WASHINGTON — Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaida and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special operations forces have grown both in numbers and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a special operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaida in East Africa. Plans exist for pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.
The surge in special operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Barack Obama released last week.
One advantage of using “secret” forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from each side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.
Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed “things that the previous administration did not.”
Special operations commanders also have become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under the Bush administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans … calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ”
The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John Brennan. He said last week that the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” of a terrorist attack but will “take the fight to al-Qaida and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”
Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in the special operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.
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