TWO WEEKS AGO, Admiral Eric T. Olson, former Navy SEAL and commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), complained in an interview that U.S. special operations forces are overcommitted and stretched too thin. “We are going to fewer countries, staying for shorter periods of time, and with smaller numbers of people than historically we have done.” This is of particular concern because, in both counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations, special operations forces are the sharp end of the spear, the troops with the precise mix of skills and training needed to fight “asymmetrical” adversaries on their own terms. Throughout the history of the U.S. military, special operations troops have been viewed with a mixture of suspicion and resentment by “regular” military leaders, who frequently fail to understand the special operations mentality, the proper employment of special operations forces, and their limitations in conventional combat roles. Typically, the United States has raised special operations units in an ad hoc manner for a particular conflict, then rapidly decommissioned them as soon as the war was over. Thus, in World War II, we raised Army Ranger battalions, a Special Services Brigade, Marine Raider battalions, combat swimmers and Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs), only to abolish most of them after VJ-Day.

We found that we needed their capabilities again in the Korean War, and went through the trouble of re-learning much that we had forgotten after World War II, only to demobilize most these units yet again once the Korean armistice was signed. A handful of small Ranger companies and Special Forces Groups (the Green Berets) carried the flame through the 1950s, until John Kennedy (a military romantic at heart), made the Special Forces his pet project, a way of fighting the elusive Viet Cong at their own game of guerrilla warfare.