Tier One

Polish GROM storms the battlefield like a crack of thunder—swift, unyielding, and impossible to ignore.

Nothing to see here, just four Delta Force operators hanging out in the office.

Delta operators Geo Hand and Pat McNamara are shown here wearing flight suits.

It was early afternoon on October 11th, 2016 when TigerSwan’s program manager, retired Delta Force Sergeant Major John Porter, met with Silverton’s owner, Carl Clifton, inside a hangar at the Mandan Municipal Airport. The hangar was initially used by Silverton security as a clandestine office for their intelligence cell that collected information on the protesters, […]

Years later, when he read a newspaper article that said Beckwith had a sign on his desk at his Texas-based security company which read, “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” he had been disappointed in the man he now considered his mentor.  He wrote him a scathing letter, and one of the […]

It was such a fine line, this difference between a legal and an illegal killing.  In the shadowy world of espionage and counter-terrorism, the line was even more difficult to define.  Yes, the men and one of the women under his command had already killed more than two dozen people since the operation began in […]

Part of me dies inside when I hear people talk about “tier one” or white “vanilla” special operations in relation to so-called black special operations.  The public throws these words around, but realistically, they only do it because of the the number of active duty and retired special operations soldiers who use these words without having a clue […]

The military is full of professional jargon and SOF is certainly no exception.  With the growing interest in Special Operations, I hear a lot of terminologies used to describe us which makes me cringe.  The worst part is that some of these terms are thrown around so often that they become an institution in and […]

In the 1970’s a new form of warfare was emerging: international terrorism.  Two counter-terrorist missions that America initially found itself unable to cope with were situations in which a terrorist barricaded himself inside a structure with hostages or when hostages were taken inside a tubular vehicle such as an airplane.  While the Army’s premier counter-terrorist […]

“Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, […]