All I get is local news and I feel dumber for it. But you're spot on.

It's kind of like announcing the sky is blue. Everybody knows we're doing it. It's more for the home folks, kind of an "expect more casualties" statement as much as anything. After the Sergeant died last week, and was announced, it a bit of a CYA pre-emptive move going forward.

OTOH, this kind of shit has been happening since Viet Nam. It hasn't always excalated into full blown war, but it has a couple of times.

Not sure I'd call it a leak, since it was discussed at a press conference.

Then you don't notice the blue rhino over there...

This is low-risk territory.

What produced this announcement, however, wasn't low-risk. It was high-risk and presumably actually cleared the way for Putin and others.

Obama has this kind of verbal tic, "There's no military solution, we won't put boots on the ground" whenever there's a situation that might, just possibly, lead to violent conflict.

Often it's like telling a bully, "Look, whatever you do, I'm not going to resist you. I just won't talk to you and I'll say bad things about you to my friends." The bully knows that the legal repercussions aren't going to be that bad and might take years to implement, but once implemented won't last long. After all, he's done this before and only good has come of it.

Having good men publicly proclaim that they will not do anything about evil past a certain limited point encourages evil to test that claim and, if the claim is accurate, to push immediately past that point if they are of a mind to. If you get limited gains from limited evil that's resisted, why not up the ROI by going to evil that's not resisted?

All the rhetoric about "not allowing a frozen conflict" or "supporting X" means nothing if the other side knows exactly where you back down and whimper. Better ambiguity and bravado than pacifism that's confused with cowardice. It's easy to move into a vacuum.

depending on the real role the special ops troops take. If the Special Ops troops start conducting raids and ambushes like the SAS is rumored to be doing, it will likely have a negative affect on the morale of the average IS soldier.

As an IS soldier when snipers start taking out your comrades or when 20 of them die all at once in an ambush and you never see a thing, you become nervous and jumpy and sleep poorly.

In baseball terms it is like taking a mediocre high school team and putting them up against the World Series champs.

The announcement can do a lot for certain goals.

if they are sent in to 'train' 'lead' then telling probably intimidate more (fear factor...spec op trained troops will soon face us)

if they are being sent in to operate....perhaps not the best idea, the shock value might be better (take out targets fast and hard with no evidence of who did it)