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Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
Give them credit. As TomDispatch’s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America’s previously “elite” Special Operations forces — once small, specially trained units in a large military — have now essentially become a military in their own right, all 70,000 of them (larger, in fact, than many national armed forces). And they are more or less everywhere, more or less all the time. They aren’t just “elite” forces anymore; they’re America’s secret military, which, as Turse has shown, is increasingly deployed to something startlingly close to all the countries on the planet (aside from a few obvious ones like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea). They are raiding and fighting from Syria to Afghanistan, Somalia to Niger. They are training allied special ops types and other forces across the globe. It’s increasingly hard to think of places where they don’t show up, even, for instance, in a rain-soaked cave that recently trapped 12 Thai soccer players and their coach. And here’s the good news: if a bill sponsored by Congressman Richard Hudson, whose North Carolina district includes Fort Bragg (home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command), passes in Congress, the more America’s special operators deploy in combat-like ways to places that the IRS doesn’t consider war zones (but indeed are), the more likely that they and their families will… yep, get a special tax break for their efforts! (War, what is it good for?)
And they aren’t just “operators” anymore. They’re path-breakers in the “science” of war. As they fight terrorists around the globe, for instance, they’re developing “loitering munitions” in their Maritime Precision Engagement program that will act as “suicide drones” (operated from speedboats). Hey, if ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest of that crew have their version of suicide drones — humans with explosives strapped to them, not to speak of off-the-shelf drones — why shouldn’t the U.S. military have the technological equivalent?
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Secret Warfare: U.S. Special Forces Expand Training to Allies With Histories of Abuse
Secret Warfare: U.S. Special Forces Expand Training to Allies With Histories of Abuse
THEY HAD HIM AT THEIR MERCY. The burly man, hooded and helpless, sat on the ground as his two captors — a soldier dressed in black from helmet to boots, another clad in camouflage, both with rifles slung on their backs — grabbed him by his armpits and hauled him to his feet. A dark Mercedes minivan snaked up the dirt road toward them, as two other soldiers in full camouflage scanned the bare tree line with their automatic weapons at the ready. The van pulled up, its door slid open, and the men, captors and victim, were gone. It looked like a scene out of a thriller starring Liam Neeson or Jason Statham.
It was, indeed, something of a fiction.
In March, members of the U.S. Special Operations forces traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to train with local special police units. Carried out at Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national training center in Manjaca, the arrest demonstration, chronicled in an official video, was part of the first-of-its-kind Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) in the Balkan nation.
The training program was part of a shadowy and growing global engagement strategy involving America’s most secretive and least scrutinized troops. Since 9/11, Special Ops forces have expanded in almost every conceivable way — from budget to personnel to overseas missions — with JCETs playing a significant role. Special Operations Command keeps the size and scope of the program a well-guarded secret, refusing to release even basic figures about the number of missions or the countries involved, but documents obtained by The Interceptdemonstrate that from 2012 to 2014 some of America’s most elite troops — including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets — carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training missions around the world.
Members of a Special Police Unit conduct a drill as part of an exercise with U.S. forces in a Joint Combined Exchange Training at Manjaca, Bosnia.
Photo: Radivoje Pavicic/AP
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