ARTICLE: N. Korea Swiftly Expanding Its Special Forces, By Blaine Harden, Washington Post, October 9, 2009

This is a prime example of the hybrid war thesis and why it is replacing the "lesser includeds" logic of the Cold War. During the Cold War, we assumed that the Big War force could handle anything found in the small wars reality. But now, the argument is, we have to master the small wars stuff because any "big war" scenario opponent will throw everything at us, including the kitchen sink.

In the Cold War hierarchy, blue (air force and navy) ruled green (marines, army) because the lesser-includeds argument said to focus solely on the Big War skills and assume all else falls out from that. But in the long war hierarchy, green rules blue.

In short, Mattis was right (see my long quote from both the original "Monks of War" piece in Esquire and Great Powers (that version used here)):

Listen to Marine Corps general James Mattis, himself a veteran of multiple command tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, decry, already in late 2005, the strategic mindset that suggests:

"Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now." Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours.