| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Interesting Review Of SOCOM |
| 2011-08-08 |
| From a force of about 37,000 in the early 1990s, Special Operations Command personnel have grown to almost 60,000, about a third of whom are career members of SOCOM; the rest have other military occupational specialties, but periodically cycle through the command. Growth has been exponential since September 11, 2001, as SOCOM's baseline budget almost tripled from $2.3bn to $6.3bn. If you add in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has actually more than quadrupled to $9.8bn in these years. Not surprisingly, the number of its personnel deployed abroad has also jumped four-fold. Further increases, and expanded operations, are on the horizon. Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command - the last of the service branches to be incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 - indicated, for instance, that he foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600. "I see them as a force someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000," he said at a June breakfast with defence reporters in Washington. Long-term plans already call for the force to increase by 1,000. During his recent Senate confirmation hearings, Navy Vice Admiral William McRaven, the incoming SOCOM chief and outgoing head of JSOC (which he commanded during the bin Laden raid) endorsed a steady manpower growth rate of 3 per cent to 5 per cent a year, while also making a pitch for even more resources, including additional drones and the construction of new special operations facilities. A former SEAL who still sometimes accompanies troops into the field, McRaven expressed a belief that, as conventional forces are drawn down in Afghanistan, special ops troops will take on an ever greater role. Iraq, he added, would benefit if elite US forces continued to conduct missions there past the December 2011 deadline for a total American troop withdrawal. He also assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that "as a former JSOC commander, I can tell you we were looking very hard at Yemen and at Somalia". Article is expansive, and unusually objective, coming from Alternet via Aljazeera. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #6 I have to admit I don't have a problem with this. Yeah, what she said. If you are going to make war on your country, don't whine like a little girl when your country makes war on you. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2011-08-08 19:00 |
| #5 JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes US citizens Which would include anyone with the sobriquet "al-Amriki" and that Yemeni prodigy (although admittedly he's gotten a bit long in the tooth for prodigy status) Anwar al-Awlaki, imam to the Pantibomber, Faisl the Fizzle Bomber, and Maj. Dr. Hassan, the convicted paraplegic. I have to admit I don't have a problem with this. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2011-08-08 15:14 |
| #4 an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine -- GOOD! |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-08 14:22 |
| #3 Born of a failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, in which eight US service members died Not exactly. The concept of a unified command for special ops has been around for sometime, e.g. SOG during the Viet war. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-08-08 14:11 |
| #2 One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes US citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal "kill/capture" campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine". Has that certain Al Jizz hyperbole and bias that one usually expects from Al Jazeera. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-08-08 14:05 |
| #1 Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, the former head of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command - the last of the service branches to be incorporated into SOCOM in 2006 - indicated, for instance, that he foresees a doubling of his former unit of 2,600. That's if he can continue to hire enough former 18's contractors out of Bragg to work at Quantico and provide the necessary training and career development. "I see them as a force someday of about 5,000, like equivalent to the number of SEALs that we have on the battlefield. Between [5,000] and 6,000," Telling statement I'd say. SOF has become a TOOL of OGA, who will eventually turn on them. Expansion is not about mission, it's about DOLLARS! Just my humble opinion. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2011-08-08 11:28 |