By Cliff Montgomery – June 14th, 2011
American Special Operations Forces (SOF) have rapidly grown across the board since Sept. 11th, 2001, with a new host of missions, swelling ranks and rising budgets. For instance, SOF were said to have been involved in the murder of Osama bin Laden on May 1st, working alongside CIA personnel.
‘Special Operations’ (SO) normally are described as military activities which are “conducted in all environments, but are particularly well suited for denied and politically sensitive environments,” stated one recent Pentagon publication on the subject.
“SO can be tailored to achieve not only military objectives through application of special operations forces (SOF) capabilities for which there are no broad conventional force requirements, but also to support the application of the diplomatic, informational, and economic instruments of national [i.e., U.S.] power,” continued the publication.
“SOF are specifically organized, trained, and equipped to accomplish the 11 core activities: direct action, special reconnaissance, counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, counter-terrorism, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, security force assistance, counter-insurgency, information operations (IO), military information support operations (MISO), and civil affairs operations,” the publication stated.
SOF operate “from the tropics to the Arctic regions, from under water to high elevations, and from peaceful areas to violent combat zones,” Adm. Eric Olson, head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), has declared.
“Although the precision counter-terrorism missions certainly receive the most attention, SOF are conducting a wide range of activities in dozens of countries around the world on any given day,” Olson stated last March to Congress in SOCOM’s 2011 posture statement.
“On an average day, in excess of 12,000 Special Operations Forces (SOF) and SOF support personnel are deployed in more than 75 countries across the globe,” he added in the 2011 statement.
Olson apparently didn’t spend as much time informing Congress that under current U.S. law, SOCOM also is free to perform “such other activities as may be specified by the President or the Secretary of Defense.”
If true, the language would seem to allow SOCOM to engage in open-ended activities on behalf of either the U.S. president or the Defense secretary.
And in fact, the statutory language is very similar to U.S. laws authorizing CIA covert actions. Thus, SOCOM conceivably may legally perform a nearly unlimited host of secret–and perhaps highly questionable–missions.
“But while there is a well-defined mechanism for congressional oversight of [CIA] covert action, no similar process for congressional notification and review appears to exist for clandestine SOF missions,” recently pointed out Steven Aftergood, Project on Government Secrecy director at the Federation of American Scientists, a D.C.-based political watchdog group.
It’s an increasingly important point. Over the last several years, Special Operations personnel has grown 3-5% every 12 months. SO personnel currently is approaching 60,000–about a third are trained SOF operators.
SOCOM’s budget also has ballooned nicely since 9/11–from $2.1 billion spent in 2001 to $9.8 billion for FY2011. And its FY2012 budget request? That’s currently sitting at $10.5 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
