Special Ops forces are more like a Swiss Army knife. Using conventional forces is like wielding a sledgehammer. It works to locate hidden nuclear-missile sites in North Korea. It conducts raids like the one in Syria in 2019 that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and carries out drone strikes like the one in Iraq in 2020 that killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani. Made up of elite soldiers pulled from each of the main military branches-Navy SEALs, the Army’s Delta Force and Green Berets, Air Force Combat Controllers, Marine Raiders-it is active in more than 80 countries and has swelled to a force of 75,000, including civilian contractors. SOCOM, whose genealogy can be traced to a small hostage-rescue team in 1979, has grown to fully inhabit the in-between space. “Then there’s that difficult in-between space.” “Tony” Thomas, a former head of SOCOM, told me last year. “There’s the continuum of absolute peace, which has never existed on the planet, up to toe-to-toe full-scale warfare,” General Raymond A. We now live in an open-ended world of “competition short of conflict,” to use a phrase from military doctrine.
It has acquired its central role despite initially stiff resistance from the conventional military branches, and without most of us even noticing. Special Ops is lodged today under the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, a “combatant command” that reports directly to the secretary of defense. And yet they are now responsible for much of the military’s on-the-ground engagement in real or potential trouble spots around the world.
Special Ops forces, in contrast, are astonishingly small. By seeking out dramatic military missions, I have chronicled the movement of Special Ops from the wings to center stage.īig ships, strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, flaring missiles, mass armies-these still represent the conventional imagery of American power, and they absorb about 98 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. Special Operators were involved in the successful hunt for the drug lord Pablo Escobar, the subject of Killing Pablo, and they conducted the raid that ended the career of Osama bin Laden, the subject of The Finish. Another, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the Iran hostage crisis, detailed an abortive but pivotal Special Ops rescue mission. One of my early books, Black Hawk Down, was about a disastrous U.S. But without any conscious plan, I have seen some of the evolution firsthand. This has taken place with little fanfare and little public scrutiny. W ithin the span of a few decades, the United States has utterly transformed its military, or at least the military that is actively fighting.
This article was published online on March 12, 2021. in Vietnam, 1964 soldiers on patrol at Camp Victory, in Somalia, 10 days after 18 Americans were killed during the Delta-led Battle of Mogadishu, 1993.* rescue operation in Iran, 1980 a marine during the invasion of Grenada, 1983 Captain Vernon Gillespie Jr. Army Special Forces sniper, 1991 the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw, the failed U.S. Image above, clockwise from top left: A U.S.
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