By Cliff Montgomery – Jun 6th, 2010
The Obama Administration has greatly increased the worldwide activities of U.S. Special Operations militaryforces, The Washington Post stated this Friday.
Obama is pitting the Special Ops forces against various groups the White House believes are working ‘againstAmerican interests’. The groups are said to include al Qaeda and other–apparently unnamed–entities.
U.S. Special Ops units currently are deployed in at least 75 countries. By comparison, these forces wereworking in about 60 nations when Obama first took office in January 2009.
The numbers were printed by the Post, which cited top administration and military officials as the sources for itsdata. The officials were not identified.
Plans already exist for retaliatory or pre-emptive strikes against various locations, which are to be conducted ifthe administration believes it has identified a possible plot against ‘U.S. interests’ or if an attack is linked to aparticular group, stated the Post.
U.S. Special Operations teams now are working throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa, as wellas in places where they’ve been a staple for years such as Colombia and the Philippines, according to thenewspaper.
The Obama Administration has asked Congress to increase the fiscal year 2011 Special Operations budget by5.7 percent–this would create a budget total of $6.3 billion.
Special Operations leaders now are a much more regular White House presence than they were throughoutthe Bush years, declared the Post.
“We have a lot more access,” one military officer told the paper.
“They are talking publicly much less, but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much morequickly,” the official added.
This certainly is true of Central Command–the Pentagon unit which directs American military operations acrossthe Horn Africa and the Middle East.
U.S. officials last month acknowledged that General David Petraeus, head of Central Command, in 2009published a secret order which called for U.S. Special Ops units to work alongside local security forcesthroughout the region, on the hopes of hemming in and possibly eliminating groups perceived as ‘threats toU.S. interests’, according to officials.
