America’s elite commandos have a problem: They are too damn good for their own good.
Ever since the global war on terror launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the insistence for their brand of brio, brains, and brawn has grown year by year. Special operations troops now have become the go-to force for missions to counter violent extremism in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and places whose names appear only on the darkest of ledgers.
As the United States brought hundreds of thousands of conventional troops home over the past decade, the model for fighting violent extremism became employing small numbers of America’s most highly trained, highly skilled forces to work with local fighters.
We’re at the point where every combatant commander wants commandos. After all, when going after the worst of the worst, who wouldn’t want the best of the best?
And when called on, these shadow warriors who have achieved an exalted, almost mythic status, never say “no.”
“We have a ‘can-do’ culture with a bias toward action,” says Gen. Rich Clarke, head of U.S. Special Operations Command based in Tampa, Florida.
But that revered status as America’s most-favored forces has been marred by a spate of widely publicized and shocking incidents: accusations of war crimes, murder, drug dealing, and theft. Similar allegations have surfaced elsewhere among the troops, but in special operations, they carry a seemingly heavier weight of betrayal. Clarke wouldn’t stand for it.
“Every time something came across his desk about this, you could feel it in the halls of SOCOM,” said an analyst inside the command’s headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. “He wants to root this up and get rid of it.”
The level-gazed Clarke, with his four stars and whose badass uniform awards rack includes a Ranger tab and two awards of the war fighter’s Combat Infantryman’s Badge, ordered a comprehensive review of the culture and ethics of his troops.
The findings draw a straight line between continuous deployments and some notable breakdowns in good order and discipline.
“Nearly 20 years of continuous conflict have imbalanced that culture to favor force employment and mission accomplishment over the routine activities that ensure leadership, accountability, and discipline,” Clarke said when releasing the unclassified report last month.
Clarke’s Special Operations Forces, or “SOF” in military parlance, include Navy SEALs, the Army Green Berets, and Delta Force, as well as Air Force and Marine Corps units, a total of roughly 73,000 troops out of an active-duty force of 1.3 million.
They are America’s super troops: stealthy and deadly, but also erudite, creative thinkers, equally able to muscle or MacGyver their way out of trouble.
The stress of unrelenting missions and back-to-back deployments has not diminished their combat effectiveness. Still, the review found a perverse downside: a shift in who were the role models in the elite, often insular community.
The report notes that from the time recruits first arrive for the grueling training to the day they arrive at their first units, “Personnel are encouraged to emulate those who have tactical deployment experience. Deployments forward, specifically to locations where combat is a possibility, are valued above all other things, and perceived as the ultimate expression of competence.”
That, in turn, resulted in an over-reverence for some badass Rambos who didn’t always represent the combination of character and competence demanded of the country’s most elite forces.
“Those who did deploy forward, specifically in some degree of combat, are held as almost an infallible standard-bearer for the rest of the organization to emulate — seemingly regardless if it is a positive or negative standard,” the report found.
It’s an erosion of core values that were captured in President Trump’s tweet in the case of Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, a decorated Green Beret, who Trump pardoned before he faced trial on charges of murdering a suspected Taliban bomb-maker in 2010.
“We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” the president said.
The tweet made many senior officers in the Pentagon uncomfortable. Still, the sentiment resonates with some special operations forces at the tip of the spear, who bristled at a letter from Clarke to troops under his command. The letter suggested that a disproportionate focus on “mission accomplishment at the expense of the training and development” in some cases had “set conditions for unacceptable conduct to occur due to a lack of leadership, discipline, and accountability.”
Special operators who spoke to the Washington Examiner off base and after duty in Tampa did not hold their fire in commenting on the contents of the review.
“It’s laughable,” said Bobby, 35, an Air Force commando who was in town on temporary assignment. “The whole thing is a joke. The military tells us to be savages, but now they want us to be choirboys.”
While Clarke underscored that the review did not find a systemic ethics problem among SOF troops, it did cite “recent incidents of individual and group misconduct” that “spanned the spectrum of offenses from minor misconduct to the most serious of crimes.”
The answer, the report concludes, is not to crack down on commandos who occasionally stray outside the lines but to end the over-reliance on a small corps or crack troops to perform missions that can be carried out equally as well by America’s conventional forces.
The troops have their ideas on what to do.
“Treat us right,” Bobby said. “Don’t send us some vague letter with sections in bold, telling us we’re great but, damn it, we need to improve through some process we haven’t figured out.”
“I’d agree on the leadership piece,” said John, 32, an Army sergeant. “You want wisdom, experience, all that good stuff.”
The report calls for an internal review of all current SOF missions “to identify forces deployed in excess of valid requirements” and bring them home.
There, the focus will be on grooming junior leaders with “the required balance of character and competence.”
“It is vital that Components ensure that from recruiting to entry-level training, and through pipeline courses, new SOF personnel are exposed to instructors and staff that demonstrate the highest levels of competence and character,” the report recommends.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
Susan Katz Keating is the Washington Examiner’s senior editor for defense and national security. She contributed reporting from Tampa, Florida.
