{"id":105315,"date":"2018-01-22T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=105315"},"modified":"2018-01-21T14:50:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-21T14:50:00","slug":"the-united-states-addicted-to-special-forces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/the-united-states-addicted-to-special-forces\/","title":{"rendered":"The United States: Addicted to Special Forces"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A US Army soldier with the 10th Special Forces Group and his military working dog jump off the ramp of a helicopter, during water training over the Gulf of Mexico.
[Martinez\/US Air Force\/Reuters]<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Jan 2018 – <\/em>The Special Operations forces of the United States<\/a> – currently 70,000-strong and thus larger than the regular militaries of many sizable countries\u00a0– occupy a very special place in US national mythology.<\/p>\n

According to TIME Magazine<\/a>, Special Ops “heroes” are the “planet’s most skillful soldiers” and “toughest warriors” – operating in their very own “secret world”.<\/p>\n

Newsweek<\/a> hails them as “dead accurate, lethal and all-but-silent. They are the military’s elite – highly trained badasses armed with\u00a0bullets and brains in equal measure”.<\/p>\n

The obsequious glorification of “badass” warriors is of course hardly surprising, given that US society has been inculcated to view international relations as a sort of video game in which the US gets points for blowing things up.<\/p>\n

More surprising, perhaps, are the dimensions of the oh-so-secretive world.<\/p>\n

In a recent dispatch<\/a>, investigative journalist and author Nick Turse reveals that Special Operations forces were active in no fewer than 149 countries in 2017 – meaning that the “secret world” has managed to encompass 75 percent of the globe.<\/p>\n

This record high is courtesy of US President Donald Trump<\/a>, that self-appointed “very stable genius<\/a>” who is now building on the special forces frenzy fuelled by his predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Exempt from scrutiny<\/strong><\/p>\n

The US Special Operations Command was officially established in 1987, but the appeal of its services grew considerably among the US political establishment in the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n

Now, Turse writes, the push to further expand Special Operations “comes at a moment when [various US senators] continue to acknowledge how remarkably clueless they are about where those elite forces are deployed, and what exactly they are doing in far-flung corners of the globe”.<\/p>\n

He refers to the shock expressed by certain officials in Washington in 2017, following the news of the demise<\/a> of four Special Operations commandos in the West African country of Niger.<\/a><\/p>\n

Other clues as to US activity in Africa<\/a> – where the present significant expansion<\/a> of Special Ops activity surely has nothing to do with copious resources found on that continent – can be found in headlines<\/a> like: “Strong Evidence that US Special Operations Forces Massacred Civilians in Somalia”.<\/p>\n

Anyway, a negative headline here and there is a small price to pay for a “secret” army largely exempt<\/a> from public – and even governmental – scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Speaking of prices, a September New York Times article<\/a> quotes a former special forces commander who speculates that it “probably costs closer to $1.5 million” to train a special forces soldier these days.<\/p>\n

Add to this the hefty subsequent costs of deployment and equipment – not to mention the financial demands of a conventional US military that is itself none too tiny<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0and it’s no wonder the US has no pennies to spare for trivial things like healthcare.<\/p>\n

“Combat boots every one of them”<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the major selling points of Special Operations forces is that their footprint<\/a> is perceived to be light, a perception buoyed by the US habit of referring to deployed forces as “advisers” and “trainers”\u00a0even when these forces are directly engaged in combat.<\/p>\n

A November TIME Magazine article quotes an assessment of the arrangement by former Navy SEAL-turned-Republican-congressman Scott Taylor: “It’s easier to put ‘trainers’ and ‘advisers’ in a country and say we don’t have ‘boots on the ground’ … Well, that’s bullshit. They’re combat boots, every one of them.”<\/p>\n

As for what certain boots on the ground have been up to in places like Iraq<\/a> and Syria, the US-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL<\/a>, also known as ISIS) was lambasted last year for its use of white phosphorus munitions, prohibited in civilian areas under international humanitarian law. Amnesty International suggested<\/a> that the coalition’s reliance on white phosphorus on the outskirts of Raqqa<\/a> – ISIL’s former self-declared capital in Syria<\/a> – “may amount to a war crime”.<\/p>\n

Indeed, one gets an idea of the effectiveness of phosphorus munitions from a passage in veteran Middle East journalist Robert Fisk’s book Pity the Nation<\/a>, which quotes a Beirut doctor on the incendiary aftermath of Israel’s use of phosphorus shells in Beirut in 1982:<\/p>\n

“I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.”<\/p>\n

Perpetual war\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

White phosphorus aside, the US Special Operations forces have been implicated in other carnage, as well – including by assisting in the coordination of\u00a0air attacks<\/a> in various conflict zones.<\/p>\n

In the battle for Mosul, Iraq – which ended in July 2017 and also involved plenty of US “advisers” doing more than advising – NPR reported<\/a> that “more civilians than [ISIL] fighters are believed killed.”<\/p>\n

The Independent also reported<\/a> a “civilian casualty rate” in Mosul “nearly 10 times higher” than the official one: “As coalition and Iraqi government forces increased their pace, civilians were dying in ever higher numbers at the hands of their liberators.”<\/p>\n

A precise casualty count has been thwarted by a number of factors, including that many bodies remain under the rubble and that, as the Independent notes, “The Americans say they do not have the resources to send a team into Mosul.”<\/p>\n

Apparently, a country with an annual defence budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars – and unilateral entitlement to invade and bomb sovereign nations at will – can’t be expected to count the dead.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in response to a growing perception that US special forces are stretched to the limit<\/a>, US Defence Secretary James Mattis has brought up the possibility of having conventional forces<\/a> assume some of their tasks.<\/p>\n

Such an adjustment would not, however, constitute a retreat from the Special Ops obsession, but rather a reinforcement of the culture of the “badass” warrior – who, “work[ing] almost entirely in the shadows”, as Newsweek puts it<\/a>, has helped the US war-making apparatus permeate the globe.<\/p>\n

And the shadows, it seems, have gotten even darker with the ascension of the aforementioned “very stable genius” to the role of military commander-in-chief, one who spends his time threatening North Korea<\/a> with nuclear annihilation and otherwise scoffing at the idea of any sort of accountability to humanity.<\/p>\n

In fact, as the US marches on towards perpetual war, it’s nearly impossible to detect a bright side.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Belen Fernandez is the author of<\/em> The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at<\/em> Jacobin Magazine.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2017, the US dispatched special operations to 149 countries. What were they doing there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":84901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}