USAF DSO Job Description

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 2-4:

A DSO [Direct Support Operator] (pronounced “dizzo”) is just an airborne cryptologic linguist by another name. Historically, there weren’t very many DSOs, mostly because the Air Force didn’t want or need that many, and partly because DSOs like feeling special, so they artificially limited the number of spots available to other non-DSO linguists. And because there were so few DSOs, it was that much easier to craft an image as badass “operators,” the best of the best, the only people who could do what they do. This was plausible; there are those elite groups within the military who have been selected for their talent, grit, and exceptionalism. And, like those elite groups, if you pushed the DSOs on it, they would be able to credibly say that because their job was highly classified (true) they couldn’t tell you specifically what they did (untrue).

A DSO does what all airborne linguists do. They “translate intelligence communications or data received or intercepted while in the air,” aka listen to what the bad guys (usually) are saying in another language and turn it into English (that quote is from the USAF’s Quincy, Massachusetts, recruiter’s Facebook page). Most airborne linguists do this aboard a jumbo jet, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, or RJ, flying thirty thousand or so feet above the ground at four or five hundred miles an hour, in an orbit that encompasses a few hundred miles. This is strategic work; the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground. But it is important, at least according to the military, as “a lot of the things we do might end up on the desk of the president” (ibid., and a little misleading, though technically not a lie if you note the usage of “might”).

The primary difference between these linguists and DSOs is one of location. DSOs don’t fly on RC-135s, or any similar massive aircraft. DSOs fly exclusively on the planes that are utilized by Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC. For the most part, these are C-130s that have been modified for various purposes. Some of these, like the AC-130s, or gunships, have been changed so much from their original cargo-carrying mission as to be unrecognizable; the only cargo a gunship carries is bullets. Others, like the MC-130s, still can and do carry cargo, but they’ve been made to be better at doing it. [Later MC-130Ws, nicknamed Whiskeys, were modified to carry weapons.] AFSOC has other aircraft that DSOs are trained to fly on, but in my time in Afghanistan, we almost exclusively flew on C-130s.

Timing is the other thing that makes a DSO’s work different from that of other linguists. AFSOC doesn’t do strategic work all that often, and so neither do DSOs. In Afghanistan, our job was to “provide real-time threat warning” to the planes we were on and to the people on the ground that these planes were supporting. How we did this work is unimportant, and honestly quite boring.

I don’t know if they still think of themselves as badasses, but when I was a DSO, that was the ethos of the community. We (not all, but most of us) felt that we were the best of the best: better than other linguists, cooler than other linguists, more important than other linguists. Once upon a time, some of this may have been true. Long before I did it, in order to be a DSO you had to be very good at the language(s) you spoke, and you had to be handpicked by other DSOs, interviewed, and tested; it was a whole process. And there were those DSOs who flew scary, complex missions in dangerous places. But by 2010 the Air Force just randomly assigned new linguists to become DSOs, and the thing most likely to take down the aircraft a DSO was in was a drone (seriously, they have a bad habit of losing connection and orbiting at preselected altitudes that are, let’s say, inconvenient for other, human-containing aircraft).

The U.S. Air Force students in the Romanian-language class ahead of me at the Defense Language Institute in 1969-1970 were assigned to an airbase in Turkey, where they listened constantly to Romanian-language radio broadcasts and recorded any that contained reference to military assets or movements, which were then translated. The two other Army students, one in the class ahead of me and one in my class, were both assigned to Military Intelligence units. The one in my class went to Germany and did some undercover work. The only other person in my 3-person Romanian class was an FBI agent from Chicago who probably didn't get much more use out of his new language skills than I did as a company clerk in Ft. Gordon, Georgia.