Coordinating America’s Elite Warriors
Posted By Juliana Geran Pilon On March 18, 2017 @ 4:50 am
The celebrity status of special operation forces (SOFs) after such high-profile successes as killing Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages with near-miraculous precision, though lucrative for Hollywood, has proven a mixed blessing for the warriors; previously, keeping a low profile had been their modus operandi. Current notoriety notwithstanding, their status alongside the traditional military is unclear, as conventional methods of warfighting continue to dominate Pentagon thinking.
It wasn't always like this. As Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Thomas H. Henriksen illustrates in his excellent new book, Eyes, Ears & Daggers, SOF-style irregular warfare goes back to the Revolutionary War. It all started with Nathan Hale, whom he calls "the progenitor of the soldier-spy fusion that has become so noteworthy in the early twenty-first century conflict with jihadi terrorism." But it didn't take long for America to turn away from that model of warfare.
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