On a blustery Christmas day at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware three weeks ago, while families across the country exchanged gifts and basked in the warmth of holiday reunions, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Goble came home to his family in a flag-draped coffin. Goble, an operator assigned to the Army’s Seventh Special Forces Group, a New Jersey native, and the father of a 6-year-old daughter named Zoey, was killed in action 7,000 miles away in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
His final, irreversible sacrifice — the culmination of 15 years of service — barely caused a ripple in our media ecosphere.
The stark contrast between the festivities enjoyed by most Americans and the nightmare engulfing Michael Goble’s family is both disturbing and emblematic of our government’s approach to the longest war in our history. Gallons of ink have been spilled about the war in Afghanistan, but one of the most overlooked and devastating stories of the conflict is our leadership’s recent use of special operations forces to tread water in the country without providing a plan for success, committing additional resources to an increasingly unpopular war, or withdrawing completely.
Tuesday night’s Democratic primary debate was a case study of this political fecklessness. Nearly all of the candidates promised to end American involvement in Afghanistan and “withdraw” our troops, before quietly adding the caveat that they would continue deploying special operations forces there.
Sending special operations forces to accomplish difficult missions that conventional forces cannot or should not accomplish is a necessary and time-honored strategic tactic, but that is not the case in Afghanistan.
Our leaders know the public has little appetite for a large military footprint in a country that cannot govern itself 18 years after the war began, but they are unable to present a plan for long-term success and unwilling to end our involvement, so they’ve created a third option: tell the public that “major combat operations have ended,” withdraw most of our conventional forces, and quietly shift the burden of the war almost entirely onto the shoulders of a tiny fraction of the military that operates away from the public eye.
The semantics change, but the war doesn’t. There is still no strategy for success or exit plan. And our country’s greatest assets are engaged in direct combat and suffering losses, with no end in sight.
As the Afghanistan Papers exposed in detail, Afghanistan’s security forces are incapable of protecting the country, its national and regional governments are irreparably corrupt and incompetent, and American policymakers who have promised imminent success for nearly two decades can’t even define the term.
I’ve discussed this issue with several members of the special operations community over the past few years, and some of them recently agreed to let me share their thoughts and experiences.
One of them pointed out that a common refrain when politicians are asked to provide a plan for Afghanistan is that “we should just leave special operations in there.” (Note: This conversation took place before Tuesday’s Democratic debate.) Those public officials, he said, have “no clue” what they’re asking. “It just sounds good to say, and everyone thinks [special operations forces] are like robots,” he added. The thoughtless deflection essentially “dehumanizes operators until they become expendable.”
This policy comes with immense military costs, but focusing solely on its strategic consequences ignores the searing human toll it imposes. Special operations casualties in Afghanistan began to outnumber all other casualties for the first time in 2016. This year, 12 of the 18 Americans killed in action in the country were members of special operations units. The Army Special Forces community has been hit particularly hard. Every active-duty Army Special Forces group has lost a member this year, and nine green berets were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019 alone.
Those statistics, as jarring as they are, cannot begin to capture the full story. Each of those deaths represents a family shattered — an abrupt ring of the doorbell that tells wives that their husbands are gone, kids that their fathers are not coming home, parents that they must bury their children. Another type of family suffers, too. Special operations communities train together, live together, and spend most of their daily lives together. They are exceedingly close, and the steady drumbeat of heartbreak takes its toll. The losses ripple through the community and are borne by all.
It doesn’t help that many of them know firsthand that the picture in Afghanistan is far from the rosy portrait painted by the Pentagon and elected officials: One operator, who has the better part of a dozen deployments, described the repeated rotations as “just mowing the grass.” Another, after talking about the loss of a friend he’d known for more than a decade, sarcastically concluded, “But hey, let’s go win this thing in Afghanistan.”
The effects of those losses are compounded by the strain of a bone-crushing operations tempo. Over the past several years, many special operations units deployed at a roughly six-months-on, six-months-off pace. A chunk of those six months “off” included training for their next six months downrange, which means even more time spent away from their families. And although it would be inappropriate to draw direct correlations between events from data alone, the spike in suicides among special operators — which tripled to 22 in 2018, the last year for which we have figures — is, at the very least, evidence of a strain on their communities.
Even at the most basic military level, our leadership’s overreliance on special operations forces is costly. We are losing our very best at an unacceptable rate. Those deaths represent the loss of years of experience and expertise that cannot be replaced overnight or even within a few years. The relentless, brutal operations tempo also leads to higher rates of attrition caused by burnout and family stress — which causes a secondary drain of experience and expertise from the force — and hampers recruiting efforts. According to one of the men with whom I spoke, his branch of the military was offering bonuses in the neighborhood of $50,000 to entice former operators to rejoin the force. Not to prevent individuals from leaving — to bring them back after they’d already left.
In sum, the political and moral cowardice of our elected officials and senior military brass is inflicting severe military and human costs on the small communities they are using to avoid difficult decisions about our strategy in Afghanistan. A republic that chooses to go to war owes the citizens it sends on its behalf a purpose for risking their lives, a plan for their success, and honesty about both. The special operators we send overseas year after year deserve at least that much.
James F. Hasson (@JamesHasson20) is a former Army officer, an Afghanistan veteran, and the author of Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. He is an attorney and currently practices in Washington, D.C.
