[Task & Purpose] Last year, retired Army Gen. David Petraeus ominously predicted that the divisive anti-Muslim rhetoric during the presidential election would not fade and would make our country less safe. This warning came to pass last week as President Donald Trump’s travel ban took effect on Friday afternoon and created the chaos across America’s major airports.The immediate outcry was predictable and justified. It doesn’t require Petraeus’ experience to realize that labeling all citizens of certain Muslim countries as suspects helps jihadists recruit new members by pitching their struggle as a religious war between Islam and the West.
But what I fear more than the way this order aids groups like ISIS and al Qaeda are the short-term risks for our forces on the ground. Treating all citizens of Muslim nations like potential terrorists alienates our Muslim allies who are fighting terrorists with America today. Nowhere are these effects so palpable than with the special operations forces around the globe who interact with these allies on a day-to-day basis.
To understand these impacts of Trump’s order, it’s helpful to understand how special operations are conducted. The large majority of special operations involve working with a partner force that creates something we call a "force multiplier." For example, a small group of special operators will deploy to an austere environment far away from U.S. forces to equip and train locals to be better and more effective fighters. Doing so, this small team of 12 or fewer Americans "multiplies" their impact by creating seasoned fighters out of hundreds or thousands of local nationals. The enemy, instead of facing a small team of highly capable Americans, faces a much larger group with well-trained and equipped fighters using local intelligence.
Strategically, this yields a better return on investment for the U.S. military. For every special operations-trained team deployed, there are thousands of conventional forces that America isn’t putting at risk to accomplish the same goal. Simultaneously, this is the exit plan: By training partner forces to proficiency, we won’t need to help them one day.
When I was in Afghanistan, I was part of one of these units that trained, mentored, and led an elite unit of Afghan commandos on combat missions. We would spend weeks training hundreds of commandos to proficiency and then fought arm-in-arm with them on raids against Taliban insurgencies in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.