Clandestine HUMINT and Covert Action - Separate Functions During Peacetime? - US Postwar Change - PWD and The Creation of US Army Special Forces

PWD and The Creation of US Army Special Forces

After World War II, the regular Army had a largesse of officers that had successfully run large UW operations, without any doctrine to guide them. The Army also had strong psychological operations capabilities, and a new Army Staff element was created to manage them.

During World War II, the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was created to conduct overt psychological warfare against German troops in Europe. A joint UK-US organization, it was commanded by US Brigadier-General Robert A. McClure . McClure had commanded psychological operations in North Africa, again under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and enjoyed his confidence. SHAEF PWD's staff came from the US Office of War Information (OWI), the US OSS, and the British PWE.

After the end of the war, the US Army created a PWD. While there had been pressure to put PWD under the newly revitalized Intelligence Division, McClure was strongly opposed.

"A great part of my difficulty in carrying out what I felt was my mission was with G-2. The G 2's all felt that they had a monopoly on intelligence and were reluctant in the earlier stages to give any of that intelligence to Psychological Warfare knowing that it would be broadcast or used in print.

There was also a sensitivity about providing intelligence to units working behind enemy lines and subject to capture. McClure believed that PWD either should report to Operations, or, as was eventually done, as a special staff for the Chief of Staff.

While McClure himself was a psychological operations specialist, his work with OSS had made him appreciative of UW. Since no other Army agency seemed interested in the UW mission, McClure was granted staff authority over UW, with a mission to:

"formulate and develop psychological warfare and special operations plans for the Army in consonance with established policy and to recommend policies for and supervise the execution of Department of the Army programs in these fields."

OPCW had three major divisions:

• Psychological Warfare
• Requirements
• Special Operations. The latter was particularly significant, because it formulated plans for creation of the US Army's first formal unconventional warfare capability: Special Forces.

McClure brought officers with World War II or Korean War experience in UW or long-range penetration, including COL Aaron Bank, LTC Russell Volckmann, and CPT Donald Blackburn. Bank had been assigned to the OSS and fought with the French Maquis. Volckmann and Blackburn had both been guerillas in the Philippines, and Volckman had also led UW in Korea. McClure saw one of his responsibilities as "selling" UW, in spite of resistance from the Army and CIA. He was able to recruit qualified personnel from the Ranger units that had been disbanded in Korea. With personnel spaces available from disbanding the Ranger companies in Korea, the Army activated Special Forces in early 1952.

Special Forces, both in their original form and as a component of the current United States Special Operations Command, have provided the nucleus of US paramilitary capabilities, both under direct military, CIA, and joint control. Some Special Forces personnel left the Army and went to work as CIA employees.

The US Special Forces was established out of several special operations units that were active during World War II. Formally, its lineage comes from the 1st Special Service Force (Devil's Brigade), but that unit was more a Special Reconnaissance (SR) and Direct Action (DA) command, which operated in uniform without augmentation by local soldiers.

Some of the Office of Strategic Services units have much more similarity, in mission, with the original Army Special Forces mission, Unconventional Warfare (UW), or acting as cadre to train and lead guerillas in occupied countries. The Special Forces motto, de oppresso liber (Latin: "To free from oppression") reflects this historical mission of guerilla warfare against an occupier. Specifically, the 3-man Operation Jedburgh units provided leadership to French Resistance units. The larger OSS Operational Groups (OG) were more associated with SR/DA missions, although they did work with Resistance units. COL Aaron Bank, commander of the first Special Forces group, served in OSS during World War II. Other OSS guerilla units included Detachment 101 in Burma, under the China-Burma-India Theater, which, among other missions, screened the larger Ranger unit, Merrill's Marauders

Douglas MacArthur did not want the OSS to operate in his South West Pacific theater of operations, so paramilitary operations there were at first ad hoc, formed by Filipinos, with Americans who refused to surrender. While Fil-American guerilla operations in the Japanese-occupied Philippines are not part of the direct lineage of Army Special Forces, some of the early Special Forces leadership were involved in advising and creating the modern organization.

US Army Special Forces (SF) are, along with psychological operations detachments and Rangers, the oldest of the post-World War II Army units in the current United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). Their original mission was to train and lead Unconventional Warfare (UW) forces, or a guerilla force in an occupied nation. 10th Special Forces Group was the first deployed unit, intended to operate UW forces behind enemy lines in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. As the US become involved in Southeast Asia, it was realized that specialists trained to lead guerillas also could help defend against hostile guerillas, so SF acquired the additional mission of Foreign Internal Defense (FID), working with Host Nation (HN) forces in a spectrum of counterguerilla activities from indirect support to combat command.