SOCOM Stops Hunting WMD Terrorists

It's a sad thing when Admiral Eric Olson, the commander of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), admits that his dance card is so full that he can't commit forces to what President Obama calls the gravest national security risk - nuclear terrorism. It's not as grim as the article first sounds. It's more of a case where a general/flag officer decides that he has to obtain increased technology to augment the lack of personnel available.

Fewer elite commandos are available for the hunt and their expertise has been degraded by “the decreased level of training,” Admiral Eric Olson said. They now have only a “limited” capability for this mission, he said.

Meanwhile, the threat of extremists acquiring and using chemical, biological or nuclear arms “is greater now than at any other time in history,” Olson told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a written response to a question posed by lawmakers after a hearing March 16 on his command’s budget.
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 In his unreleased guidance, Gates cited the need to “fully fund” technologies for disposing of explosive ordnance, destroying “ultra-high performance” concrete that might shelter WMD production or storage sites and disabling “control systems” for “state-run weapons production facilities.”

The proposed budget for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that develops these capabilities increases to $113 million in 2015 from $61.3 million in fiscal 2010.

The agency’s fiscal 2011 plan calls for continuing to develop and field “new technologies to improve” the commandos’ “ability to detect, disable, interdict, neutralize and destroy chemical, biological and nuclear production, storage and weaponization facilities.”

SOCOM hasn't really been paying attention to WMD terrorism for the past decade. They used to be much more focused on counterproliferation issues - but that was when we had Saddam as a threat. Since no WMDs were found in Iraq in 2003, business has been kind of slow in the counterproliferation area (for SOCOM at least). Now that business is drying up in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't have WMD sites, SOCOM and DTRA need to invent a new threat. It would be nice to actually find terrorists who are developing CBRN production, storage, and weaponization facilities. Until then, we can all pretend that we need these new technologies that don't work to defeat a threat that doesn't exist.

Comments

[Accountant]

But wait... Didn't ADM Mullen just say that "The single biggest threat to national security is the national debt"? Perhaps the folks at SOCOM should trade in their cool toys for master classes in forensic accounting, bookeeping, contracting, and procurement. Setting-up interdiction and elimination teams that sniff-out clandestine defense over-spending.