Wednesday, September 26, 2012

What’s So Special About Special Ops?

In the face of the failure of America’s conventional military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington establishment seeks a silver bullet, a “force of choice” that can win. It thinks it has found one in Special Operations Forces, which include most famously the Navy’s SEALs and the Army’s Green Berets.
Experience is the best teacher, as the old saying goes, but she kills all her pupils. Experience is likely to teach us that against Fourth Generation non-state enemies Special Operations Forces are no silver bullet. We could learn the same lesson beforehand through a bit of reflection, without expending the lives of some of our best and most admirable men.
The first reason is that the strategic objectives the foreign-policy establishment sets are unattainable by any military. Not even an army of elves and ents could remake Third World hellholes into Switzerland. And as Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you are going to remake him in your image for his own good.
Second, while there is wide variance within the Special Operations community, most SOF units share the same problems that afflict our conventional forces. They, too, are stuck in the Second Generation of modern war, with an inward-focused culture of order that reduces the complex art of war to putting firepower on targets.
SOF are more skilled at techniques than their conventional counterparts, but techniques are not a typical American weakness. Our armed forces are technically capable across the board.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whats-so-special-about-special-ops/

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