WASHINGTON — Using high-tech parachutes to drift through the night sky above Iraqi positions, sometimes traveling 30 miles or more, American Special Forces teams equipped with night-vision goggles and special radios reported from midair on enemy formations below.
Green Berets, living in sandy burrows for days at a time to escape detection, infiltrated deep behind Iraqi lines--into the very heart of Saddam Hussein's most fearsome ground units. They fed vital intelligence to allied commanders weeks before the ground war began.
Other Special Operations units disabled communications towers and water wells, used lasers to target Scud missile launchers and tank emplacements for aerial attack and placed explosive charges on bridges to cut off future avenues of retreat for Iraq's Republican Guard troops.
These and countless other Special Operations forces "were the eyes that were out there," said Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in Operation Desert Storm--the eyes and also the claws that penetrated the skin of Iraq's elite forces and helped sow the seeds of their destruction.
U.S. commando teams even planned and apparently executed "snatches"--wartime kidnapings--of Iraqi soldiers, said one knowledgeable official, bringing vital human intelligence assets to planners in the rear.
Yet, effective as these forces proved to be, employing their particular talents and capabilities was not a foregone conclusion. In earlier times and under earlier U.S. leaders, they might have stayed at home.
"The real story is that Gen. Schwarzkopf was willing and allowed to use these forces at all," said William Cowan, a former Special Operations officer and president of a Washington-area defense consulting firm. "There's been substantial reluctance for political purposes to use them in past years, given the risks that their detection could cause an international flap for the Bush Administration."
But Cowan added that the use of the elite military commandos in Iraq also reflects the Pentagon's renewed confidence in Special Operations forces as an effective, high-precision tool in the nation's military's toolbox. That attitude, in turn, results from nearly a decade of vastly increased funding and congressional attention to the Special Operations mission.
For the Special Forces, that attention has brought new technology straight out of James Bond:
* Hand-held devices allow commandos to eavesdrop on radio transmissions of nearby units.
