Defense official pledges continued investments in special ops

Despite growing concerns across the military services about increasingly strained Defense budgets in fiscal 2008 and beyond, a senior Defense Department official on Wednesday said the military has all the money it needs to make planned investments in U.S. special operations forces.

Indeed, the military will have enough money to grow its special forces by 15 percent, while also equipping them with new technologies needed for the war on terror, said Mario Mancuso, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting with reporters, Mancuso said Pentagon officials took into account a flattening of defense dollars when they spelled out their goals and strategy for special forces in the Quadrennial Defense Review, a major planning document released earlier this year. As such, they placed an emphasis on technology and other investments with a high rate of return for use against both state and non-state adversaries.

Special forces are expanding their abilities to fight "irregular warfare" as spelled out in the QDR, essentially battling insurgents and other unconventional enemies, Mancuso said. Doing so involves investing in satellites and other intelligence and reconnaissance systems that allow special operations troops to conduct protracted surveillance missions.

The mass diffusion of technologies to insurgents has been a major challenge for the military, which has been trained and accustomed to combating traditional state enemies. But Mancuso stressed that the military still has an "overwhelming overmatch" in its arsenal of weapons systems to combat insurgents and other unconventional foes.

Aside from new gear, the military also is investing heavily over the next several years in developing a "human capability," essentially a force that is more linguistically and culturally aware of the area in which they are deploying, Mancuso said. He emphasized that amassing a force fluent in Arabic and other languages is not the ultimate goal.

Rather, the military needs a "very special kind of person" who can become comfortable in and familiar with another culture, Mancuso said. The goal, he added, is to develop a "global sensor network" of troops capable of collecting human intelligence.

Meanwhile, efforts to enlarge special operations forces by 15 percent, as directed in the QDR, could take years, largely because of the high selection criteria for and long training needed to develop a special forces member, Mancuso said.