"Yes, Senator," Miller agreed.
It's likely as well that the members of the 82nd Airborne, perhaps even Lieutenant Miller and one or more post-9/11 privates, will deploy again to Afghanistan in the coming years. As the core of the military's Global Response Force, the 82nd Airborne Division is on-call to react anywhere in the world within 18 hours. It is a globe-trotting, rapid-response light infantry force that has seen recent service in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the Horn of Africa and shares its home, Fort Bragg, with U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
It's also likely that an increasing number of Special Operations forces from Fort Bragg and elsewhere will be spread ever more equally across the planet, while deployments to perpetual hot-spots like Afghanistan and Iraq continue. A generation of special operators has already deployed repeatedly to South Asia, the Middle East, and increasingly Africa. Some of them are now entering the special ops hall of fame despite the fact that not one post-9/11 war has been definitively won, the number of terror groups aligned against the United States has markedly increased, and the number of special ops battle fronts -- from Afghanistan to Cameroon, Iraq to Tunisia, Yemen to Somalia, the Philippines to Niger, Libya to Syria -- in this country's forever wars has only grown.
Tactical successes have been many -- battles won, territory taken, foes killed, enemy leaders eliminated. But failures have been far greater, including ill-conceived deployment policies that neglect to link SOF missions to strategic outcomes, man-hunting being substituted for strategy, and commanders leaning on Green Berets and Navy SEALs to solve national security problems -- issues that ought to be addressed by policymakers, not commandos.
In his confirmation hearing, General Miller put a spotlight on one of the most critical shortcomings of Washington's "infinite war," one that has afflicted every level of the U.S. establishment from the White House and the Pentagon to the special ops community: a failure of imagination. After acknowledging that the war in Afghanistan -- the one he has been fighting on and off for almost two decades -- was "generational," the four-star general admitted what he had failed to consider 17 years before as a lieutenant colonel.
"This young guy sitting behind me," he said, referring to his uniformed son, "I never anticipated that his cohort would be in a position to deploy as I sat there in 2001."
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. He recently covered an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Democratic Republic of Congo for Vice News. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
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Copyright 2018 Nick Turse
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