Lieutenant Commander Philip Kapusta served on the joint strategic plans and policy staff of Special Operations Command, Central (SOCCENT) in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) from 2001 through 2003. An initial problem encountered in the planning process was that, although there was some resident knowledge of the area and SOCCENT was in charge of the Central Asian States Initiative, Kapusta says, "A lot of people had never heard of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan." It was difficult to find US databases and these were commonly incomplete. With the likelihood of war, the staff was greatly increased in size, mostly with reservists, who were, according to Kapusta, "coming in without a lot of knowledge." He notes that Central Command largely fought the war in Afghanistan from Tampa, Florida, including Generals Franks, Delong and Renuart. A byproduct of this is that, with video teleconferences, the Joint Special Operations Task Force in theater, while nominally subordinate to SOC, became functionally coequal. Kapusta's portion of the staff deployed forward, first to Camp Asaliyah and then Bagram, Kabul and Tora Bora. "Up until this point I believed in the myth that there was this big room somewhere with all the smart guys and the computer banks where you could call up all the information at the punch of a button," he says, but sadly contrasts that myth with the reality of a planning staff which is under-resourced in every possible way. He thought that everyone approached the planning from a very conventional perspective and everyone brought a parochial point of view. Fortunately, most on his staff were very accepting of other views and the net effect was a joint integration. He goes on to say that at the foxhole level joint integration was seamless. The employment of coalition special forces, "the SOF Olympics," was much more dependant upon their organic transportation than any other considerations. Their biggest obstacle was a supply system which was too slow and bureaucratic. After OEF, attention shifted to planning for Iraq. "I know General Franks went up to brief that plan" - which called for a much more sizable invasion force than was ultimately fielded - "and he got hammered," says Kapusta, adding that former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was "100 percent right" in originally calling for substantially more troops. In executing OIF, Kapusta argues that special operations forces essentially took two-thirds of Iraq and praises Colonel Charles Cleveland for the amazing balancing act he carried out in the Kurdish region. He explains that SOC was split between the Naval Special Warfare Task Group supporting the Marines and the Special Forces supporting the Army. He finishes by stating that their assumptions about the insurgency were mixed.

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