John Weisman is one of a select company of writers to have had books on both the New York Times fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. His best-sellers include Rogue Warrior (written with Richard Marcinko) and Rogue Warrior's eight fictional sequels. A former journalist, Weisman has worked in more than three dozen countries. His latest work, the Black Ops novel SOAR, is now available through HarperCollins/William Morrow. He is currently completing the second Black Ops novel, Jack in the Box, for release in 2004. He can be emailed at: blackops@johnweisman.com
Special Event: John Weisman will be appearing to sign autographed copies of his latest thriller, Soar, at the following locations:
August 15: Fort Bragg
11:00-11:30 a.m. - Bldg 80-5050 (2nd street and Buckner Rd)
2:00-4:00 p.m. - Bldg 1017 on Canopy Lane
August 19 & 20: TREXPO EAST (Chantilly, VA)
10:00 a.m.-5::00 p.m. - TEAM ONE NETWORK booth, at Dulles Exposition Center, Chantilly, VA. Official ID credentials required.
August 30: Quantico
12:00-2:00 p.m. - Marine Corps Post Exchange
September 6: Horse Shoe Curve Restaurant (Pine Grove, VA),
6:00-9:00 p.m. at Horse Shoe Curve Restaurant
Pine Grove Road
Pine Grove, VA
Pine Grove Road [Rt 679] runs off Rt.7, just west of the Blue Ridge, and 2 mi. east of the Shenandoah River.
Twenty years ago during Operation Urgent Fury, so the story goes, a young officer who needed naval gunfire support on Grenada had to use his credit card to phone the U.S. to pass his request on, because his radio couldn't connect to the Navy's communications network.
How far we have come since then.
This past week, when U.S. intelligence assets passed information that targets of opportunity had appeared at a restaurant in Baghdad's al Mansur neighborhood, it took less than half an hour for a B-1 crew to launch four GPS-guided bombs in the hope of decapitating the Iraqi leadership.
That mission was a demonstration of the military's newfound flexibility and equally important, its decisiveness.
Within the space of a few minutes, it was possible for target coordinates to be passed from a SpecOps forward controller who had "eyes on" the target, up the chain of command and back again to an E-3 AWACS, which scrambled the B-1, and as well, assigned an F-16CJ and an EA-6 Prowler to provide protection end electronic countermeasures if called for. Twelve minutes later, the B-1 was over the target and releasing its ordnance, resulting in what the B-1's pilot, USAF Captain Chris Wachter, later described as "a 100 percent surgical strike."
Find, track, target, and kill-all in less than half an hour. What an impressive display of flexible, netcentric warfare.
And what a far cry from Urgent Fury. Or Mogadishu, when the military's rules of engagement were often set by the Clinton White House communications staff, not the operators on the ground in Somalia. Or Belgrade, where targets had to be approved by a NATO committee (one of whose French officers, it later turned out, was passing sensitive targeting information to the Serbian intelligence service).
Or even Afghanistan. In the early days of that campaign, SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld reportedly went ballistic after a Hellfire-armed CIA drone had spotted Taliban leader Mullah Omar but never took a shot. Rumsfeld discovered that critical tactical information from Afghanistan had caromed back to CENTCOM in Tampa, trickled down several layers of middle management, then oozed through a slow-moving cadre of JAG Corps lawyers who finally opined against firing the missile because someone might get hurt.
It didn't matter. By the time the JAG verdict came in, Mullah Omar had disappeared.
Rummy, I am reliably told, vowed that such tactical dithering would never again occur on his watch.
And so the SECDEF, one hears, encouraged -- and when he felt it was necessary, cajoled, badgered, and even browbeat -- the uniformed services to come up with new ways in which to think about the battlefield. He emphasized tactical suppleness and proactive tactics. He pushed for the integral inclusion of Special Operations and Black Ops, instead of relying on old, off-the-shelf, one size fits all ops plans that called for lot of boots on the ground, but little in the way of innovation.
In return, Donald Rumsfeld was, during the first few days of the war, vilified in anonymous leaks to the press, and criticised by a large percentage of the retired military "experts" called upon by networks and cable news channels to opine about the war, 24/7.
The battle plan, most of them said was a disaster. The campaign would turn into a "quagmire." The Iraqis, they stated, would never welcome our Coalition forces as liberators.
Funny thing: back in October, 1983, just as Operation Urgent Fury got underway, the previous generation of "experts" were saying much the same thing. Grenada would quickly become a "quagmire." The American medical students, they emphasized, didn't want to be liberated.
The lesson here is simple. In the past two decades, our Military has advanced light years. Our ability to find, track, target, and kill and do it RIGHT NOW has taken a quantum leap.
And the "experts"? They're still looking for a credit card to call home.
