{"id":36022,"date":"2018-07-18T06:40:27","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T11:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36022"},"modified":"2018-07-18T06:40:27","modified_gmt":"2018-07-18T11:40:27","slug":"special-ops-133-countries-down-17-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36022","title":{"rendered":"Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Give them credit. As TomDispatch<\/em>\u2019s Nick Turse has so vividly reported<\/a> over the last decade<\/a>, America\u2019s previously \u201celite\u201d 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<\/a>, in fact, than many national armed forces). And they are more or less everywhere, more or less all the time. They aren\u2019t just \u201celite\u201d forces anymore; they\u2019re America\u2019s secret military, which, as Turse has shown<\/a>, 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<\/a> to Afghanistan<\/a>, Somalia<\/a> to Niger<\/a>. They are training allied special ops types and other forces across the globe. It\u2019s increasingly hard to think of places where they don\u2019t show up, even, for instance, in a rain-soaked cave<\/a> that recently trapped 12 Thai soccer players and their coach. And here\u2019s the good news: if a bill sponsored by<\/a> Congressman Richard Hudson, whose North Carolina district includes Fort Bragg (home of U.S. Army Special Operations Command), passes in Congress, the more America\u2019s special operators deploy in combat-like ways to places that the IRS doesn\u2019t consider war zones (but indeed are), the more likely that they and their families will… yep, get a special tax break<\/a> for their efforts! (War<\/a>, what is it good for?)<\/p>\n

And they aren\u2019t just \u201coperators\u201d anymore. They\u2019re path-breakers in the \u201cscience\u201d of war. As they fight terrorists around the globe, for instance, they\u2019re developing<\/a> \u201cloitering munitions\u201d in their Maritime Precision Engagement program that will act as \u201csuicide drones\u201d (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<\/a> — why shouldn\u2019t the U.S. military have the technological equivalent?<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Special Ops: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go? Give them credit. As TomDispatch\u2019s Nick Turse has so vividly reported over the last decade, America\u2019s previously \u201celite\u201d 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[15990,6463,827,8907],"class_list":["post-36022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-nick-turse","tag-tom-dispatch","tag-united-states","tag-us-special-forces"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36023,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36022\/revisions\/36023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}