Military History

Exercise Bold Alligator – MARSOC is game on

USSOCOM – SOF Truth #5 “Most Special Operations require non-SOF assistance” Bold Alligator 2012 involved more than 25 naval vesicles, 14,000 personnel from 5 different countries. This was the largest Joint/Combined exercise in 10 years and reinforced more of a traditional large scale amphibious landing and assault operation. MARSOC was set center stage for the […]

How Trump and his advisors could tackle issues facing the intelligence community

In 1943, in the darkest depths of the Second World War the British sent a small, select group of intelligence officers from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) into Nazi-occupied Albania. Living under extreme conditions, one step ahead of capture at all times and short on supplies and support, the SOE personnel began to produce immediate […]

British SAS finish the Iranian Embassy siege

On April 30, 1980, 6 men approached the Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate, in South Kensington, London. They were Arabs, members of a little known dissident group called the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan, an oil rich area of Iran which had ruled itself autonomously until 1925. Their goals were to re-establish […]

How Iranian weapons are ending up in Yemen

Weapon shipments intercepted in the Arabian sea by Australian, French and U.S. warships this year contained large quantities of Russian and Iranian weapons, some of which had markings similar to munitions recovered from Houthi fighters in Yemen, according to a new report released by an independent research group Wednesday. In October, U.S. officials claimed to have captured […]

UDT/SEAL history in brief

In the media of late, SEALs have been lumped in with a great many other SOF units seeming to be just another elite form of a conventional unit. However, due to their many unique assets, frogmen have an illustrious history with many noteworthy accomplishments outside of the predominantly land warfare mission of the last 15 […]

See the Historic Maps Declassified by the CIA

Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush and several advisors gathered at Camp David to weigh the country’s options. On the table in front of them, as you can see in the photo below, was a map of Afghanistan created by cartographers at the Central Intelligence Agency. It was […]

Fidel Castro and his unique history with US Special Operations Forces

In the 1960’s, the United States was forced to deal with a communist regime 90 miles away from its shores.  Due to the threat of mutually assured destruction with a direct war with the Soviet Union, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had to tread carefully concerning Fidel Castro and Cuba.  Neither administration wanted […]

Meet the Green Beret who designed the HALO jump wings

In a previous article about Blue Light, America’s first dedicated counter-terrorism unit, one of the Green Berets assigned to the outfit was named Gregory Dailey.  He not only re-designed the Blue Light emblem but also went on to design the HALO jump wings which are still in use by the Army to this day. The […]

Soviet secrets: Are there dead cosmonauts in orbit above Earth?

On April 12th, 1961, a Russian man named Yuri Gagarin made history aboard a Soviet Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft.  For years, the United States and Soviet Union had been using the barrier between our world and beyond as a benchmark to test each nation’s greatest technological and engineering advances, and on that day, Gagarin achieved an […]

Think like a Green Beret: Small victories.

In the Special Forces pipeline, everyone goes to SERE school (Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape). One of the most powerful concepts they teach is winning small victories. If you can win even a small victory, you can stay motivated in an impossible situation. SERE school starts with classroom training on the Code of Conduct, then continues with […]