SOCOM
Rangers armed with M16A1 rifles, participate in the evacuation of American students from Grenada.
respective services. Goldwater-Nichols also elevated the SOF community out of its “stepchild” status with the services. And yet, there were still problems to overcome. “I felt that Goldwater-Nichols really did not deal with the issues that I had been concerned with originally,” said Cohen. “How do you take the talent of SOF warriors that we have, get ‘jointness’ of command for them, along with the training and study of language, culture, and history, and then insert them into a country that is a potential trouble spot? And do this well in advance, so that they have time to learn the customs of the people and the region? Then have those individuals gather information and report back to us, without it being just the examination of a single CIA agent in the field, but the observations of a trained military observer who may have to go into battle as the tip of the spear, either going after select targets, or serving the combatant commanders directly? I just did not feel that was coming through with Goldwater-Nichols. “The key staffer in crafting the SOF legislation was … Jim Locher [then-congressional staffer James R. Locher III]. And you need to keep in mind that he also was behind the creation of the position of assistant secretary of defense [ASD] for special operations and low intensity conflict [(SOLIC). Some refer to the civilian ASD SOLIC as the “secretary of SOF,” who essentially plays the role of service secretary.] “That also was hard fought. He was working with the staff members of the committees, which were open to him by virtue
of what they had heard during the hearings into Desert One, the Grenada operation, and the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon,” Cohen said. “It comes back to the fractured command structure that we saw during Desert One,” Cohen said. “I was convinced you [have] to have a command created with a four-star officer in charge with budget authority, that could not be shoved aside by those in the parent services. This had to be a joint command unto itself. And from the beginning, I saw that money is power, so having budget authority means being able to control things. And once again, I think it was Jim Locher who came up with that feature in the legislation. I would turn to Jim Locher as our intellectual reservoir for putting together the research, and making sure we were apprised of all the pitfalls of what we were trying to do. Even if you are relatively knowledgeable as a senator on military affairs, you still have four other committees you are serving on and who knows how many subcommittees, and you’re spread pretty thinly. So you depend upon people like Jim Locher, staff members who are extraordinarily bright. Jim, coming from a West Point background, was a student of organizational science and history, and I would have to give him and those who worked with him a great deal of credit. I don’t profess to be at that level. The SOLIC position at DOD [the Department of Defense] was the same kind of thing, and I have to give Jim credit for that as well.” The resulting legislation became known as Nunn-Cohen, and resistance to it from some corners was fierce. It essentially was
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