Foreign Internal Defense

The deadly ambush in Niger in 2017, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, revealed to a dumbfounded public the silent war that has been taking place in the Sahel. Aside from U.S. troops, several other countries have a strong presence in the area. Belgium is one of them. And its Special Forces Group […]

During my time embedded with Kurdish Peshmerga forces, I spent the majority of it in a training and advising role when not conducting combat operations. With this position I have come to acquire a vast amount of experience in what it requires to train soldiers to specific standards. There are basically two routes when it […]

Over the years, many have lamented the end of Special Forces, foreseeing the destruction of the Green Berets, a slipping of training and selection standards, and plenty of general navel-gazing about how it “use to be.”  Hell, I remember buying a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine in the PX at Fort Bragg over a […]

In the tactical world, the word instructor is widely overused and has become an over-saturated description for many people. The meaning has become null in the sense that instructing and teaching are two very different approaches to the problem and the solution. For real world applications (high threat) instructing the solution isn’t enough as to […]

And I discovered that my castles stand Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand -Coldplay-                              The American major was ready to murder the two top government officials                           […]

Last March, China quietly deployed troops to Syria. The soldiers, according to Chinese officials, trained members of the Syrian army, offering advice on medicine and logistics. Despite how little fanfare surrounded this move, it was, in fact, very significant: this is the first time China has sent troops to the Middle East for any reason […]

One of our readers asked if we’d discuss some of the training that goes into Unconventional Warfare, which we’ll from this point address as UW.  But it is kind of putting the cart before the horse somewhat. Many of, if not most of our readers at SpecialOperations.com are aspiring candidates to become members of our […]

Here at SpecialOperations.com, we frequently get questions from our readers, many of whom are or will shortly be aspiring members of our Special Operations Forces (SOF). Since most of our articles deal with the training aspect of SOF, we always welcome them. We had a question and answer session this past weekend in one of […]

When mentioning Special Operations missions, the talk generally centers around those direct action missions, the raids on suspected terrorists’ locations, and the like. Everyone likes those linear, tangible missions and the results are much easier to gauge the success or failure from. But in the Unconventional Warfare or Counterinsurgency environment, the results are harder to […]

The Marine Corps hadn’t had a Special Operations unit since World War II, but all of that changed in 2003 when on June of that year, the Marine Corps and USSOCOM formed Marine Corps Special Operations Command Detachment One (MCSOCOM Det 1) to explore unit level Marine Corps participation in USSOCOM. Prior to this, Marine […]

Read Part 1 HERE The Light Reaction Company nearly had their first counter-terrorism training course cut short as the military wanted to deploy them immediately down south to Basilan. The mission was to locate and rescue two American missionaries who had been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf. Martin and Garcia Burnham were taken from a resort […]

In the aftermath of 9/11, the bread and butter of the defense industry shifted in many ways from focusing on big-ticket Cold War items like tanks and fighter jets to the world of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. With this new paradigm came waves and waves of self-appointed experts, clueless academics, and hucksters trying to sell crap […]