If not you, who else is going to look out for your ass?

Personal responsibility begins with looking out for yourself.

Just like in the airplane — put on the oxygen mask BEFORE you put it on the child. Otherwise you are going to be of no help to the child, and just become a burden to others as another victim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Special_Operations_Command

Some day some historian will write an account of how Special Forces, originally conceived as organizers of local resistance to the enemy in question became transformed, via, for example, Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam Era, into the bleeding edge of wet work in the shadows—ideally with local accomplices but, now increasingly in cooperation with drones and other high-tech toys.

The U.S. Special Forces (not to get too far into the weeds, but you seem to be making the common terminological mistake of referring to SOCOM as a whole as Special Forces) can trace their origin to the OSS and the Jedburgh teams. There’s an Afghanistan connection in there, as Churchill was an admirer of butcher and both while fighting the Pashtun in British India.

I do think there is an argument to be made in favor of the night raid strategy, but having lived in a place were people went to bed at night with an honest fear that someone dressed in black was going to kick in their door before sunrise I am consistently creeped out by how unproblematically it is presented in American media, Frontline being a happy exception. The latest Frontline is a good one, too.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification in regards to SOCOM members. The Pararescuers are life savers first and foremost and the why of the Special Forces is to provide a foreign training capability. “JSOC”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-the-militarys-joint-special-operations-command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html is at the center of the kill or capture efforts, though non-Tier 1 units are also involved.

I assume there are those who would like to see a COINcentric military (fewer and fewer every day, hopefully), but I think the nation-building stuff can just as well be read as mission specific to Iraq and Afghanistan. USFK and the 3rd Marine Division have remained pretty clear in their post-Berlin Wall raison d’être, for example.

Anthropologists have a way of talking about “the military” as if the military was an undifferentiated blob. Those of us with a bit more intimate perspective (in my case a daughter and son-in-law who are both Annapolis graduates and did tours in the Middle East—for a time we were one of the few families I knew who subscribed both to The Nation and to the Proceedings of the Naval Institute), the situation is more complex, involving both inter-service rivalries and on-going attempts to rethink the mission for different parts of the military. What seems to be happening at the moment is a growing gap between Special Operations Command, which is all about “We are warriors” and deeply involved in aggressive Kill/Capture programs directed at “terrorists” and the boots-on-the-ground big army folk, who have been scrambling, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a primary mission defined as being able to defeat a Soviet invasion of Europe, to find a new raison d’être—which increasingly involves humanitarian and other “nation-building” activities.

Just last week, before returning to Japan from the States, we saw a great PBS program on this issue. Check out

http://interactive.wxxi.org/highlights/2011/05/frontline-killcapture-wxxi-tv

See also: Spanish-American War, Panamanian Independence from Gran Colombia, etc. Nation building is what America does.

I would as well stop and talk to the Sons of Iraq and ask them what is up. The SOI or Sons of Iraq are like volunteer police. They used to be paid by the government but now I believe they are free agents so to speak. Sometimes the locals pay them and sometimes they are burned alive by the local insurgents. They are the brave son of a bitches who stand on the streets with their AK 47’s everyday so they are in the know. Why we don’t interact with them more is beyond me.

A wonderful act of This American Life centers on a former member of the SOI.

Where is your agency soldier? Or wait, aren’t we allowed to ask that on 9/11?

Even worse, I don’t see how you could train soldiers for nation-building person to person work without indoctrinating them in some particular ideology, which right now would be free-market triumphalism + as much authoritarianism as is necessary + cooperation with the US + a dose of Christianism sneaked in + whatever else the individuals in the field come up with. And these principles then return to the US when military finish their tours or retire.