Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His 2017 Harper’s magazine article, “Ghost Nation,” is a finalist for an American Society of Magazine Editors award. His website is NickTurse.com.
经过近二十年的战争，武装部队已经将胜利的标准降低到敌人塔利班的水平。
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of
Both AFRICOM and CENTCOM seem intent on pouring money into Africa’s Drug War, an effort that had produced few successes.
2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). There was the investigation of the two-star commander of U.S. Army Africa who allegedly sent racy texts to an enlisted man’s wife. There was the investigation into the alleged killing of a Special Forces soldier by Navy SEALs in Mali. There was the inquiry into reports of
As wars and interventions have multiplied, as U.S. commandos have spread across the planet, and as terror groups have proliferated, the tempo of operations has jumped dramatically.
At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters cruised through the darkness
Six people lay lifeless in the filthy brown water. Three of the dead were American commandos.
Soldiers of the East Africa Response Force (EARF), a Djibouti-based joint team assigned to Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, depart from a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules in Juba, South Sudan. Three of the dead were American commandos. The driver, a captain nicknamed “Whiskey Dan,” was the leader of a shadowy team of operatives never
Since 2011 American special forces ops have set foot in 150 of the world’s 196 nations.
In this Thursday, June 20, 2013 photo, special operations forces from Iraq, Jordan and the U.S. conduct an exercise as part of Eager Lion multinational military maneuvers at the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) in Amman, Jordan. Photo: Maya Alleruzzo/AP In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey
U.S. Special Operations Forces are likely deployed in more than 100 countries — roughly 60% of the nations on the planet.
“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 U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a series of basic questions: In how many countries were U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed in 2013? Are manpower levels
