What's So Special About Special Ops?
Sexy? Yes. But how effective over the long haul?
W.J. Astore
What's so special about Special Ops? It used to be that special operations troops were few in number. You had Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs, mixed units like the Delta Force, and a few others, but nowadays U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) consists of 70,000 troops, equivalent to five or six regular army divisions, a military within the military.
What's truly elite about America's special ops community, as Nick Turse shows in his latest article at TomDispatch.com, is their global reach and global power, to borrow an Air Force phrase. Special ops forces have already been deployed to 137 countries in 2017, or 70% of the planet's nations. Talk about reach! Yet enduring victories from past deployments, as Turse shows, have been surprisingly elusive.
Why is this? Special ops forces are good at short-term kinetic actions (hit and run strikes, commando stuff), and they do their share of training and advising. Yet their staying power, their persistence, their endurance, their ability to shift strategic winds in America's favor, simply hasn't been there. Some would say that's not their purpose, except that the U.S. military and government has been selling them as strategic game-changers, which they're not.
As I've written before, I see America's special ops forces as America's global missionaries, our version of the Catholic Church's Jesuit order during the Counter Reformation. The Jesuits were soldiers of Christ, a militant order of highly trained missionaries, totally dedicated to upholding the one true faith (Catholicism, of course). For many peoples around the world, Catholicism was the Jesuits. And for many peoples around the world today (137 countries!), Americanism is a gun-toting special ops troop,
Coincidentally, I came across this report from FP: Foreign Policy this morning:
Pentagon taking lead in Africa makes some allies uneasy. At a recent summit meeting in Malawi attended by several U.S. generals and their African counterparts, some allies on the continent, while welcoming American attention, aren’t so sure they want it all from the Pentagon while the State Dept. is diminished.
“We have statements out of Washington about significant reductions in foreign aid,” Gen. Griffin Phiri, the commander of the Malawi Defense Forces, told the New York Times during the African Land Forces Summit, a conference between American Army officers and representatives from 40 African nations. “What I can tell you is that experience has shown us that diplomacy and security must come together.” He was unsure over the “mixed messages” coming out of Washington.
But is Washington's message really mixed? It seems clear. Ever since 9/11, as Nick Turse has shown in several articles for TomDispatch.com, America has been downplaying diplomacy while ramping up "kinetic" strikes by special ops. This trend has only accelerated under the leadership (if that's the right word) of Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson at the State Department. When it comes to world affairs, Trump and Tillerson have often been AWOL, leaving the real action to Mattis and the Pentagon.
And nowadays the real action at the Pentagon is centered on SOCOM, the military within the military, America's militant missionary order.
Even allies question America's almost monomaniacal commitment to military action everywhere. They're right to do so. For special ops aren't so special when they're deployed everywhere in dribs and drabs, parceled out on missions that lack achievable aims.
Finally, there's this. Say what you will of the Jesuits, they had faith. A clear ideology. Their faith, their devotion, was an inspiration to many. Even as their symbol was the cross, their skill-set was quite varied, e.g. they were often learned men, well ahead of their times in areas like science and mathematics.
Does Washington's militant missionary order have a clear ideology? A compelling symbol? A varied skill-set? Favorable and enduring results? Evidence (so far) suggests otherwise.