Cat Fight at the Puzzle Palace

OK, that's oversimplifying it a bit, but -- dayum.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ plan to deploy three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over a proposed near-term “surge” of spec ops forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.

The National Security Council’s surge proposal, which grew out of its Afghan strategy review, recommended an increase of “about another battalion’s worth” of troops to the Combined and Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, or CJSOTF-A, said a field-grade Special Forces officer, who added that this would enlarge the task force by about a third.

Several sources said that the “SOF surge” proposal originated with Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the so-called “war czar”...

...the proposal sparked a fierce high-level debate, with special operations officers charging that Lute and his colleagues were trying to micromanage the movement of individual Special Forces A-teams from inside the Beltway, and countercharges that Special Forces has strayed from its traditional mission of raising and training indigenous forces and become too focused on direct-action missions to kill or capture enemies. (Emphasis mine)

My buddy COB6 will tell ya that soldiers, especially SOF, are meant to be used to take it to the enemy -- quickly, violently, and overwhelmingly. His actual words about SOF are "with surgical, extreme violence". Let's quit arguing about the role, and start thinking about the GOAL.

Hey, there's a slogan in there.

IT'S NOT THE ROLE, IT'S THE GOAL.


H/T Small Wars Journal Blog