through their things and you touched their clothing.
“That was the level of ignorance we still had. And this was pretty late in the war,” McChrystal observes today, noting that while U.S. forces increasingly understood the broad outlines of Afghan culture, the nuances often remained out of reach.
By 2010, the fight in Afghanistan was going badly enough that all anyone wanted was a solution that worked. For the past decade women had been serving in combat, McChrystal notes—regardless of official policy—as intel analysts, combat pilots, and in Delta Force. Women had won Purple Hearts and Bronze Star Medals for
Valor, and had been killed and grievously wounded alongside their male colleagues. McRaven was a practical problem-solver. What would have been unthinkable just five years earlier because of preconceptions about American servicewomen in combat as well as ignorance about the role of women in Afghan culture now became unavoidable. McRaven made a decision: female soldiers would now
officially
accompany the Rangers on target. Ideology be damned.
That it was the “knuckle-dragging” Rangers who first asked for the female “enablers” held irony for many. (McChrystal notes that the old joke was that the
n
in
Rangers
stood for “knowledge.”) These were not touchy-feely men; they were the “blunt instrument” of special operations, guys whose idea of fun was guzzling a Rip It energy drink, working out for two hours, and then getting into a gunfight against bad guys. Nor did they bother with building foreign forces or forging relationships with locals, which was the specialty of the storied Green Berets. The Rangers had a pure and easily quantifiable mandate: you either got the insurgent you wanted or you didn’t. And by now McRaven was ready to employ any smart strategy that would make his men and their mission more effective.
So when McRaven’s official Request for Forces landed on his desk, Olson viewed it as an immediate call to action. This was no longer about his ideas of the “yin and yang of warfare,” Olson told the men who worked for him: this was a hard requirement from a JSOC commander in the field. And everyone knew that what JSOC requested, JSOC received. Olson immediately began putting the wheels in motion, beginning with a request to the Army Special Operations Command to start training the new teams of female soldiers at its Fort Bragg headquarters. Olson divided the teams into two groups: the “direct action” side would go with counterterrorism-focused units, alongside the Rangers. The second group would accompany the more “indirect action” teams out in the hinterland where Green Berets forged relationships with local people and their leaders. These women would be part of VSOs, or Village Stability Operations.
In the meantime, Olson consulted his lawyers about the ban on women in ground combat and learned that as long as he “attached” rather than “assigned” women to these special operations units, he could put them almost anywhere. Including on missions with Rangers.
Finally there was the issue of the team’s name. Everyone agreed that the word
female
should be avoided, since that would make acceptance all the harder among the all-male units. Since the concept of teamwork was so fundamental to special operations and its distinctive sense of community, they all agreed that it should be a “team.” Another carefully selected word would help blunt the argument of those who thought the program was just a backdoor way for women to become frontline operators:
support
. Finally, they needed a term that would express the idea that these American female soldiers would make inroads into Afghanistan’s social fabric to reach places and people that men couldn’t:
cultural
.
The Cultural Support Teams were born.
And so it was that from Olson’s kernel of an idea about what female service members could do that men could not; from McChrystal’s desire to win and his experience on the ground; and from McRaven’s request for women to support his men, there grew a series of conversations that matured into plans that took unexpected twists and eventually produced a program that led Second Lieutenant Ashley White and her female comrades onto the battlefield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, late one night in August 2011.
* * *
L
ane Mason heard the ding of an incoming email and gazed down at her aging laptop. Tall, with ice-blue eyes, walnut brown hair, and tattooed arms, she looked like a Harley-Davidson model. A twenty-three-year-old Iraq War veteran from a small town in northeast Nevada, Lane worked for the local National Guard shepherding new recruits and transitioning them into the Guard.
Despite motherhood Lane’s body still possessed the taut strength of the track star she had been. In high school she had led her team to the state championships year after year, but didn’t realize until it was too late that she could have ridden her athletic talent all the way to a college scholarship. Instead she signed up for the National Guard because she knew her parents could never afford her tuition. The Guard would pay for college.
From childhood she had fended for herself. Her mother’s life collapsed after her dad walked out on them when Lane was fourteen. After that, track and field raised her and kept her out of trouble. Together she and her older brother ran the household, cared for the pigs and cows on their small farm, and pushed each other every night to at least try to finish some portion of their homework.
At the moment the email sounded she was thinking about her Guard unit, trying to figure out when it would deploy and how she would prepare her two-year-old daughter for her absence. Her unit had served in Iraq early in that war and she had led supply convoys
in the south through some seriously heavy fighting. She was prepared to deploy again; with two wars on, most every Guard member had to go to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once, often more. But she did not want to go to war again with her particular unit, which she felt was not well disciplined—or prepared to protect its members.
Now a friend from the Wisconsin National Guard was forwarding an email about a new job on something called a “Cultural Support Team.”
“Hey, Lane, this sounds just up your alley,” she wrote.
The subject line of the email read: “Female Volunteers for the US Army Special Operations Command Female Engagement Team Program.”
Females
in Special Ops? Lane was intrigued. Everyone knew that women couldn’t officially serve in any unit that engaged in direct ground combat, and Special Operations was among the most combat-focused parts of the American military machine. But the email made it clear the women would not be operators themselves: they would be
supporting
Army special ops. It went on:
Currently, the US Special Operations Community has very few trained soldiers which limits Army Special Operations Forces’ ability to connect and collaborate with this critical part of the Afghanistan society. As mitigation, US Army Special Operations Command has begun a Female Engagement Training program at Ft. Bragg, NC, to meet this critical mission requirement.
Lane’s heart beat faster as she continued reading. She saw another benefit: the deployment was already scheduled and would last only six to eight months instead of the usual year. She would finish training by July and be back home with her daughter well before summer vacation began. Plus, anything beat driving convoys and sitting in a truck for up to twelve hours while people shot at you.
Lane had mastered the art of peeing in a bottle, a skill that had yet to prove useful back at home. She was eager to do—and learn—something more.
But Lane had another, more urgent reason for wanting to leave her Guard unit and do the CST mission. Back in Iraq, a fellow soldier in another unit had raped her. Not knowing where to turn, she had said nothing to anyone. Her marriage was already on the rocks, and she worried this might tip the fragile balance. But the experience had haunted her, and changed her. After returning home to Nevada she enrolled in college, only to find she couldn’t focus on her studies and kept suffering flashbacks. A doctor at the local veterans’ hospital told her it couldn’t be post-traumatic stress: that could only come from combat injuries, not from trauma caused by rape.
A year after returning stateside Lane’s Guard unit played a video about rape in the military, in which experts counseled soldiers on how to spot the “predators” among them and introduced the concept of “acquaintance rape,” which put a name to Lane’s personal nightmare. Watching the video unleashed a tsunami of horrific memories Lane had been trying to suppress. She ran out of the room desperate for fresh air, eyes watering, leaving her fellow Guard members whispering to one another, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. When she returned, she sat down with her team and finally, for the first time, shared her story about Iraq. She assured them that what they were watching on that video was very real. They needed to watch out for their fellow soldiers—and not just on the battlefield.
Talking about what happened to her left Lane feeling suddenly lighter. Her fellow Guard members wrote letters to tell her how much her admission had meant to them and taught them. She vowed that from that moment on she would not let the rape define who she was or what kind of person—and soldier—she would be. When the email announcing the CST program arrived, Lane felt a door opening; she believed it would offer her a rare opportunity to
both serve alongside the Army’s finest fighting units and confront her demons in the open, on the battlefield. She would put herself in the most challenging combat situation possible with the most elite fighters possible, and prove to herself she was no victim. Lane knew she was tough enough.
“If I get to Bragg,” she vowed, “there is no way I am letting them turn me down.” She felt her old intensity return for the first time in years. “No one is keeping me out of this.”
T
wo thousand miles away, in Columbia, South Carolina, another soldier received an email from a fellow sister-in-arms. Amber Treadmont, a twenty-eight-year-old first lieutenant, had enlisted just as soon as she could, at the age of seventeen. Now a message arrived announcing that the Army was seeking exceptional females to support special operations. She read the cover note from her company commander:
If I weren’t about to become a major I would absolutely do this. You should go for it.
Amber had wanted to be in the Army for as long as she could remember. With blond hair and blue eyes, everyone thought she looked like Heidi in the popular children’s movie, a fact that made her passion to be out shooting guns all the more surprising to those who didn’t know her. In high school in rural Pennsylvania she spent hours every week shooting targets and dreaming of the day when she could aim her weapon at a real enemy, not a piece of paper or a Coke can. But Amber was a girl, and women could not serve in the infantry. So she joined the Army’s intelligence teams, training at Fort Huachuca, a dozen miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona. Her first deployment, at the age of nineteen, was to Bosnia, where she analyzed terror networks for a task force hunting war criminals and terrorists transiting through the region. Her skills as an analyst
became known, and the FBI brought her on for three years to help with counternarcotics operations in Pennsylvania. Her team’s efforts led to the indictment of thirteen members of the infamous Bloods gang.