A FEW months ago, my wife and I had dinner with a couple we didn’t know very well. It was awkward at first, but there was wine, and conversation soon followed. At one point, the wife asked about my tour in Iraq, where I served four years as a cavalry officer. I began talking about the desert, the tribal politics and the day-to-day travails of counterinsurgency. “That’s all fine,” the husband interrupted. “But tell us about the super-soldiers. The Special-Ops guys. That’s what people care about.”
He had no time for “G.I. Joe.” He wanted “American Sniper.”
He is not alone. The mythos of Special Operations has seized our nation’s popular imagination, and has proved to be the one prism through which the public will engage with America’s wars. From the box office to bookstores, the Special Ops commando — quiet and professional, stoic and square-jawed — thrives. That he works in the shadows, where missions are classified and enemy combatants come in silhouettes of night-vision green, is all for the better — details only complicate. We like our heroes sanitized, perhaps especially in murky times like these.
The age of the commando, though, is more than pop cultural fantasy emanating from Hollywood. It’s now a significant part of our military strategy.
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WNU Editor: I have seen this cultural change shift within this blog over the years. Before the Osama Bin Laden raid there was little if any discussion on Special Operations .... after the raid everyone wanted to know everything that there is to know about Special operations .... and more. And Washington .... they all embraced Special Operations as a means to wage war without the messy deployments and consequences of their policies, and are rewarding this "new age" with even more monies and resources.
It's deja vu all over again, as in 1960 when General Maxwell Taylor became a John Kennedy favorite with his book "An Uncertain Trumpet," we had the ballad of the green berets, etc.
ReplyDeleteObviously Big Army has been unsuccessful so they go toward Small Army.