Why Are US Special Operations Forces Deployed in Over 100 Countries?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/177797/why-are-us-special-operations-forces-deployed-over-100-countries


US Special Operations Forces around the world, 2012-2013 (key below article). (Map courtesy of TomDispatch and Google)


“Dude, I don’t need to play these stupid games. I know what you’re trying to do.” With that, Major Matthew Robert Bockholt hung up on me.

More than a month before, I had called US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a series of basic questions: In how many countries were US Special Operations Forces deployed in 2013? Are manpower levels set to expand to 72,000 in 2014? Is SOCOM still aiming for growth rates of 3 percent to 5 percent per year? How many training exercises did the command carry out in 2013? Basic stuff.

And for more than a month, I waited for answers. I called. I left messages. I emailed. I waited some more. I started to get the feeling that Special Operations Command didn’t want me to know what its Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos—the men who operate in the hottest of hotspots and most remote locales around the world—were doing.

Then, at the last moment, just before my filing deadline, Special Operations Command got back to me with an answer so incongruous, confusing and contradictory that I was glad I had given up on SOCOM and tried to figure things out for myself.

[BobUp]

1. To spy.

[warrant46]

13. Its hard to be The World's Policeman

For the 1% so they can Pillage

[JustAnotherGen]

2. My father has been gone since August of 2012

He was one of the first Green Berets. We had a lot of interesting convos the summer of 2005 and the week of his death.

I was born in then West Germany. He had been out playing 'war games' for 2 weeks prior to my birth date - and got back from CENTRAL AMERICA to Wiesbaden literally three hours prior to my birth.


Where they 'are' is of no concern - it's just how it 'looks' where they are.

[stevenleser]

6. Yep. I think this is easily explained by one statement with some bullet points

We're regarded as having some of the best special forces in the world, so the militaries of many of the world's countries want our help training their own military and special forces. And second, our special forces have the most experience dealing with terrorism and so are highly sought after to teach that particular skillset.

[JustAnotherGen]

12. Well in Central America

I don't know that they wanted our help . . . there and South America. In hindsight - my father would have flipped out if he had been alive when we went on our honeymoon . . . to Belize.

Famous Not Last Words - "Our country does things that they tell you only other countries do." Drilled into me since I was in grade school.

That and that Jeff McDonald was innocent and the military killed his wife and kids and did what they did to him as a warning to other special forces guys who thought they might like to talk or get themselves out of their brainwashing. *sigh* I'm 50/50 on believing that one.

[stevenleser]

14. No question, but my sense is that 90% of these 100+ countries are routine training deployments. nt

[jsr]

3. Because we rule the planet and we have so much money

Our budget has got a lot of numbers in it.

[The_Commonist]

4. To protect corporate interests.

[madokie]

5. Corporations

Gotta keep the money flowing to the rich mans coffers you know

[Romulox]

7. Um, freedom??? Duh. nt

[NuclearDem]

8. So we can quickly switch between Eurasia and Eastasia without skipping a beat.

[jakeXT]

9. Interesting ... alphabet agencies, academia and cyber propaganda

While congressional pushback has thus far thwarted Admiral McRaven’s efforts to create a SOCOM satellite headquarters for the more than 300 special operators working in Washington, DC, (at the cost of $10 million annually), the command has nonetheless stationed support teams and liaisons all over the capital in a bid to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C.—from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center in 2013. Referring to the acronyms of the many agencies with which SOCOM has forged ties, McRaven continued: “If there are three letters, and in some cases four, I have a person there. And they have had a reciprocal agreement with us. I have somebody in my headquarters at Tampa.” Speaking at Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of agencies where SOCOM is currently embedded at thirty-eight.

---

In remarks before the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral McRaven noted that his Washington operation, the SOCOM NCR, “conducts outreach to academia, non-governmental organizations, industry, and other private sector organizations to get their perspective on complex issues affecting SOF.” Speaking at the Wilson Center, he was even more blunt: “We also have liaison officers with industry and with academia… We put some of our best and brightest in some of the academic institutions so we can understand what academia is thinking about.”

Not content with a global presence in the physical world, SOCOM has also taken to cyberspace where it operates the Trans Regional Web Initiative, a network of ten propaganda websites that are run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets. These shadowy sites—including KhabarSouthAsia.com; Magharebia, which targets North Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com—state only in fine print that they are “sponsored by” the US military.

[RC]

10. Another article from the link at the bottom:

The US Has Bombed at Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001
Why are so many of our “surgical” strikes going so terribly wrong?


The headline—“Bride and Boom!”—was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a US drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners—“terror” or “Al Qaeda suspects”—in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the United States had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.” Ba-boom!

As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately. “A US drone strike targeting al Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday—a wedding party heading to the festivities.”

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance. In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by US air power. If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of US war-making since December 2001 when the first partyof Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A US drone…took out a likely target.”


http://www.thenation.com/article/177684/us-has-bombed-least-eight-wedding-parties-2001

Apparently our owners goal is to rule the world. Eventually the terrorism we inflict on the rest of the world, will be brought home to control us. Count on it. We, you and I, will be seen as being no better than the common citizen in any other country.
A picnic in a park - suspected terrorist group planing something.
A deer hunting party? Obviously, one or more has terrorists connections. Military aged men with guns. What else could it be?
A duck hunting party? Obviously a terrorist training exercise.
Your daughter's wedding? Sure looked like cover for a terrorist meeting. One of them was a known agitator protester malcontent terrorist. Sorry about your daughter, though.

[alc]

11. because we don't have enough special forces

We obviously need to increase the military budget so we can put them in all 180+ countries.

And decrease the physical requirements to get more women (and men) in the special forces.