Insiders' story of USAF special tactics units

No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan. Col. John T. Carney Jr. and Benjamin F. Schemmer. Ballantine Books. 335 pages; photographs; maps; appendices; notes; index; $25.95.

There are reams of unclassified pages describing Delta Force, Rangers and SEALs, units that concentrate on assorted forms of direct action. The Air Force Special Operations squadrons and the Army's Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which routinely furnish those elite formations with aerial infiltration, exfiltration, resupply and fire support, are equally well known, but next to nothing about Air Force Special Tactics units has appeared publicly until bookstores displayed No Room for Error.

Both coauthors are eminently qualified to lift that veil. In 1977 Col. John T. (Coach) Carney Jr. jury-rigged the first ad hoc Special Tactics team, euphemistically called Brand X, shaped its progress during the next 14 years and set enduring standards. Benjamin F. Schemer, a former editor of Armed Forces Journal, supplemented Carney's first-person accounts with unvarnished views from insiders who planned, participated in or critiqued key actions around the world during the last quarter century. The back cover bristles with praise from heavy hitters, featuring two former Secretaries of Defense, two former combatant commanders, a former Army Chief of Staff, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.

The prototype team that Capt. Carney commanded 25 years ago did not exist officially and seldom consisted of the same six combat controllers. Team members temporarily joined Brand X in response to Coach's Irish blarney. The original missions were to survey potential insertion sites, then install beacons, lights and seamless air-ground communications, mainly for Delta Force.

Doubting Thomases generated thumb-- in-the-eye turf squabbles that left Carney's team with "no room for error." First-class professionals prospered in that hostile environment, while faint hearts fell by the wayside. Interservice and internecine resistance continued even after the Air Force fielded seven Special Tactics squadrons with proven combat records, boasting a slogan that legitimately reads "First in, last out." Their clientele currently includes all U.S. special operations forces (SOF), wherever and whenever summoned. Abilities to control air traffic, call in air strikes, care for precious cargoes (rescued hostages; incapacitated comrades) and help extricate friendly forces in extremis make current Special Tactics teams vastly more versatile than their Brand X originators.

The first real world opportunity for Carney's crew to strut its stuff came in March 1980, while Delta Force was finalizing preparations to rescue U.S. hostages held in Teheran. Plans tentatively called for MC-130 Combat Talons to rendezvous deep inside Iran with Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters at an intermediate staging base code-named Desert One. It was Carney and his people who surveyed the site weeks before the operation. Unfortunately, Carney's excessively casual CIA pilot, on the night of March 31-April 1, 1980, deposited him on the wrong side of a preselected highway at a bend in the road rather than along a straight stretch, as directed. Resultant discombobulation early on April Fool's Day wasted precious time before Carney finally got his bearings, paced off a reoriented landing strip, repositioned beacons and roared around in the dark on a motor bike collecting soil samples to help scientists determine surface loadbearing properties (all within a bit more than one hour), then beat a successful retreat before daybreak.

Carney's recon of that desolate site was a resounding success, with one crucial exception that might best be described as an act of God: Desert One "was hard packed sand, like a pool table," when surveyed. Three weeks later, it "was covered in ankledeep, soft sand from dust storms that had passed through the area in the interim." Disaster subsequently occurred during the rendezvous on the night of April 24, 1980, when a helicopter hovering in a powdery cloud that reduced visibility to zero collided with an EC-130 tanker. Eight men died in the resultant inferno. Five others were badly burned, injured or both.

Special Tactics teams were eager to demonstrate much improved reconnaissance, surveillance, airfield seizure and hostage rescue skills in conjunction with Delta Force, Rangers and SEAL Team Six during Operation Urgent Fury, but opportunities to do so were scarce because command arrangements and impossible planning procedures at the top made all participants look amateurish. Investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh suggested that "every officer in the armed forces should be compelled to read the chapter on the 1983 invasion of Grenada-it's an enraging primer on how not to do it."

Coach Carney passed the torch to another commander in 1991, and the tools he forged are still effective. Eleven members of the 24th Special Tactics Squadron acquitted themselves so heroically during the showdown with Somali mobs in Mogadishu on October 2-3, 1993, that all received decorations, including one Air Force Cross, two Silver Stars, and four Bronze Stars for valor. Special Tactics units subsequently covered themselves with glory in Afghanistan, beginning in mid-October 2001, when two noncoms accompanied the 12man Army Special Forces A-Team that opened operations against Taliban troops and al Qaeda terrorists. Combat controllers and paramedics from five Special Tactics squadrons surveyed 21 austere airstrips before phase one of that war wound down three months later, controlled air traffic at 15 expeditionary airports that launched and recovered more than 8,000 aircraft, participated in more than 30 combat operations, mostly with Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), called in more than 600 close air support sorties (once while on ponies at full gallop) and guided more than 90 percent of all precision munitions during final descent onto targets.

Readers may take issue with the book's bias, exhibited in the unflattering portraits of some prominent officials who opposed Special Tactics teams from the onset and coloring every adverse decision as ill-advised, but No Room for Error is still a grand read. I knew a bit about Army, Navy and Air Force SOF before I opened this book, having recently reviewed colonial and U.S. developments since 1670, but the interdependency of all special operations components, not just with each other but with conventional forces as well, hit home with me much harder before I finished the final chapter.

By Col. John M. Collins U.S. Army retired

COL. JOHN M. COLLINS, USA Ret., joined the Army as a private in 1942 and retired as a colonel in 1972 after wartime service in Europe, Korea and Vietnam. He was senior specialist in national defense at the Congressional Research Service from 1972 until 1996 and has been a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow at National Defense University ever since. He has written 12 books about military matters.

Copyright Association of the United States Army Feb 2003
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