Vet News: Leadership Changes in Special Operations

Some leadership changes involving the military’s special operations forces:

• Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson will be promoted to admiral and take over as head of U.S. Special Operations Command. Olson, a 1973 Naval Academy graduate, will be the first Navy officer to run the command and the first Navy SEAL to make four-star rank.

Olson, a Middle East specialist, earned a Silver Star for combat valor in Somalia in 1993. As the country’s top special operations officer, Olson will be responsible for training and equipping the commando units from all the military branches.

• Army Maj. Gen. Francis Kearney will be promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as deputy commander. Kearney graduated from West Point in 1976 and is a veteran of operations in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since March 2005, Kearney has been U.S. Central Command’s special operations chief. It was Kearney who ordered a Marine special operations company out of Afghanistan in March after the unit allegedly fired at civilians on a road in Nangarhar province. Eight Afghans died and 34 were wounded.

• Army Maj. Gen. David Fridovich will be promoted to lieutenant general and run the Center for Special Operations. A Green Beret officer, Fridovich has political science degrees from Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and Tulane University.

• Air Force Maj. Gen. Donald Wurster will be promoted to lieutenant general and lead Air Force Special Operations Command. Wurster is now second-in-command at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

A 1973 graduate of the Air Force Academy, Wurster spent three years at Special Operations Command before his current assignment, serving first as intelligence chief and later as deputy director of the Center for Special Operations.

In his new position, Wurster will manage air commandos and the specially configured equipment they use for attacking or infiltrating enemy territory.

• Navy Rear Adm. Joseph Kernan took charge of the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif., on June 13.

The command trains and manages SEAL forces and combat crewmen. A 1977 Naval Academy graduate, Kernan is a former commander of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the formal name for the secret "Seal Team Six" anti-terrorism unit.

Kernan had been deputy commander to Rear Adm. Joseph Maguire, who will be promoted to vice admiral and fill a senior position at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington.

• Michael Vickers will be the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities. He will replace Thomas O’Connell, who left the Pentagon post in April. Vickers has been working as a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Vickers is a former Army Green Beret and CIA operations officer. His career summary notes that he was "the principal strategist for the largest and most successful covert action program in the CIA’s history: the successful effort to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan."

In his new position, Vickers will be the primary advocate for commando forces during Defense Department budget and policy deliberations.

• Kalev Sepp, also a former Green Beret, will be one of Vickers’s top deputies. Sepp is an insurgency expert who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

He has been to Iraq several times, serving at various points as an adviser to Gen. George Casey, who was the senior commander in Iraq before being named Army chief of staff. Sepp also served on one of the advisory panels that supported the work of the Iraq Study Group.

SOURCE: Yahoo News