Into this breach, elite US forces are deployed again and again. The fault for this lies not with the troops themselves but with a political and military establishment that often appears bereft of strategic vision and hasn’t won a major war since the 1940s.
For all their abilities, tactical skills, training prowess, and battlefield accomplishments, the capacity of US Special Operations forces to achieve decisive and enduring successes-strategic victories that serve US national interests-have proved to be exceptionally limited, a reality laid bare from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to the Philippines. Cocaine, the study’s authors write, “may be making a comeback.”Ĭolombia is hardly an anomaly when it comes to US special-ops deployments-or the results that flow from them. “Recent findings suggest that cocaine use may be reemerging as a public health concern in the United States,” wrote researchers from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in a study published in December 2016-just after the Green Berets attended that ceremony in Colombia. US cocaine overdose deaths are also at a 10-year high and first-time cocaine use among young adults has spiked 61 percent since 2013. Today, however, more than 460,000 acres of the Colombian countryside are blanketed with coca plants, more than during the 1980s heyday of the infamous cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. “Over the longer haul, we can expect to see more effective drug eradication and increased interdiction of illicit drug shipments,” President Bill Clinton predicted in January 2000. Indeed, this was the ultimate promise of America’s “Plan Colombia” and efforts that followed from it.
#Spec ops strain professional#
A 2015 RAND Corporation study found that the program “represents an enduring SOF partnership effort that managed to help foster a relatively professional and capable special operations force.” And for a time, coca production in that country plummeted. Part of a $10 billion counter-narcotics and counterterrorism program, conceived in the 1990s, special-ops efforts in Colombia are a much ballyhooed American success story.
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