Specialoperations

“How the hell am I going to fill 1000 sandbags…and how did get myself into this mess?” Sometimes life throws her curveballs at you and you have to do your best to sit back in the box and hit it the opposite way. And in doing so, you can take a bad situation and definitely […]

“…We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence then is not an act but a habit” Aristotle One of the first questions we always get from any aspiring SOF candidate is, “What do I have to do to get Selected?” While it is a legitimate question, it is a bit simplistic. There is no one specific […]

In 1866, just about 18 months after the Civil War, the U.S. military suffered its worst defeat in the West until 10 years later when LTC George Custer and the men of the 7th Cavalry would be wiped out at the Little Big Horn. The defeat took place in Wyoming along the Bozeman Trail. Here, […]

On the evening of December 13, 2003, in the small Iraqi town of ad-Dawr outside of Tikrit, elements of Task Force 121, and the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Hussein hid in a spider hole and was found by a Delta Force operator. The operation was named after the […]

While the majority of people associated with our Special Operations Forces consider Robert Rogers as the father of the Ranger Regiment, his troops weren’t the true first American Rangers, that distinction, which outside of historians in New England many people don’t know, falls to Benjamin Church. Benjamin Church created the first true Ranger force, circa […]

Because most of our military bases are in the southern United States, one area that can be neglected, especially when preparing for Special Operations training is cold weather training.  It is surprising how many young people who enter the military don’t know or understand the basics of cold weather preparation. First some of the basics; […]

Okay, so anyone who knows me or has read any of my articles in the past knows that I am and have always been a huge Merrell fan. Owner of too many pairs to count, Merrells are my go-to boots for anything. But that may be subject to change. I like to scan and read […]

Time flies when you are having fun, or in the case of the United States Army Special Operations Command, when you are employed so heavily, the years, never mind the days and months fly by. In 1989, USASOC was activated and although it wasn’t that long ago, the world, as well as the command has […]

On a cold December evening in December 1773, American colonists, members of the Sons of Liberty protested the British Tea Act by disguising themselves as American Indians and threw an entire shipment of tea from England into Boston Harbor. This political protest and the subsequent reactions of the English government, set in motion a series of […]

We always get some questions vis-à-vis about passing Selection and most of the questions center around rucking and the land navigation course. While each has their own challenges for the Selection candidate, you’ll have to utilize both together while passing land navigation as you’ll be conducting it with a rucksack on. While we encourage our […]

A good friend of mine is a career law enforcement professional here in New England and although we don’t hang out on a regular basis, whenever we run into one another we’ll stop and catch up. So weaving around a stoppage in the road a few weeks ago, I saw my friend trying to make […]

One of the best-known cavalrymen of the Civil War was John Singleton Mosby. He served under J.E.B. Stuart for the Confederacy during the Fredericksburg and Gettysburg campaigns and started his own cavalry unit, the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry, which became known as Mosby’s Rangers, or Mosby’s Raiders. Mosby’s Rangers operated out of Middleburg, Virginia. […]