A US Special Forces trainer supervises a
military assault drill for a unit within the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army. (Reuters/Andreea Campeanu)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. They
snatch men from their homes in the
Maghreb and
shoot it out
with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty
spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise
Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the
oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the
deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is
waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed—until now.
Since September 11, 2001, US Special Operations forces have grown in
every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling,
however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments
globally. This presence—now, in nearly 70 percent of the world’s
nations—provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war
being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from
training missions with African allies to information operations launched
in cyberspace.
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly
deployed in about sixty countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to seventy-five,
according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of
The Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye
told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.
In 2013, elite US forces were deployed in 134 countries around the
globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public
Affairs. This 123 percent increase during the Obama years demonstrates
how, in addition to conventional wars and a
CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and
extensive electronic spying,
the US has engaged in still another significant and growing form of
overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s
most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far
from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight,
increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic
consequences.
Growth Industry
Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown
steadily in the post-9/11 era. SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach
72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001. Funding for the
command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3
billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in
supplemental funding). Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed,
too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.
A recent
investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports,
found
evidence that US Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved
with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012–13. For
more than a month during the preparation of that
article,
however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total
number of countries to which special operators—Green Berets and Rangers,
Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews,
boat teams and civil affairs personnel—were deployed. “We don’t just
keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview
once the article had been filed. “We have to go searching through stuff.
It takes a long time to do that.” Hours later, just prior to
publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in
November of last year. “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to
134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.
Globalized Special Ops
Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven
explained his vision for special ops globalization. In a statement to
the House Armed Services Committee, he said, “USSOCOM is enhancing its
global network of SOF to support our interagency and international
partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging
threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent
presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where
necessary or appropriate…”
While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those
Special Operations forces are another matter. The 12 percent jump in
national deployments—from 120 to 134—during McRaven’s tenure reflects
his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth.
SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation
sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments
we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions
being carried out by America’s secret military.
Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in
training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi and the Seychelles Islands in the
Indian Ocean. In June, US Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese
and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in
Aqaba, Jordan. The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and
Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces. In
August, Green Berets
conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors. In September,
according to
media reports, US Special Operations forces joined elite troops from
the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand,
Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia—as well as their
counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China,
India and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded counterterrorism
exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.
In October, elite US troops
carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia,
kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being
driven off
under fire. In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian
operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The
next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group
conducted
a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft
at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while
undertaking
an evacuation mission in South Sudan. Green Berets then rang in the new
year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in
Bahlozi village in Kandahar province.
Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive
enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was
seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans
Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to
foreign audiences.” These would join an existing global network of ten
propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look
like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com,
Sabahi
which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East
known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called
Infosurhoy.com.
SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the
command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have
folks in every agency here in Washington, DC—from the CIA, to the FBI,
to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to
the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said
during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year.
Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of
departments and agencies where SOCOM is now
entrenched at thirty-eight.
134 Chances for Blowback
Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an
antiwar candidate,
President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief
whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA
trade-speak has long been called
blowback. While the Obama administration oversaw a US withdrawal from Iraq (
negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a
drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan (after a
major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the US military presence in
Africa, a
reinvigoration of
efforts in
Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “
pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet).
The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of
America’s drone war. While President Bush launched fifty-one such
strikes, President Obama has
presided
over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of
Investigative Journalism. Last year, alone, the US also engaged in
combat operations in Afghanistan,
Libya,
Pakistan,
Somalia, and
Yemen. Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower
Edward Snowden
have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of US
electronic surveillance during the Obama years. And deep in the shadows,
Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double
the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure.
In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of US military
operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole
regions aflame. More than ten years after America’s “
mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted
surge, the Iraq that America helped make is
in flames. A country with
no Al Qaeda presence before the
US invasion and a government
opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government
aligned with Iran and
two cities flying Al Qaeda flags.
A more recent US military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan
dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a US-supported
bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup
there carried out by a US-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody
terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing
short of a
terror diaspora in the region.
And today South Sudan—a nation the US shepherded into being, has supported
economically and
militarily (despite its reliance on
child soldiers), and has used as a
hush-hush base for Special Operations forces—is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward
civil war.
The Obama presidency has seen the US military’s elite tactical forces
increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with
Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have
little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly
they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. As
retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and
international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization
of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased
military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set
the stage for a war without end. “In short,” he
wrote
at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already
too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own
sake.”
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce
unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New
Yorkers will
remember well the
end result of
clandestine US support for
Islamic militants against the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day,
the Pentagon,
seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback.
Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than twelve years after
the US invaded the former and
almost ten years after it began conducting
covert attacks in the latter, the US is still dealing with that Cold War–era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting
missile strikes against an organization (the
Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency
supplied with missiles.
Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are
operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the
consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash
over the world. But if history is any guide, they will be felt—from
Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa and,
perhaps eventually, in the United States as well.
In his blueprint for the future,
SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven
has touted the globalization of US special ops as a means to “project
power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.” Last year, SOCOM may
have done just the opposite in 134 places.
Read Next:
Nick Turse’s investigation of SOCOM’s global network.