Free Not a Good Day to Die by Sean Naylor Page A

the early 1990s that required both organizations to train with each other every three months. After a few years of this routine, the leaders in each organization had grown up beside each other. A mutual respect ensued. By the mid-1990s the friction had become a healthy rivalry rather than outright animosity. Strong friendships developed between operators in each organization.
    Nevertheless, JSOC commander Major General Dell Dailey’s insertion of TF Blue into Afghanistan irked Army special operators, and Delta men in particular, who worried that their Navy counterparts’ limited land warfare training did not adequately prepare them for the extraordinarily demanding missions presented by operations in Afghanistan. They noted, disapprovingly, that while Delta would never seek to conduct a direct action mission at sea, Team 6 had no inhibitions about taking on missions that required a deep understanding of land warfare. “A lot of the SEALs are just boat guys, and you can’t shake and bake an infantry guy,” an Army operator in Afghanistan said. In the eyes of the Delta operators, much of the blame lay with Joint Special Operations Command, which seemed determined to treat Delta and Team 6 as interchangeable, despite their vastly different areas of expertise. The decision to withdraw Delta’s A Squadron early and put Team 6’s squadrons into the TF 11 rotation before all three Delta squadrons had seen action seemed nonsensical to Army types. The operators in Delta’s C squadron “were borderline suicidal that they weren’t in the fight yet,” according to an Army special ops source.

But Dailey, an Army special operations helicopter pilot who had also served in the Rangers, had little sympathy for the Delta operators. His decision to use the SEALs reflected his view that the “war on terror” had to be viewed in the same context as the Cold War: a long, drawn-out marathon, not a short sprint to victory. He expected the new war to last forty years and was determined to ensure JSOC could prosecute the fight with intensity over the long haul. Therefore he decided to give Delta a rest. Committing the unit to Afghanistan indefinitely, he believed, would burn Delta out within nine months. He knew Delta was superior to Team 6 in land operations, but he thought each unit easily surpassed the standard required for success.
    Dailey applied the same thought process to the leadership of TF 11. In October Sword’s joint operations center moved from JSOC headquarters at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina to Masirah Island, off the coast of Oman in the Indian Ocean. Dailey went along as Sword’s commander. But in a move that roughly coincided with the change from Sword to 11, he put his entire operation in Masirah and Afghanistan, including his position as the task force commander, on a ninety-day rotation cycle. So in January he and his principal staff returned to Pope. His replacement was his deputy, Air Force Brigadier General Gregory Trebon. Curiously, although Task Force 11’s raison d’être was reconnaissance and direct action against high-value targets, Trebon had no background in those fields. A vastly experienced pilot who had logged over 7,000 flight hours in fifty-five different military and civilian airframes, Trebon was also a free-fall–qualified parachutist. He had spent most of his career in special operations and enjoyed a reputation for being a solid professional. But Trebon’s special ops assignments had been spent in aircraft units or coordinating the special operations air component on larger Air Force or joint staffs. His specialty was piloting C-141 transports specially configured for landing on dirt airstrips or dropping Rangers on low-level parachute missions. An expert at integrating Air Force special ops into commando operations, he had had no opportunity to learn the tactics, techniques, and procedures involved in hunting down and killing enemies on the ground.
    Some JSOC personnel thought