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CNN Live Saturday

America's New War May Require Special Operations Units

Aired September 15, 2001 - 16:45   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: We're join from Reno, Nevada with retired Marine Corps General Martin Brandtner. General Brandtner is here to talk to us a little bit about some of the challenges that are facing the president, his military planners and soldiers on the ground as well as they begin a process of trying figure out who is responsible and what to do about it.

General Brandtner, good afternoon.

GEN. MARTIN BRANDTNER, U.S. MARINE CORPS (RET): Good afternoon, Aaron.

BROWN: Look, I'm no military mind here, but the first problem seems to me, it's not like we know where the enemy is, in a sense. There's not some big army we can get a satellite picture on them, see them staging and all of that. So one assumes the first thing is, how do you find them?

BRANDTNER: Well it's, of course, extremely a complex problem, and it's intelligence-dependent. I am certain that right now the military planners are looking over all the information they could possibly acquire from a host of sources in order for them to better identify the attackers, where they're located, who is harboring them, who is supporting them. And I'm certain they're going to discover -- and they already know this -- that they are in a wide variety of places, not just one location. And that this kind of an attack was obviously carried out by a host of cells in various parts of the world.

BROWN: So you're -- reducing this to, perhaps, a too terribly simple way, you're not talking about a shotgun approach where you can go in and drop lots of bombs over a wide area; you really need a kind of pistol approach where you find a target and go get them?

BRANDTNER: I think that's right. You know, there's a thought that the president has made clear, and that is that we are going to hold nations responsible for those who harbor and support these terrorist.

But to actually get the terrorist cells themselves and break them down and destroy them, it's going to have to be very pinpoint and very accurate, and done in a manner that will ensure that these cells are, in fact, destroyed along with the network that's supports them.

This is not a very short-term project, obviously.

BROWN: I want to talk about that broader military problem in a second. But let me just, if I can, ask you a couple more questions about the more surgical aspect of this.

Are there military units, Marine, Army, whatever, that are trained to perform those kinds of actions?

BRANDTNER: Yes there are. Both the Army and the Marine Corps have units that are capable of special operations; highly risky. I suspect that there would be a very significant amount of intelligence gathering done before any kind of an operation like that would be launched. But yes, the capability does exist.

BROWN: And have we had much success with these sort of operations in the past?

BRANDTNER: Well, we've had success on limited times that are not very well publicized. Of course, you look back to Desert One, which was a terrible disaster, and that was really the genesis of all the special operations forces.

BROWN: Just for people who don't remember, Desert One was -- if I'm wrong, jump in here -- it was the effort to rescue the Iranian hostages, correct?

BRANDTNER: That's correct.

BROWN: And that was a disaster on the ground.

BRANDTNER: It was.

BROWN: And then there was the attempt to get Gadhafi a decade -- a little less than that -- and that didn't precisely work either, did it?

BRANDTNER: Well, the end result of that particular effort, however, did come about, that Gadhafi has essentially been put out of work and has kind of hunkered down. So I think you can say that that particular effort did result in a desired outcome.

BROWN: But at best -- at best -- we've had a mixed record in these kinds of operations. The military is much more comfortable in a more classic battle.

BRANDTNER: Well, I would -- I would say that right now the special operations forces we have are extremely competent. I have worked with them, I know how good they are. And I have ever confidence that if they were ever called upon to exercise their mission, they would do it in a very professional way. And they did, of course, do a variety of things during the Gulf War, and they were very, very successful at that.

BROWN: Right; and I wouldn't suggest for a minute that they weren't professional. I merely suggest this is very hard to do well and successfully. It has a lot of risks, a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that can go wrong.

BRANDTNER: Absolutely. And that's why I think you'll find that before any kind of an operation of that nature is conducted that there will be very, very careful planning, a very substantial gathering of intelligence to eliminate as great as possible the margin of error.

BROWN: We have grown as a country, the United States, used to these air wars where you could keep ground soldiers out of harm's way and you drop some bombs and hope that works. The end result of this is more complicated, isn't it? I mean, if you go after governments -- do you see this as simply an air war?

BRANDTNER: No, I don't. I think one is if you have air power which is very capable it's going to be mixed with a variety of other kinds of actions, and across the spectrum of economic sanctions and embargoes, forming alliances that will act in concert against these countries, as well as military actions.

So it's going to long-range, it's going to very, very complicated. I think you'll find that the military activities that occur are going to be selective. They'll be very aggressive and, probably in some cases, massive. But I think you're going to find that it's going to be a longer-term, very carefully orchestrated effort on a magnitude that we have not seen before.

BROWN: Which raises a whole different set of questions which we'll get to in the days ahead. General Brandtner, thanks for joining us. Martin Brandtner, retired Marine Corps general joining us this afternoon from Reno, Nevada. Thank you, sir, it's nice to talk to you.

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