The remainder of America's forward-deployed special operators were scattered across the globe with just over 14% active in Africa, more than 10% in Europe, 8.5% in the Indo-Pacific region, and 3.75% in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. During any given week, commandos are deployed in about 82 nations.
Traditionally, America's elite forces have placed a heavy emphasis on "security cooperation" and "building partner capacity"; that is, the training, advising, and assisting of indigenous troops. In testimony to members of Congress last April, for instance, SOCOM commander General Richard Clarke asserted that, "for developing countries, security cooperation activities are key tools for strengthening relationships and attracting new partners while enabling them to tackle threats and challenges of common concern."
Common concerns are not, however, always of the utmost importance to the United States. In that same testimony, Clarke made special mention of so-called 127e ("127-echo") programs, named for the budgetary authority that allows U.S. Special Operations forces to use certain local troops as proxies in counterterrorism missions, especially those directed at "high-value targets."
"It allows," said Clarke, "small-footprint USSOF elements to take advantage of the skills and unique attributes of indigenous regular and irregular forces -- local area knowledge, ethnicity, and language skills -- to achieve effects that are critical to our mission objectives while mitigating risk to U.S. forces. This is especially true in remote or politically sensitive areas where larger U.S. formations are infeasible and/or the enemy leverages safe havens that are otherwise inaccessible to USSOF."
Used extensively across Africa and the Middle East, 127e programs can be run either by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secretive organization that controls the Navy's SEAL Team 6, the Army's Delta Force, and other special mission units, or by more generic "theater special operations forces." In Africa, these programs typically involve small numbers of U.S. special operators working with 80 to 120 specially trained and equipped indigenous personnel. "The use of 127e authority has directly resulted in the capture or killing of thousands of terrorists," Clarke claimed.
So-called direct action missions have led to the deaths of Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden, and countless other supposedly high-value targets, but some experts question the utility of these many attacks. Retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan, including as the combined joint special operations component commander there, as well as the chief of Special Operations Command Africa from 2015 to 2017, is one of them. Now running for the Senate in New Hampshire, he is critical of what he sees as an obsessive focus on killing one leader after another while not putting in the hard work of training local forces to achieve actual security and stability without U.S. technology and assistance. "You just can't kill your way to victory," Bolduc told TomDispatch.
Commando Crimes
In addition to questions about the efficacy of their tactics and strategy, Special Operations forces have recently been plagued by scandal and reports of criminal activity. "After several incidents of misconduct and unethical behavior threatened public trust and caused leaders to question Special Operations forces culture and ethics, USSOCOM initiated a Comprehensive Review," reads the executive summary of a January report on the subject. But that review is itself a bit of a puzzle.
SOCOM commanders have repeatedly called out wrongdoing by America's elite forces. In November 2018, then-SOCOM chief General Raymond Thomas co-authored an ethics memorandum for his troops. A month later, he also sent an email to them in which he wrote: "A survey of allegations of serious misconduct across our formations over the last year indicates that USSOCOM faces a deeper challenge of a disordered view of the team and the individual in our SOF culture."
In February 2019, SOCOM underwent an ethics review followed by a 90-day "focus period on ethics." Not long after, Thomas's successor also decried moral turpitude within the command. "In the recent past, members of our SOF units have been accused of violating that trust and failing to meet our high standards of ethical conduct this command demands," SOCOM commander General Richard Clarke told members of the House Appropriations Committee in April 2019. "We understand that criminal misconduct erodes the very trust that enables our success." Clarke, in fact, inherited self-assessments of SOCOM components ordered by Thomas and used them as the basis for that Comprehensive Review issued in January.
"This is a very detailed review that takes a hard look at ourselves," Clarke wrote in a letter to the SOF community released with the report. But despite employing a 12-person advisory team and an 18-person review team, despite their "55 engagements" and canvassing of more than "2,000 personnel across the SOF enterprise," there's no evidence of the review being "detailed" or the look all that "hard." In fact, the 69-page report fails to offer even an inkling of what "misconduct and unethical behavior" it was examining.
In 2019 alone, however, many examples came to light that could have been included in just such a review. For instance, a Marine Raider, Staff Sgt. Kevin Maxwell, Jr., pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in military prison for his role in the killing of Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar, an Army Green Beret, in Mali in 2017. Navy SEAL Adam Matthews was also sentenced to a year's confinement and a bad conduct discharge after pleading guilty to conspiracy, unlawful entry, hazing, obstruction of justice, and assault with battery, among other charges, in the attack on Melgar by fellow special operators. (It was meant to be a sexual assault, but led to the Green Beret's strangulation and death.) Another Navy SEAL and a Marine Raider accused in Melgar's death both face life in prison.
Last July, reports emerged that not only had members of SEAL Team 10 been caught using cocaine, but that commandos had long been cheating on urinalysis screenings. That same month, an entire platoon of Navy SEALs from SEAL Team 7 was removed from Iraq following reports of serious misconduct, including the rape of a female service member attached to the unit. Meanwhile, there have been rumors about even more serious misbehavior involving another SEAL Team 7 detachment in Yemen. In September 2019, three senior leaders of SEAL Team 7 were fired for failures in leadership that led to a breakdown of good order and discipline.
That same month, a complaint filed with the Department of Defense Inspector General accused Naval Special Warfare commander Rear Admiral Collin Green of "duplicitous actions" that were "done in an attempt to bolster his own reputation and protect his own career." A month later, four members of the Naval Special Warfare Command were arrested in Okinawa on various charges related to unruly behavior.
Accounts of rampant drug use among SEALs also emerged in the court martial of SEAL Edward Gallagher who, in a circus-like case, was acquitted of charges that he had killed noncombatants in Iraq, but convicted of posing for photographs with the corpse of a teenager he was accused of murdering. (After Navy officials sought to discipline Gallagher, potentially stripping him of the Trident pin that signifies membership in the SEALs, President Donald Trump intervened to reverse the decision.)
And all of this followed a string of black eyes for elite troops in recent years, including allegations of massacres, unjustified killings, murder, prisoner abuse, child rape, child sexual abuse, mutilations, and other crimes, as well as drug trafficking and the theft of government property by Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Air Force special operators, and Marine Raiders.
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