What Acting SecDef Miller’s Special Ops Shift Means

WASHINGTON: Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller has only been at the Pentagon for one week, but has already announced major changes to military posture and structure around the globe amid a major White House shakeup of civilian leadership. 

Standing in front of “Bronze Bruce,” a memorial to Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg this morning, Miller signed a memo authorizing the Pentagon’s Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict office to begin reporting directly to the Defense Secretary, instead of reporting to the policy undersecretary.

“I am here today to announce that I have directed the Special Operations civilian leadership to report directly to me, instead of through the current bureaucratic channels,” Miller said, making good on language that permitted such a move in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Note the NDAA did not mandate the change; it allowed it.

“This couldn’t come at a more critical moment in time as we bring our nation’s longest conflict to a responsible end and prepare our special operations forces for this new era of great power competition,” Miller continued. “It will put Special Operations Command on par with the military services for the first time.”

Miller himself is a former Army Special Forces officer, and deployed several times to Iraq and Afghanistan, including being part of one of the first units into Afghanistan in the weeks after the attacks of September 11.

While the announcement was not expected, the reform has been the subject of bipartisan agreement including being part of the 2017 NDAA signed into law by President Barack Obama. 

Linda Robinson, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at RAND Corporation and an expert on special forces issues, said the move would likely add needed weight to the SO/LIC office.

“In the pecking order of the Pentagon, a civilian assistant secretary is frankly not that powerful,” she said, adding that the office hasn’t always been copied on communications between the head of Special Operations Command and the Defense Secretary.

That has made it more difficult for the head of the office to oversee SOCOM activities, and made it more difficult to provide civilian oversight of the four-star command. “The secretary of defense can’t possibly do all of the detailed work to really exercise oversight, so it makes this a more powerful office to be able to actually conduct that oversight,” she added.

“The bureaucratic concerns within the Pentagon aren’t just rice bowls,” Robinson said, “there is a sense that SOF has been doing its own thing that doesn’t always represent the community, creating a narrative that SOF has been off the reservation.”

The Special Operations Command has grown to about 70,000 troops from about 43,000 in 2001, and a series of alleged war crimes, murders, and evidence of drug use and drunkenness in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa has damaged the command’s reputation, creating at times an aura of lawlessness.

The move would not only elevate the SO/LIC office, but can be seen as taking a task away from the Policy shop, which is why it has been opposed by that office since Congress acted in 2017. Miller, having been a Special Forces officer and spent time in SO/LIC, is intimately familiar with the issues involved.

Asked for more details, Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Candice Tresch said the assistant secretary has 30 days to submit a plan to Miller outlining how the changes might be carried out. It’s unclear if the office would need to add staff to cater to the forthcoming changes.  

That timeline will give the department about a month before the Biden administration assumes office, which will then accept or reject the plan.

“I think increased civilian oversight is long overdue in SOF,” said Luke Hartig, a former senior director for counterterrorism in the Obama administration, and a one-time SO/LIC official. 

The crux of the transformation will ensure that the top special operations official at the Pentagon can go directly to the Defense Secretary on matters of training and equipping special operations forces, along with operational matters, including secret raids against high-value targets. The office will no longer have to move through the larger DoD Policy apparatus to reach the secretary, though some issues with the country’s larger counterterrorism policy will likely still need to be coordinated with the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy. 

The Tampa-based Special Operations Command has grown exponentially since 2001, as the Pentagon has relied on elite troops to conduct raids against insurgent leaders and train and partner with local forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Advocates of the move have long said the SO/LIC office needs to be treated more like a service secretary, given the swelling budgets and thousands of SOF troops deployed around the world.

The move in many ways puts the commander of Special Operations Command and the assistant secretary leading SO/LIC “on a more equal footing [with service chiefs] in the eyes of the secretary,” Hartig added, as opposed to being layered underneath the Policy office. “I think that greater civilian oversight of the office is really important. And this is certainly one way to do that.”

The move does raise questions, however. None of the officials involved have been vetted and approved by the Senate. The timing of the announcement also creates a public relations issue, coming just a day after Miller announced the withdrawal of most US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and his refusal to take any questions from the media. 

It also comes just a week after the firing of Esper, his chief of staff, and other top defense and intelligence officials in a purge at the top levels of the Pentagon, and the installation of Kash Patel, a Trump ally, as Miller’s chief of staff. 

The day after Esper’s ouster via the president’s Twitter feed, Joseph Kernan, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and James Anderson, the acting undersecretary of policy were removed from their positions. Anderson was replaced by Anthony Tata, President Trump’s failed pick to take over the policy job earlier this year.

The current head of SO/LIC, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, is also unconfirmed and is currently serving an “acting” role, while also serving as the acting undersecretary for Intelligence and Security.

Another new face is Joseph Tonon, who was recently installed as an official “performing the duties of” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for SO/LIC, coming from the previous role as Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.