{"id":133662,"date":"2019-05-20T12:00:22","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T11:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=133662"},"modified":"2019-05-27T11:45:45","modified_gmt":"2019-05-27T10:45:45","slug":"u-s-special-forces-school-publishes-new-guide-for-overthrowing-foreign-governments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/05\/u-s-special-forces-school-publishes-new-guide-for-overthrowing-foreign-governments\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Special Forces School Publishes New Guide for Overthrowing Foreign Governments"},"content":{"rendered":"

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8 May 2019 – <\/em>The official school of the United States’ Special Operations Command has published a new paper detailing a decades-long history of Pentagon-backed interference around the world, hoping to provide insight on how best to approach such efforts in the present and future.<\/p>\n

The 250-page study, “Support\u00a0to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness,” was\u00a0compiled by Army Special Forces veteran Will Irwin and published earlier this week by the official Joint Special Operations University, where he was a resident senior fellow.\u00a0Though the report notes that its views\u00a0“are entirely those of the author,”\u00a0its findings present a comprehensive look at how the U.S. has supported efforts to pressure, undermine and overthrow foreign governments.<\/p>\n

Watch Video: US National Security Advisor John Bolton’s Message to Ayatollah of Iran<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report includes some 47 case studies spanning from 1941 to 2003, detailing a legacy of mixed results that included\u00a0assisting partisans against the Axis Power satellites during\u00a0World War II, bolstering anti-communist forces\u00a0throughout the Cold War and taking on\u00a0post-9\/11 adversaries<\/a> in Afghanistan and Iraq. The numerous Washington-orchestrated coups of the past 70 years\u00a0were\u00a0“not included in this study as they did not involve legitimate resistance movements.”<\/p>\n

“This work will serve as a benchmark reference on resistance movements for the benefit of the special operations community and its civilian leadership,” the report reads.<\/p>\n

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A guerrilla soldier aims a U.S.-built Stinger surface-to-air missile system at passing aircraft near a remote rebel base in the Safed Koh Mountains, in Afghanistan, on February 10, 1988. Robert Nickelsberg\/Liaison<\/p><\/div>\n

The cases were broken down into three major support to resistance (STR)\u00a0categories: disruption, coercion and regime change. The report found that “from 1940 to the present, nearly 70 percent of STR operations were conducted for disruptive purposes,” while “non-disruptive cases were about equally divided between coercion and overthrow.”<\/p>\n

Of the 47 cases analyzed, 23 were deemed “successful,”\u00a020 were designated “failures,” two were classified as “partially successful” and two more\u2014both during World War II\u2014were\u00a0called “inconclusive” as the broader conflict led to an Allied victory anyway. Coercion was the most successful method at a three-quarters rate of success or partial success, while disruption worked just over half the time and regime change only yielded the desired result in\u00a029 percent of the cases reviewed.<\/p>\n

Other major findings included\u00a0observations that most operations “were carried out under wartime conditions, with those being nearly twice as successful as cases conducted under peacetime conditions” and “support to nonviolent civil resistance seems to be more likely to succeed than support to armed resistance.” At the same time, they were also “most effective when conducted in direct support of a military campaign rather than as an independent or main effort operation.”<\/p>\n

In eight of the 20 failures found, the author blamed security breaches that clued the enemy in ahead of time,\u00a0sometimes potentially through coverage\u00a0in U.S. media, as may have been the case with newspaper stories prior to the abortive\u00a0CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.<\/p>\n

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U.S. national security adviser John Bolton speaks during the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association lunch at the Biltmore Hotel, in Coral Gables, Florida, on April 17. The Trump administration has evoked the U.S.\u2019 extensive history of intervention against leftist forces across Latin America with new efforts targeting Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Joe Raedle\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The paper also acknowledged that this kind of mission\u00a0“most often addresses immediate issues and short-term rather than longer-term interests,” though it defended unintended consequences of U.S. assistance for Afghan mujahedeen, some of whom went on to form the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, by suggesting the Soviet satellite state they were fighting may have turned out to be an even\u00a0more formidable\u00a0enemy.<\/p>\n

“One thing common to all 47 cases reviewed in this study is the fact that the targeted state was ruled either by an unfriendly occupying force or by a repressive authoritarian regime,” the author wrote, before asserting that in the present day, “Russia and China have boldly demonstrated expansionist tendencies.”<\/p>\n

The U.S. has identified Russia and China as its top rivals\u00a0in recent years, with President Donald Trump specifically calling the powers out by name in major strategy documents. Under Trump, Washington\u00a0has also waged economic wars with other stated foes\u00a0such as Iran, Syria and Venezuela\u2014whose governments the White House has publicly sought to oust, accusing them of human rights abuses as posing a threat to the national security of the U.S. and its allies.<\/p>\n

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

8 May 2019 – The 250-page study, “Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness,” was published earlier this week by the official Joint Special Operations University. Its findings present a comprehensive look at how the U.S. has supported efforts to pressure, undermine and overthrow foreign governments, hoping to provide insight on how best to approach such efforts in the present and future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":133663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242,65,57],"tags":[133,120,267,1050,504,950,291,91,86,112,287,249,639,70,126,118,172,75],"class_list":["post-133662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exposures","category-anglo-america","category-militarism","tag-cia","tag-conflict","tag-geopolitics","tag-imperialism","tag-international-relations","tag-invasion","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-pentagon","tag-power","tag-trump","tag-uk","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133662","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=133662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}