Far more important: He was certain the Army was losing something essential when it did not pick up the capabilities abandoned with the dissolution of the OSS Jedburgh teams and operational groups (the latter were teams of thirty men that could be split into two teams of fifteen — precursors of the twelve-man Special Forces A-Detachments). During World War II, operational groups were inserted behind the lines in Europe and Asia (primarily Burma), where they performed direct-action combat roles, such as sabotage, or linked up with guerrillas and partisans, as the Jcdburghs did.
Bank believed that the postwar Army required similar units, but ones that were even better trained, equipped, prepared, and staffed. In his view, special operations forces designed to organize, guide, and equip indigenous resistance or guerrilla movements could turn out to be as essential as any of the conventional combat arms in the U.S. arsenal.
In 1947, the CIA was formed, with a mission to re-create the intelligence operations of the OSS. It was also given a covert, special operations role, to deal with resistance movements and guerrilla organizations, but it was never comfortable with it. Even after the creation of the CIA, Bank continued to feel a strong need for the Army to take on the entire task once performed by the Special Operations branch of the OSS.
This conviction was not shared by the majority of the Army. Conventional soldiers tend to see unconventional warfare primarily as a sideshow, peripheral to the real action — that is, regular infantry, airborne, tanks, artillery — and more than a little outrageous. "To the orthodox, traditional soldier," Bank writes in his memoir, From the OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces, "it was something slimy, underhanded, illegal, and ungentlemanly. It did not fit in the honor code of their profession of arms."
Over the years, U.S. soldiers have been especially vulnerable to this attitude. As noted before, our army is traditionally nervous about elites. It's a citizens' army — ordinary folks. Superior soldiers and superior units are welcome, but they aren't expected to call much attention to themselves. Special forces, by their nature, call attention to themselves. A few years later, after the formation of U.S. Special Forces, assignment there was not thought to be a lucky career move.
The U.S. Army is no more friendly to oddballs and reformers than it is to elites. It is bound by rules, nervous about innovation, slow to change. Revolutionaries need not apply. Yet, as Aaron Bank knew, the Army is not a monolith. It's a very large house with hundreds of rooms. Reformers aren't exactly encouraged, but smart, politically savvy, courageous men who are patient, do their homework, and are willing to risk their careers have a shot at making their changes stick — especially if an inspired few others share the dream.
Meanwhile, during the years between the dissolution of the OSS and the outbreak of the war in Korea, Bank did his homework. Specifically, he read all he could find about unconventional warfare. What is it? How does it differ from "conventional" war? What does history say about it? Why do we have operations called "special"?
UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE
Unconventional warfare is hard to pin down, but over the years, a working understanding has developed. It is far from complete, and is blind to many nuances, but it's not a bad place to start:
Unconventional warfare primarily involves operations different from the conventional fires and movement of massed troops, armor, artillery, and airpower. Normally, unconventional warfare is performed by small, highly trained units, takes place behind regular lines of battle, and involves such activities as reconnaissance, sabotage, raids, raids in force, assassination, and, above all, the training and support of friendly guerrilla forces. This comes under the overall title of direct action.
One prime example of direct action was a blowtoreh-violent joint U.S./Canadian ranger unit, called the First Special Service Force (FSSF), that so distinguished itself in World War II that it has been designated an official ancestor of today's Special Forces. The FSSF was formed to make lightning raids on targets such as the Germans' heavy-water production facilities in Norway and the Romanian oil fields, but was used primarily to crack through mountain fortifications in Italy (where it took heavy losses).
But unconventional—"special" — warfare also has other facets, as every Jedburgh knew: Screwing with your enem's head is one. Helping people in trouble — with medical aid, organizational advice and counsel, assistance in building bridges and roads, and getting clean water — is another. "Screwing with your enemy's head" is called psychological operations, or PSYOPs (in Aaron Bank's day: psychological warfare).
"Helping people" usually comes under the rubric of civil affairs (CA), a tool that's been in the special operations kit nearly as long as PSYOPs. There are many justifications for CA, including simple goodness, but its main military one is this: A population that is friendly to you and has experienced your kindness is not likely to feel kindly to — or give help and support to — your enemy.
The debate has raged over which is the purest model for "special" units — larger units such as Rangers and commandoes, which tend more to direct action or smaller teams such as Jedburghs and A-Detachments, which specialize more in teaching and training indigenous forces.
Here, as it turns out, "purest" is a blind alley, and the best answer is "all of the above."
Historically, there is no clean division between conventional and unconventional wars. The historical roots of both go back equally far. At the time of Jesus, freedom fighters fought a long, drawn-out guerrilla war with the occupying Romans. A thousand years later, Vikings launched commando-type raids from seas and rivers. During Napoleon's occupation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, Spanish guerrillas forced the French army to regret their conquest (and Spaniards gave this form of warfare its name: guerrilla in Spanish means "little war"). Robin Hood and his men were guerrillas. T.E. Lawrence was a kind of semi-freelance special operations officer guiding indigenous Arabs in their struggle to break free of an oppressive occupying power.
Traditionally, resistance, insurgent, or guerrilla movements spring up from people who are otherwise powerless to gain liberation from foreign occupation or to gain freedom from their own oppressive or tyrannical government — a prime instance of Carl von Clausewitz's most famous insight, in On War, published in 1832, that war is simply another form of politics.
Though von Clausewitz's insight has never been lost on the more thoughtful of military men, military planners don't normally give the political aspects of a problem serious consideration when they develop their strategy and tactics. They mostly see civilians as either encumbrances, props, or potential threats ("Get the damned civilians out of my way!").
Recent times have seen a change in these attitudes, a change that is reflected in the currently fashionable expression, "end state" — as in, "What end state do we want and how can we achieve it?" "End state" reflects both the military and political situation hoped for at the end of a conflict. Yet it still remains true that most military leaders do not normally consider how those under their command can affect a political situation that can in turn have a bearing on the outcome of a war.
Such is not the case with practitioners of unconventional war. Special soldiers have to be conscious of both the political implications of their military actions and the military implications of political actions — in fact, they have to be conscious of anything they do or say that could have an impact on the people they have been assigned to help and guide. Success lies far beyond the obtaining of military objectives.