According to defense officials, the purpose of the Pentagon creating the special Support Branch is to

Defense officials in the United States have confirmed that the Pentagon has created its own unit to help gather military intelligence. But they denied it’s a rival to the CIA or that they are bending the law. The admission came after a senior Republican senator said he would raise questions about reports of a clandestine unit operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is our Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs. The group is known as the special Support Branch. For about the past two years it has been providing personnel to deploy secretly with Special Forces and other units to gather all important human intelligence for military operations. US Defense officials have played down the significance of the secret cell and denied that it’s an attempt to rival the CIA. The Washington Post first revealed the unit saying it’s meant to delve into CIA territory and that the Pentagon was reinterpreting US law to do it. But defense officials say the new group is merely a more focused version of things they’ve been doing before to provide better support for US military forces.