A former Army Special Forces officer who was in charge of a team involved in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan was nominated as the Pentagon’s head of special operations.
Derrick Anderson was nominated Monday by President Donald Trump to serve as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, according to a notice on Congress.gov. His nomination was referred to the Senate Armed Services Committee for consideration.
If confirmed to the largely bureaucratic position, Anderson would oversee administrative and policy issues that apply to special operations and irregular warfare units and advise the secretary of defense and other senior civilian leaders on issues like equipment, readiness and training for the force.
While a captain in the Army in 2014, Anderson was the commander of a Special Forces team in Afghanistan from the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. On June 9, 2014, his team and allied Afghan soldiers engaged in a firefight with the Taliban that ended in a wayward American airstrike that killed five U.S. soldiers and one Afghan. A U.S. Central Command investigation found that miscommunication and a lack of proper protocols among Anderson, his tactical air controller and the crew of the B-1B bomber that dropped the bombs led to the friendly fire.
In a later interview with 60 Minutes about the incident, Anderson disputed that his leadership was at fault in the strike. A classified report on the strike obtained by 60 Minutes found that a central cause was the inability of the B-1’s sensors to detect the strobe lights worn by the Green Berets on their equipment — an issue that neither the bomber’s crew nor the ground team were aware of.
“I’m the commander of this team. This is my team. I miss my guys tremendously. But at the end of the day there’s nothing that myself or my Team Sergeant did that day or failed to do that day that caused that incident to happen,” he told 60 Minutes. “We made the decisions that we thought were best at the time on the ground for the guys that were getting shot at.”
In 2024, Anderson also ran for a Congressional House seat in Virginia as a Republican but lost to Democratic candidate Eugene Vindman.
Anderson grew up in Virginia and attended Virginia Tech on an Army ROTC scholarship, according to a Special Operations Association of America bio page. He went on to become an infantry officer, went to Ranger School and became a platoon leader in Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. He served on a 13-month tour during the 2007 “Iraq surge.” He also oversaw burial and memorial ceremonies with the 3rd Infantry Regiment in Arlington National Cemetery. After leaving the military, he attended law school at Georgetown University and clerked for three federal judges, according to his LinkedIn page.
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