It works to locate hidden nuclear-missile sites in North Korea. Using conventional forces is like wielding a sledgehammer. Special Ops forces are more like a Swiss Army knife. Over the years, the U. Most Americans are unaware that it has been active in a country until the announcement that its forces are being withdrawn.
Or until something goes wrong—as in Niger in , when four Special Ops soldiers were killed in an ambush. Notably, its continued growth has been spurred by both success and failure. And perhaps because Special Ops is such a flexible tool, that growth has enabled the U. The advent of nuclear weapons, in the s, presented leaders with urgent ethical and strategic imperatives.
Defining the purpose of such weapons automatically demanded fresh thinking about the bedrock values of a democracy, the nature of multilateral alliances, the morality of warfare, and the scope of U.
Because of its sub-rosa nature, Special Ops has not compelled the same kind of reckoning—and, in fact, may foster the illusion that a strategic framework is not necessary. And yet even a versatile knife can do only so much. How did Special Ops come to occupy such a central role in American military operations—and even foreign policy? The history of its rise is telling. President John F. Kennedy bucked this convention when he stood up the Green Berets.
It was a bright idea that burned out in Vietnam, where an initial commitment of Green Beret advisers—who did more than advise—escalated into a full-blown war, with more than , American troops deployed at its peak.
The Green Berets survived as an elite unit, but many ambitious Army officers considered a berth in Special Forces a career-killer. Then came the Iran hostage crisis, in November Two days after Iranian students stormed the U. Something called the Delta Force already existed on paper.
It was the brainchild of Colonel Charlie Beckwith, a profane, hard-drinking, stubbornly tenacious Army officer who had served briefly with the British Special Air Service in Malaya. He had agitated so long to create a similar multipurpose commando unit within the U. But in the mids, two spectacular rescue missions captured the headlines.
A special Israeli unit stormed an airport in Entebbe, Uganda, in , rescuing more than passengers who had been taken from a hijacked airliner. When the Tehran embassy was seized, Delta Force had yet to undertake a mission, and the challenge posed was beyond any imagined for it. But Carter wanted a military option. Months later, they had to be; Carter was desperate. A new plan had been drawn up, only marginally more plausible.
Choppers would deliver the Delta team to Tehran and then would pluck the team and the rescued hostages from a stadium near the embassy. They would all be flown to an airfield secured by a company of Rangers. Eagle Claw, as the mission was called, never cleared the first hurdle—getting to Tehran. An accident at the landing site ignited a fireball that killed eight servicemen. The mission remains one of the most humiliating failures in American military annals—a failure that became the impetus for expanding Special Ops.
In the aftermath of Eagle Claw, an investigation known as the Holloway Commission found the Pentagon woefully unprepared for daring, joint, pinpoint missions.
It revealed a crippling lack of interservice and intergovernmental cooperation. Mission planners had had to plead to obtain blueprints of the embassy compound in Tehran. The Navy pilots flying the helicopters across the desert had not even conducted the practice runs the planners had requested. The service branches hated the idea. Admiral James Stavridis, a former U. The services fought it and fought it and fought it, at every level. Once created, JSOC was treated like a poor stepchild. In the end, a staff of 70 was dispatched to Fort Bragg to handle administrative chores.
A Special Ops helicopter unit was created. But JSOC depended on haphazard funding and relied on a grudging chain of command for missions.
That is how things stood in October , when the U. Its Cuba-aligned Communist government had collapsed, and its leader, Maurice Bishop, had been murdered. Rescuing hostages being its prime focus, JSOC was a key player in the invasion, which was over fast. It was celebrated as a rousing success by the Reagan White House. But within the military, it was seen as an embarrassment. General Thomas, now 62, was then a lieutenant who went in with the first wave.
He had been a West Point cadet when the disaster in Iran had unfolded, and had no idea then how important that episode would prove to be for the military or for himself. But in fact he would be present for nearly every major U.
Four SEALs drowned on a preinvasion reconnaissance mission. Cuban and Grenadian military personnel were known to be on the island, but no one knew exactly where or how many, or what kind of arms they had. A Tokyo court sentenced U. Once a special operations forces Marine Raider in Afghanistan, year-old veteran Jason Lilley has had to work through feelings Special Operations Forces Center.
Featured Special Operations Articles. Maritime Raid Force. Special Operations Spotlight. Featured Video. These shadowy sites—including KhabarSouthAsia.
Just as SOCOM is working to influence audiences abroad, it is also engaged in stringent information control at home—at least when it comes to me. I asked what exactly was inconsistent. It was, as I stated very plainly in the piece, the assessment given by John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former counterinsurgency adviser to now-retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus. Bockholt offered no further examples of inconsistencies. He did not. I responded that I hold all subjects that I cover to a high standard.
It was—finally—a seemingly simple answer to what seemed like an astonishingly straightforward question asked a more than a month before: What was the total number of countries in which Special Operations forces were deployed in ? Janssen was concise. His answer: How, I wondered, could that be? And if Special Operations forces were deployed in 92 nations during just one week in , according to official statistics provided to the New York Times , how could they have been present in 12 fewer countries for the entire year?
Today, Special Operations Command finds itself at a crossroads. Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch. You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch. Mattea Kramer and Miriam Pemberton. Dana Liebelson. Andrew Bacevich. Rachel Morris.
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