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Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 6:17 AM
6:17AM

The split in Special Ops

DateTuesday, September 25, 2007 at 6:17AM

ESSAY: Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command, BY SEAN D. NAYLOR, Armed Forces Journal, September 2007

Even inside the Special Ops Forces, those who engage in SysAdmin work their own SysAdmin command.

I wrote about this split in Blueprint for Action: there is a huge cultural divide--believe it or not--between the civil affairs/engagement/training crowd and the direct action/trigger pullers.

Civil affairs was largely shunted off to the Reserves and Special Ops Command after Vietnam (the latter being stood up in the early 1980s after Desert One) because the Army didn't want to be associated with nation/capacity-building.

Now, in this frontier-integrating age, that skill set is in high demand, thus you see more bureaucratic agitation of this sort--as in, "give us our due!"

Makes sense to me in a Long War.

(Thanks: Matthew Garcia)

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