Very odd.
Have we been hearing hype to make us feel better, and to stir up the Taliban?
Or are we hearing this to maybe get the taliban to relax?
The dark of the moon is still a few days out.
Ed

October 7, 2001, New York Times

SPECIAL OPERATIONS
Few Commando Units in Striking Distance
By THOM SHANKER
ASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — For all the emphasis that Pentagon
planners have put on Special Operations forces in a war
against the network of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban
government, at the moment relatively few of these
secretive soldiers are within striking distance of the
heart of Afghanistan, officials at the Pentagon say.

As the military's mobilization accelerated this week, a
Defense Department official said that "only a few
dozen" members of the military's Special Operations
forces had deployed into the region so far. Short of an
intelligence coup disclosing Mr. bin Laden's location,
that is scarcely enough to scour the caves and canyons of
the country looking for him and his captains.

But an additional 500 or so members of Special Operations
units will be laced among the 23,000 United States troops
now landing in Egypt for a monthlong military exercise,
"Bright Star," which begins next week, Pentagon
officials say.

"They could easily swing over toward
Afghanistan," one Pentagon official said. And other
Special Operations forces will most likely deploy with
many units bound for the region.

With so few of them there so far, the initial mission of
these fighters has focused on the more conventional of
their many specialized roles. These include scouting
targets and standing by to illuminate them with laser
beams that precisely guide missiles and bombs to the most
important ones.

Recalling the Persian Gulf war of a decade ago, Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, said this
week that the "most effective means for finding Scud
missiles, Iraqi Scud missiles, was putting very brave
special forces people on the ground in western Iraq."

But he conceded that their daring sometimes went to
waste. "When they got there and they found targets,
we didn't have the kind of integration with our air
capability to make that bravery effective," Mr.
Wolfowitz said.

Special Operations forces are also the most likely
soldiers to carry out another strategy that Pentagon
officials have spoken of: assisting resistance forces of
the Northern Alliance in their campaign against the
Taliban's military.

"Assisting forces that are in opposition to the
government of a hostile country — now, that is a classic
special forces mission," said one veteran of the Army
Special Forces, the Green Berets. Indeed, in the Special
Forces doctrine this kind of operation goes by the name
"unconventional warfare," exactly the term that
top Bush administration officials have used again and
again to describe their plans.

The hope has been both to dislodge the Taliban regime and
to flush out members of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network.

And counterterrorism generally is another of the
particular missions of Special Operations units. Wayne A.
Downing, a retired four-star Army general who headed the
United States Special Operations Command, has joined the
National Security Council as the president's new director
for counterterrorism.

American commandos are capable of much more than hiding
for days on end and working in the dark of night to
locate targets, or propping up indigenous rebels to do
the fighting. These forces receive the most intense
training in the military, and some of its most
sophisticated radios and weapons, so they can wipe out
targets on their own.

Special forces wage their corner of the war with intense
and concentrated violence that can be important
tactically to the broader mission, and disruptive
psychologically to an enemy, current and past members of
these units say.

In the words of one former Special Operations officer,
"They fight fast and they fight furious, and then
they get out."

They can be secretly inserted into enemy territory in
pitch darkness by Pave Low and Pave Hawk helicopters that
skirt the terrain. For heavier loads and longer
distances, there is the Combat Talon, a modified cargo
plane that needs only 750 feet of rudimentary runway to
land.

So secret are the Special Operations forces' missions
that their movements into and around the region are
blacked out of slide presentations about the war effort
shown to some of the most senior military leaders at the
Pentagon.

Their importance to that effort, though, is no secret.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has made it clear
that in this campaign, "a lot of it will be Special
Operations."

Some Special Operations missions are too secret ever to
be disclosed, even when they succeed. But Hollywood
notwithstanding, the majority of them have nothing to do
with high- altitude parachute drops followed by five-mile
swims against the tide followed by kicking in doors
followed by long knives in the night.

As the Air Force readies high- altitude food drops over
Afghanistan, an operation aimed at filling the stomachs
as well winning the hearts of the Afghan people and
undermining the Taliban's legitimacy in their minds,
special forces could stealthily search for, identify and
help destroy Taliban anti-aircraft systems, whose
capabilities remain an unknown, Pentagon officials say.

That mission would become even more critical if President
Bush orders a sustained bombing campaign to squeeze the
Taliban by attacking command posts, arms depots,
airfields, training camps and storage sites for the
heroin that has underwritten the Taliban, officials say.

Special Operations forces do everything from coordinating
refugee relief to training foreign soldiers to
reconstituting a water purification system to preparing
leaflets urging surrender in dialects that few American
soldiers have ever heard spoken.

There are 40,000 members of United States Special
Operations units, budgeted at just over $3 billion, or
about 1.3 percent of all military spending, said Col.
Bill Darley, a spokesman for the Special Operations
Command. (Most Special Operations personnel who work in
civil affairs are in Reserve units, as are many of those
trained in psychological operations.)

Units vary in size and specialty, from the top-secret
Delta Force, which specializes in counterterrorism, to
Navy Seal teams that specialize in coastal
reconnaissance, infiltration and demolition, to the
larger units of Army Rangers, perhaps the best-trained
infantry in the world.

But spectacular failures still haunt these forces. There
was the aborted hostage rescue in Iran in 1980. During
the 1989 invasion of Panama, the forces had a
disproportionate number of casualties when their small-
unit missions rolled into large, set- piece firefights.
The disastrous attempt to kidnap a Somali warlord,
Mohammed Farrah Aidid, in 1993 certainly ended public
support for involvement there.