Looking Downrange

And though I wear a uniform
I was not born to fight 
--Last Year's Man, Leonard Cohen 
_____________________

[Sometimes a piece gets lost in the queue.  Today's post was a response to a Special Forces Valentine written last summer by Joe Pappalardo in Popular Mechanics (The Future of Special Ops).]

There is much contradiction in this piece, but that does not hamper the article's goal, which is to re-create Top Gun, 2012-style.  Hurt Locker and now Zero-Dark-Thirty shill director Bigelow is doing her part too in creating the mystique, our own Leni Riefenstahl as Naomi Wolf recently noted (RAW's Lisa said it first, but she didn't publish it, so it doesn't count.)

We must must remeber that the Ranger - SF dichotomy has become less distinct as SF's mission becomes more direct action (which was in the past the basic orientation of the regular combat arms branches.) The primary distinction between normal soldiers and the SOF was in their communication style: regular forces communicate with their own, whereas the SOF are trained to talk with a host nation's indigenous assets; this demarcation between conventional and non-conventional soldiers has been dissolving.

Special Forces and Rangers are both Light Infantry, so when and how did Light Infantry Special Operations become nation builders?  Where is the data showing that building foreign armies and police forces produces stable nations?  Army-building does not equate with nation-building: Strong armies and police do not ensure either democracy or stability. If our Special Forces are so special, why are they pulling guard duty like buck Privates in a leg unit? 

A team leader said, "We all have Type-A personalities on this team."  Type-A could just be another way of saying that attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the hallmark of the new SF; this is not necessarily a positive. A Ranger - SF - SOF selection process that selects for Type-A's indicates a break with the historical SF qualities of calm-thinking and logic.

--Not too phallic (fr. The Future of Special Ops)

How do soldiers teach a nation to take of themselves?  If these soldiers are "warrior-politicians", as a team leader is quoted as saying, then why are they not under State Department auspices?  The Department of Defense is not about politics, it is about killing people and breaking things; the SF skill set is more about breaking things than building things (which is why it is under the DoD aegis.)

The article does concede that "SOCOM has become the U.S. government's tool of choice for soft power projection ... by default":

"'Most of our resources, when it comes to these types of efforts, are placed in the Department of Defense,' says Rick Nelson, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who served with Joint Special Operations Command. 'The reality is that the State Department and USAID are not funded at appropriate levels.'"

A typical American bias is seen in the following:

"These "indirect-action" missions include training foreign troops and teaching locals how to establish responsible governments. The strategy also promotes economic development by building bazaars, encouraging farmers to grow extra food crops to sell, and constructing roads. No one makes video games based on indirect-action missions."

But -- what if the locals do not want any of these things? Laying things up for a rainy day fits in with our oft-preached (though seldom practiced) capitalistic ideology, but if you are nomadic, where are you gonna store your surplus?  It is not like there is a storage mall around the corner. (And heaven forfend Storage Wars break out.)

A team member is described tooling around in a "$470,000 mine-resistant, all-terrain vehicle" but by placing SF assets in fun off-road vehicles we have just reinvented the wheel.  Placing SF in such vehicles merely creates a new mechanized unit, albeit one that happens to wear SF - Ranger -Airborne tabs.

Why not use plain old Mechanized Infantry for this function (since this is what they do)? Putting SF  assets into an up-gunned vehicle that is naught but a modern chariot has nothing to do with nation-building.  It is simply a weapons platform, like an Apache helicopter with wheels -- whoopee, we have reinvented the Armor Branch.

The following concept escapes Ranger's comprehension:

"The attacks on Afghans who support the government in Kabul—and the United States—will only grow as 2014 approaches. The police units that spec ops teams train have been the targets of infiltration and murder. 'We talk to guys who are over there now,' Alpha says. 'We're expecting a hard fight.'"

How can SF teams train credible indigenous police forces when nobody on the SF teams has any civilian police force experience? Why do we pretend that Afghan police are anything other than paramilitary assets that have no police function other than that of supporting a corrupt and morally bankrupt puppet regime?  Why are our SF involved in such morally dubious activities?

So basically, the future of SF looks as confused as its recent past has been.  When will we ever learn?