America’s elite troops were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, according to US Special Operations Command. The map above displays the locations of 132 of those countries; 129 locations (in blue) were supplied by US Special Operations Command; 3 locations (in red)—Syria, Yemen and Somalia—were derived from open-source information. (Nick Turse)
Nick Turse, The Nation: Donald Trump’s First Year Set a Record for Use of Special Operations Forces
Elite commandos deployed to 149 countries in 2017.
“We don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in October. That was in the wake of the combat deaths of four members of the Special Operations forces in the West African nation of Niger. Graham and other senators expressed shock about the deployment, but the global sweep of America’s most elite forces is, at best, an open secret.
Earlier this year before that same Senate committee—though Graham was not in attendance—Gen. Raymond Thomas, the chief of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), offered some clues about the planetwide reach of America’s most elite troops. “We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” he boasted. “Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands… providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.”
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Update: Only Year One: Trump Milestone as US Sends Special Ops to 149 Countries in 2017 (Sputnik)
WNU Editor: 149 countries?!?!?!
2 comments:
@WNU a special operation may just be to get a cafe latte in downtown Berlin, you never know what these special ops guys are up to :)
I am very skeptical that there were any SF operating in Sweden without our media going nuts, so this chart is giving a false positive in its estimations.
So basically, the numbers are not true.
Maybe they count exercises as a deployment, because i remember that there was an airshow of some kind here..
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