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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTop Officer Seeks ‘More Autonomy’ For Elite Special Ops Forces: Report
By Agence France-Presse
Monday, February 13, 2012 2:23 EST
The top US special operations officer, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, is seeking new authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels, according to The New York Times.
The newspaper said Admiral William McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of US foreign policy.
The plan would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed, the report said.
It would also allow the special operations forces to expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the paper noted.
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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/13/top-officer-seeks-more-autonomy-for-elite-special-ops-forces-report/
msongs
(67,441 posts)grasswire
(50,130 posts)Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone, you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father could never have imagined."
~Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)From what I can tell, our faultless, star-spangled fightin' men and women operate in a totally unrestrained manner as it is. Oh sure, if a couple dozen civilian bodies hit the ground and you're stupid enough to record the actual hoots of derision from the killers, you might have to go through the formality of a court martial before walking away from the whole incident, but really, what's stopping them now?
We may finally achieve that blissful state where those terrorists no longer hate us for our freedom.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)EFerrari
(163,986 posts)pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)And if he's the one who leaked the internal discussion, he's really an idiot. 'Lobbying' like this is really stupid. And, for all their faults, the Pentagon brass knows better than to delegate that kind of decision-making to that level.
lpbk2713
(42,766 posts)This is the same scary scenario they make movies out of.
Wherein the ultra patriots decide their country's leaders are too weak and decide to take over.