Black Ops & Intel

This comes to us from a current YPG cadre regarding how the Syrian Kurdish Army is organized in terms of its structure and how the men and women in these units actually fight on the ground. -Jack Havel Hassan (havel means comrade in Kurdish), an ethnic Turk and member of the Turkish Communist Party, rested his mangled leg […]

The artifice on which every intra-state relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) stands is: “In China, ‘win-win” means China wins twice.” There have been a few articles on the PRC here on SOFREP. I recently worked on a project that dealt with this, and thus my decision to write on it was appropriately […]

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. military interventions in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq have left most observers without doubt that the U.S. and her allies would triumph against any plausible adversary in the event of a full-scale, conventional war. Whilst there are certainly no misgivings to the incredible military power […]

I was able to meet with an Ukrainian SOF Veterans Association, and they told me I was the first foreigner to meet them to talk about the war. It was weird as most of them served in Afghanistan along with their Russian counterparts and they still keep talking through social networks even with the ongoing war.

So, you wanna be a hacker? First, buy lots of black t-shirts and start listening to Dub Step, as one of our SOFREP readers brought up. Once you have an entire closet full of black t-shirts and you are listening to mind-numbing electronica, the real work can begin. Obviously, there is no single path to […]

I retired 180-A, Special Operations Technician, and spent the majority of my Special Forces time working in Central and South America. I earned a CIB in Operation Desert Storm before my retirement in 1992 and was a member of the coveted P.I.G Team, also known as a “Green Light” Team in 7th SFG. I am […]

Despite being crushingly defeated by the joint efforts of a French/Malian/West African military effort last year, Northern Mali Jihadists may be slowly crawling out of their hideouts, like desert ghosts, as France prepares to launch a new mission to fight those groups. Earlier this month, Ansar Dine’s leader, Iyad Ag Aly, resufaced in a rare, […]

In 2009 I was a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant deployed to Tal Afar, Iraq.  Being a Weapons Sergeant of course, I liked all the toys.  We got to play with all manner of pistols, sub-machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, machine guns, mortar systems, and more.  Being overseas with 24/7 access to connex containers filled […]

The following are a series of seven reforms proposed to eliminate corruption in Indian’s intelligence services, harmonize operations, and establish a system that is self-correcting and self-learning. 1. Establish an Intelligence Fusion Cell that works under the Prime Minister’s Office. One of the major problems in India’s intelligence services is harmonizing internal and external intelligence […]

Currently at least one Intelligence Bureau officer is standing trial for extra-judicial killings. The charge is that he colluded with local police officers to stage a “terrorist encounter” as an excuse to execute four Muslim men in Gujarat in 2004. Between 2002 and 2006 it is alleged that the same group executed up to 20 […]

If the purpose of an intelligence service is to inform their nation’s leaders and prevent them from being surprised, then the Sino-Indian war of 1962 was perhaps India’s worst intelligence failure. While Indian military leaders had assumed that Chinese forces would come from the north if they decided to invade what is now Arunachal Pradesh, […]

India’s intelligence services are not simply a history, but rather a legacy, which they inherited from the British colonial empire. In the colonial years, the intelligence services were used primarily as a tool to suppress Indian nationalists. Human Intelligence was gathered mainly by the Central Intelligence Bureau, but also by, “Intelligence units of the armed […]