Why Green Berets Exist: the Phantom Army
The Force Multiplier concept applied to today’s way of warfare.
In his 1986 memoir From OSS To Green Berets, the father of the US Army Special Forces (and NYC native) Aaron Bank explained why Green Berets and their Operational Detachments-Alpha (ODAs) exist. Having served as an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Jedburgh team leader in the south of France in the Second World War, not only did he know how a small cadre of highly trained and language-enabled commandos could organize and lead local guerrillas to attack an enemy at its weakest points, but he noted that General Dwight Eisenhower “declared that the contribution of the resistance movement had been equivalent to that of fifteen infantry divisions.” What this means is that potentially just over 200 highly trained American OSS, British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and French and Dutch expatriate soldiers and their guerrillas accomplished what somewhere between 150,000–300,000 personnel were typically capable of. That’s an amazing economy of effort.
Seven years after the end of that war, Bank and two other unconventional warfare veterans (more on them in later posts) designed and built what became the Green Berets. Knowing from personal experience the value of that Jedburgh economy of effort, Bank says:
“…Special Forces should not be considered as fixed in fifteen-man teams as far as strength, equipment, and logistics support were concerned. They were not to be compared to a Ranger or infantry squad. Each team would be a cadre around which an indigenous guerrilla force of up to fifteen hundred men would develop”
…and that…
“Special Forces would be behind the development of an indigenous, secret, phantom army, well dispersed initially but then able to strike repeatedly and disappear deep into the heartland of enemy territory. In essence, what Special Forces would assemble would be equivalent to a massive paramilitary army.”
The leadership, skill and capability required to create a guerrilla army in the midst of conflict and separated from American support has dictated the unique makeup of the ODA, even today. Each team is assigned two weapons sergeants, two engineers, two medics and two communicators. Each member is still required to be highly skilled in their specialty but also just as capable as a leader and fighter. Each would have to enable that guerrilla battalion in their specialty, but also command and control at least a company of local guerrillas in combat — the same way Bank did in France near the end of the Second World War.
Creating that phantom army behind enemy lines is what Green Berets call Unconventional Warfare (UW). In the past several decades, Green Berets have performed a number of additional missions, such as foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action, and counter-terrorism. But UW is still the core mission and the ultimate force multiplier — where you can turn a specially selected and well-trained American into 100 indigenous guerrillas already positioned to exploit your enemy’s weaknesses.
Source: Bank, Aaron. From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces. Pocket Books, 1987.
