The Balkans get cold in the winter, and preparing the force for action involved a major effort. Special cold-weather clothing and rations were delivered to the 26th by mid-November. Because of the multi-national makeup of the IFOR (United States, France, Great Britain, etc.), special consideration had to be given to communications. Numerous hookups were planned around the NATO communications systems. Best of all, the personnel of the MEU (SOC) and ARG now had an Internet link that allowed them to send and receive daily E-mail from home. Along with the obvious materiel upgrades for operating in the Balkans, the staff of the MEU (SOC) ordered additional mine detectors, chains for the vehicles, and a small augmentation force of personnel with skills that might be required for the IFOR mission.
When the preparation was done, the 26th MEU (SOC) and PHIBRON 4 became the IFOR Theater Reserve Force. This meant that during the two months the IFOR ground forces were setting up in their positions on the ground, the ARG would be steaming in wide "doughnut" patterns around the Adriatic. For the rest of the cruise, Colonel Battaglini had to keep his personnel ready and alert. A rigorous drill and exercise program helped, but boredom slowly began to take over. The enlisted personnel started calling the force "the Maytag MEU" (after the terminally bored Maytag repair man in commercials back home). But they worked hard to stay sharp. All the classroom time spent studying ROE, mine detection and clearance, cold-weather operations, and counter-sniper tactics helped. By early February 1996, it was finally time to come home. They handed off to the 22nd MEU (SOC) at sea, and now they were at Rota in the final stages of washdown and reloading the ships. The next day, they would leave at noon for home.
Friday, February 16th, 1996, Naval Station Rota, Spain
By 1000 on Friday morning, Captains Duffy and Buchanan were knocking at my stateroom door. If I wasn't on the dock soon, they told me, I would be riding home the long way! Grabbing my bags, I headed down to the vehicle deck and the brow. Captain Buchanan was not kidding either: At 1200 sharp, all three ships of the ARG weighed anchor, pulled up lines, and promptly headed past the breakwater and out to sea. In less than a two weeks, the MEU and the ARG would have their home-comings at Camp Lejeune, New River, Little Creek, and Norfolk. Once home, they would start the ritual of preparing for their next cruise, planned to start in November of 1996. Colonel Battaglini would give up command of the 26th in the spring of 1996 to become an aide to the Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton. John Allen was headed up to the Commandant's Office at the Pentagon as the Commandant's aide. And after several years, Dennis Arinello was leaving the 26th for a shore assignment.
As for the ships of the ARG, Wasp headed into dry dock for her first major overhaul since being commissioned. For the 1996/97 cruise of the 26th MEU (SOC), PHIBRON 8, comprising the USS Nassau (LHA-4), USS Ponce (LPD-15), and USS Pensacola (LSD-36), would handle the job of transportation. Captain Buchanan planned to retire in 1997, Captain Duffy went to Washington to chair a promotion board and attend the National Defense University, and Stan Greenawalt relieved Ray Duffy as CO of Wasp in April of 1996.
In May 1996, it all began again.
The MEU (SOC)
in the Real World
In earlier chapters, I have shown you what a Marine Expeditionary Unit--Special Operations Capable, a MEU (SOC), can do in combination with its Amphibious Ready Group (ARG). Now we'll sketch out a couple of alternative futures to examine how a MEU (SOC)/ARG team might operate in the early part of the 21st century. The MEU (SOC)s will tackle two "major regional contingencies." Follow along as we explore some near-term possibilities.
Operation Chilly Dog: Iran, 2006
Back in the 1960s, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, knew that someday the oil would run out. (He was wiser than most rulers in the region.) "Petroleum," he once said, "is a noble material, too valuable to burn." So he envisioned a national electrical grid powered by a series of clean, modern nuclear plants. The French were doing the same thing, and he admired everything French. He also knew that possession of nuclear technology brought prestige that would enhance Iran's position as a regional power. It had worked for Israel. He also admired the Israelis. The sleepy Persian Gulf port of Bushehr made an ideal site for the first plant. The Bushehr peninsula was a solid, isolated block of rock, standing out along the generally flat, barren, central Persian Gulf coast. Nature had intended it to be an island, but ages ago silt had filled in the narrow channel, and a road built on an elevated embankment led to the town. Power lines from the nuclear plant would run alongside the road and up through the mountains, supplying the great inland city of Shiraz with cheap, abundant electricity.
In 1979 the Islamic Revolution came; the Ayatollahs threw the Shah out of the country, and the foreign engineers and construction crews departed soon afterward. The Ayatollahs may have been fanatical, but they weren't crazy. They remembered what had happened to Saddam's ambitious Osirak nuclear power plant, smashed into rubble by a few Israeli bombs. The Shah's nuclear dreams were abandoned, and intelligence officers in the West nicknamed the site "Dead Dog." With the passing years, war came and went. And oil continued to flow. But the Shah was right; it would not flow forever. A new generation of Iranian technocrats rose into positions of power, and they rediscovered the Shah's vision. Russia offered nuclear reactors on advantageous barter-trade terms. Nuclear technology brought prestige, enhancing Iran's position as a regional power. It had worked for Israel.
Iranian Army Officer Training School, March 1991
The young officers in the cadet program were a privileged elite; they were permitted to watch the Gulf War and its aftermath on CNN. Those who understood a little English translated for the rest who spoke Farsi, but the images spoke for themselves. It was a gut-wrenching experience to watch the destruction in four days of the hated Iraqi army which had defied the mobilized might of the Islamic Republic for eight grinding, bloody years of attrition warfare. Every young man in the room had lost friends or relatives in battle against Saddam's Revolutionary Guards' armored divisions...and now Saddam's armor evaporated like snowflakes in the hot desert sun.
It was a bitter joy they found in the humiliation of their enemy. For the victory which should have been their victory was being won by an even more hated enemy, the Great Satan, America. The junior officers were the best and the brightest of their generation. But it didn't take much to see the writing on the wall. If the Americans can do this to Saddam, what could they do to us? They listened attentively to lectures by officials from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. The Great Satan's victory, it was said, had been bought with the oil revenues of the corrupt Gulf sheikdoms. The godless Russians had given the Americans the secrets of Saddam's defenses. Iraq had only collapsed because the martyrdom of a million faithful Iranians had fatally weakened his regime. After evening prayers, the junior officers gathered in the dorm, arguing late into the night. The mandatory time for lights out came and went, but no one could sleep. They resolved that whatever it took, they would understand the causes of Iraq's defeat, and they would ensure that their nation never suffered the same fate.
Sub-Lieutenant Gholam Hassanzadeh did not have to wait long. Before the Islamic Revolution, he had studied physics at Teheran University for a year. He spoke good English and fluent Arabic. His first assignment was debriefing a plane-load of Iraqi nuclear technicians who had escaped to Iran after their prototype isotope-separation plant was reduced to rubble by U.S. BGM-109 Tomahawk missiles. They would be working for the Islamic Republic of Iran now. The technicians, all educated men and good Muslims, had little love for Saddam. They had escaped only minutes ahead of the Mukhabarat secret police that Saddam had dispatched to execute them, to keep them from telling the Americans what they knew.
Gholam took an instant liking to these men, uprooted from homes and families by the winds of war. Their accommodations were harsh, little better than prison barracks, but Gholam had grown up in a culture where hospitality toward the stranger was not only a religious obligation, but a fine art. He did what li
ttle he could to make their exile more comfortable. They reciprocated with a torrent of information. His reports were read with growing interest by top Government officials. One caught their special interest. In it he outlined a plan for an Iranian nuclear deterrent force. Gholam swiftly made captain, and then major. In a few years, he was given the leadership of the team that managed secret nuclear labs that were building a true Islamic bomb.
International Hotel, Bushehr, Iran, August 8th, 2006
The humidity was near 100 percent, and the temperature was about the same as body heat. He half expected it would cool off after sunset, but then remembered he was in the Persian Gulf and that it was August. An air-conditioner sat mockingly in the hotel room's window, but salt fog had corroded it into junk years ago. He hated this place almost as much as the local people hated him--he was a symbol of the West, the Infidel, the Enemy. Hans Ulrich, Senior Technical Inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), dreamed about the alpine glaciers of his native Switzerland as he sat unhappily in the stifling room that passed for luxury accommodations in Bushehr.
Tomorrow he would complete the solemn, high-tech ritual of placing inspection seals on meticulously weighed and measured fuel rods of the Bushehr #1 Reactor Unit, a Russian VVER-440. He hated working around Russian reactors. He knew, of course, that this one was a pressurized water type, a safer, more modern design than that horrible graphite pile of crap at Chernobyl. Still, it was a sloppy piece of work by his standards, and that offended every neuron in the finely machined clockwork of his Swiss brain. In a few hours of work, he would accumulate almost an entire year's permissible radiation exposure. Then he would face the struggle of getting back to IAEA headquarters in Vienna with a quarter ton of inspection equipment from a country where every official, cab driver, and schoolchild regarded him as an enemy spy. As Ulrich continued to sweat, he went back to writing out his report in longhand. He would have used his laptop data slate, but it had gone into thermal shutdown an hour before, and was useless to him now. He hated trusting his thoughts to a sweat-stained notepad, but it would have to do for now.
As he sweated, he took a swallow of warm orange juice and sat back. He was thinking about the sealed cases of uranium cores that he had seen in the plant's secure storage area. He had been here just six months earlier to certify the refueling of the #2 reactor, and the spent fuel rods from that operation were still in their containers. When he asked why they had not been shipped out for reprocessing, he was told that the tons of rod assemblies from the first refueling had been held over to save on costs. In that way only one shipload would be required. While technically not a violation of the rules, it was not good management. As much as 75 kg/165 lb of weapons-grade plutonium might be mixed in with the witches' brew of radioactive isotopes in those cases. Until they were safely at a certified reprocessing facility, raw material for at least a dozen nuclear weapons lay in Iranian hands.
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) in the Gulf of Oman, August 14th, 2006
At least once a week, an elderly F-14 equipped with a TARPS reconnaissance pod made a low-level run from the carrier around the Persian Gulf's north coast, keeping carefully outside Iranian air space. If anything nasty was happening onshore, the NRO's imaging and radar satellites would pick it up almost immediately. Nevertheless, it was good training for the naval aviators and the ES-3A Shadow crews farther out in the Gulf, who expectantly monitored the electromagnetic spectrum, hoping the Iranian radars would light off some new frequency or pulse modulation. Thanks to some trick of the Gulf's freakish aerial refraction, this week's imagery was particularly good.
As he studied the fine detail in high magnification on the workstation, Lieutenant JG Jeff Harris, a photographic intelligence analyst assigned to the carrier's air wing, saw something odd about a new pair of oil platforms under construction off Bushehr. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he opened a new window on the screen and called up precise 3-D renderings of typical Persian Gulf drilling and production platforms and then rotated the images for side-by-side comparison. Something was definitely different. The steel lattice at the center of each platform was much too light to support the massive structure of a drill rig. Staring for a few moments, he reached around to a small classified safe, dialed the combination, extracted a CD-ROM, and loaded it into the workstation's drive. As the program displayed various pieces of equipment, it became clear there was nothing in the wildcatter's world that could be mounted there. But the grid pattern would fit the dimensions of a vertical-launch canister cluster for a Russian SA-N-9 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system. Those round fittings at each corner of the new platforms made no sense as mountings for any kind of drilling equipment. But they were exactly the right size and shape as mounts for CADS-1 gun/SAM mounts. And what looked like racks for drill pipe might be mounts for Chinese CS- 802 surface-to-surface missiles (SSM). Rubbing his eyes, he rose to pour another cup of coffee, then picked up a phone to call his department head. While he waited for the intelligence chief to arrive, he suddenly realized that these platforms had been built to protect something. He pulled more CD-ROMs from the security safe, and began to think.
Defense Intelligence Agency Headquarters, Bolling AFB, near Washington, D.C., August 22nd, 2006
In all the vast bureaucratic labyrinth of the American intelligence community, you probably would not have found a bigger collection of prima donnas than the Counterproliferation Coordinating Committee. The Committee, of course, did not officially exist. Its funding was buried in an obscure Interior Department line item that covered long-forgotten uranium mining subsidies to a holding company in Utah. Attendees for the every-Tuesday-morning meetings were drawn from the CIA, various imagery agencies, all four military services, the Department of Energy labs, a sprinkling of academic physicists and engineers, an FBI deputy director, and whatever senior analyst the State Department could spare that week. All of them had the right "tickets" (Special-Access security clearances). The older guys tended to be "Kremlinologists," long-time Russian specialists who had acquired profound cynicism and paranoia during long, bitter years of being outwitted by the KGB and its successors. The younger guys tended to be East Asia specialists, who built entire careers on the interpretation of enigmatic scraps of data from the bizarre information vacuum of North Korea. The absence of Middle East specialists might have seemed startling, unless you understood the politics of the intelligence community. In the aftermath of 1991 Gulf War, it was discovered that Iraq had operated several vast, parallel nuclear weapons programs right under the high-tech nose of countless billions of dollars worth of U.S. spy satellites. This was one of the great intelligence failures of the century; it sent a clear message to a new generation of intelligence officers. Stay away from anything connected with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East; it's not career-enhancing. Anyhow, it's the Israelis' responsibility. They can collect HUMINT (Human Intelligence) over there; we can't. Besides, they don't like anyone else messing around on their turf.
This Tuesday morning, the agenda began with a presentation by Dr. Rob Kennelly, a young nuclear engineer from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was describing new developments in laser-based gaseous isotope separation to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel. Conventional extraction of weapons-grade fissionable material required construction of vast industrial complexes that were impossible to hide. But this laser plasma technique could be scaled down to machine-shop dimensions; a complete facility might be concealed on the grounds of a nuclear power plant. The only "signature" would be diversion of megawatts of power to drive banks of high-energy lasers. At the completion of the presentation, the committee chairman politely thanked the engineer, dismissing him with a nod toward the door. He wasn't cleared for the afternoon's agenda. But he wasn't ignored. During the lunch break, the lieutenant colonel who represented the Marine Corps took the young man aside and bombarded him with questions.
Russian Embassy, Teheran, Iran, August 25th, 2006
Yuri Andreevich Rogov was carried on the official Embassy roster as Senior Science and Technology Attache, but of course he reported directly to the station chief of the SVR, the successor of the KGB. Like its Soviet predecessor, the SVR selected its officers carefully and trained them rigorously. Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic, Rogov operated with smooth confidence and impeccable courtesy in an often suspicious, hostile, and unpredictable country. He had stood and gazed in wonder at the ruins of Persepolis, and marveled that these people had built a cultured and efficient world empire back when his own distant Slavic ancestors lived in reed huts and slogged through the Pripyat marshes as hunters and gatherers.
Another characteristic the Russian Republic shared with its Communist predecessor was that it demanded long hours and hard work from its Foreign Service officers. One of Rogov's many duties was maintaining contact with the hundred or so technicians down at Bushehr. Officially, they were independent contract hires, working directly for Iran's Energy Ministry. Some of them had Ukrainian or Kazakhstan passports, but the project was based on an agreement between Russia and Iran, and the Iranians expected the Russian Embassy to keep the men happy, healthy, and out of trouble. No women were permitted, an irrational and unfortunate local custom, Rogov thought.