were seeing was genuine rapport and a real camaraderie. In our sector, the Kurds had a standing order not to allow any Americans to get killed, and thus they surrounded our ODAs during combat." Operational model of UW At the operational level, the UW force, prepares the battlefield for other units and conducts operations on conditions favorable to it. SF must constantly be ready to adapt, and to use the political insights of guerrilla warfare theorists whose ideology might be quite different from theirs: Relationships with theater-level command In most cases, the AO will be within the scope of a U.S. regional Unified Combatant Command (UCC), and the UW force will be part of the special operations organization subordinate to that Command. There may be rare circumstances in which the SF operation is controlled at national level, with USSOCOM retaining command. A U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force is "joint" in the sense that it contains components from different branches of the U.S. military. The JSOTF may also include personnel, perhaps on exchange assignments, from countries with which the U.S. has especially close relationships. There may be multiple Joint Task Forces (JTF) in a theater, which contain both regular and special operations forces under a JTF commander. Alternatively, the geographic combatant commander can authorize the theater special operations command (SOC) to establish JSOTFs for pure special operations, based on area of operations or type of operation (e.g., UW versus FID). Security may dictate that the JSOTF not be on the ground of one of the countries within the geographic region. Especially when the JSOTF has a significant naval component (e.g., while a direct action (DA) mission, Operation Prime Chance headquarters was afloat), the JSOTF headquarters may be afloat. Using advanced communications, the formal headquarters may stay in the United States, with a "forward" command post in the area of operations. Both of these choices can help deal with situations where it might be awkward for the host nation, or the nation hosting the government in exile, to have a U.S. headquarters on its soil. In the organizational chart, the pink horizontal lines show multinational relationships; in practice, at least some of those pink lines will actually represent multinational headquarters operations. The lower the organization level, the more likely a multinational headquarters will exist. Sometimes, the resistance organization already controls part of the AO. Still, there usually will be some liaison