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WIRED
2 days ago
- Politics
- WIRED
The Rise of the US Military's Clandestine Foreign War Apparatus
Aug 12, 2025 7:00 AM Seth Harp's new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel , goes deep into the forming of the Joint Special Operations Command and its origins in the aftermath of 9/11. Photo-Illustration:The 2020s are shaping up to be one of the most violent decades in modern history, with American-sponsored proxy conflicts and shadow wars smoldering all over the world, from Ukraine to Yemen to Gaza. The United States enables and prolongs these wars not by sending troops to fight in them, but by trafficking arms to the belligerents, providing intelligence to its favored proxies, and using covert operations, especially assassinations, to shape geopolitical conditions. At the forefront of these clandestine US military machinations is the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which despite its relative invisibility to the public is far and away the most powerful organization in the military, and one of the most influential institutions in the US government. But it was not always this way. As I discuss in my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel , the rise of JSOC does not date back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the wars that the United States waged in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. Rather, the origins of JSOC's takeover from within are traceable to the darkest days of the Iraq War, about five years after 9/11, when things were going considerably worse for American war planners and foreign policy officials, and—in a backlash that would lead to the election of President Barack Obama—the public was turning sharply against US involvement in foreign wars. This excerpt tells part of that story. On just one day in June 2006, the Associated Press reported that shootings and bombings killed 12 people in Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed four and wounded 27 at the funeral of a Shiite soldier, seven bullet-riddled bodies were pulled from the Tigris River, two who had been tortured to death were fished out of the Euphrates, and police found the body of a teenage girl who had been raped and murdered in Kirkuk. Amid this horrible paroxysm of revenge killings, auguring Iraq's descent into outright civil war split along sectarian lines, President George W. Bush and his national security council pulled together a host of new advisors in an attempt to revise their failing strategy. It was at this juncture that a number of ambitious officials in the special operations community stepped up to offer a new path forward. The plan of action that they developed, which Bush's successor would adopt and expand in Afghanistan, forever transformed the American way of making war, and goes a long way toward explaining how Fort Bragg, North Carolina, even more than the CIA's headquarters at Langley, Virginia, came to be the United States' national nerve center of invisible imperial power. Courtesy of Penguin Group Buy This Book At: Amazon Target Viking If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Stanley McChrystal, then a two-star major general, was the most important figure in this revolution in military affairs. McChrystal, a West Point graduate and the son of a distinguished general, had risen through the ranks in the 75th Ranger Regiment and was groomed for some of the Army's most sensitive missions. Smart, shrewd, charismatic, and press-savvy, McChrystal first came to prominence as a Pentagon spokesman, and in 2003, was tapped to lead black ops JSOC, which until then had been relegated to important but limited roles. Consistent with the emphasis laid on psychological operations in the Special Forces, the most important warfighting innovation that McChrystal developed while serving in this position was not primarily tactical or strategic but ideological and mediatic. Although there were relatively few foreign fighters in Iraq and most came from neighboring Syria, McChrystal was the primary proponent of the view, quick to spread among Washington policymakers, that the enemy was not a nationalist rebellion against outside occupation, but one node of a global conspiracy of America-hating terrorists. To describe this nebulous and inherently malignant foe, McChrystal and his staff invented the term 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' or AQI. At the top of this dubious organization, which they themselves had done more than anyone else to conjure into being, JSOC analysts placed the dopey Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a mysterious Bedouin bogeyman, much hyped by deceitful Pentagon spooks in the runup to the war, who may not have even been in Iraq at the time. To explain away the paucity of tangible contacts between insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden's organization, the remnants of which were now scattered around Pakistan and Yemen, McChrystal and his aides redefined al-Qaeda as a concentric grouping of decentralized 'franchises' operating on a 'blind cell model.' In his memoir, McChrystal admits with remarkable if belated frankness that JSOC produced intelligence assessments 'that inflated al-Qaeda's role,' and 'problematically used 'AQI' as a catchall designation for any Sunni group that attacked Americans.' This narrative, he acknowledges, was a way to 'sidestep the reality' that most Iraqi insurgents were primarily motivated by 'earthly grievances,' not Islamist ideology. There's no indication, however, that he shared these important caveats with President Bush, who seized upon the imaginary influx of foreign jihadists into Iraq as an after-the-fact vindication of his discredited case for war. By grossly exaggerating Zarqawi's importance, McChrystal and his deputy, Vice Admiral William McRaven, convinced the Bush administration that it was possible for the United States to kill its way to victory in Iraq through a massively stepped-up campaign of targeted assassinations. This was an essential precondition for the rise of JSOC. Another of the advisors whom Bush called upon to reformulate the war effort in late 2006 was Michael Vickers, the top Pentagon official in charge of the larger umbrella organization over JSOC, the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, known by the comically unwieldy acronym 'ASD SO/LIC & IC,' for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities. In his memoir, Vickers recalls how the Bush administration scrapped its existing playbook and instituted a new policy that put JSOC firmly in charge of the fight in Iraq. The plan involved a two-pronged approach, the public-facing aspect of which was a temporary buildup or 'surge' of conventional forces. But the real escalation took place behind the scenes, as JSOC was quietly tasked with implementing a radically expanded campaign of mass assassinations very similar to the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, which in spite of the repugnance it had elicited in the public, was considered a success by the Washington-dwelling national-security set. Once limited to former regime officials and leaders of the insurgency, JSOC's hit list, euphemistically known as the 'disposition matrix' or 'joint prioritized effects list,' grew exponentially to include anyone, however youthful or peripheral, suspected of taking up arms against American occupiers. Vickers calls this covert war the 'hidden surge.' From now on, Iraq would be a war of targeted killings carried out clandestinely, almost always at night. Swollen with new infusions of money, personnel, equipment, and aircraft, JSOC became 'JSOC on steroids,' a 'counterterrorism killing machine' capable of slaying recalcitrant Iraqis on a scale that both Vickers and McChrystal describe as 'industrial.' From about 10 a month at the start of the war, the number of night raids that JSOC carried out increased to 10 per day at the height of the surge. McChrystal called this relentless tempo the 'continuous targeting cycle.' Fluent in McKinsey-style jargon like 'decision cycle,' 'dynamic process,' and 'nodal analysis,' he was adept at spitting out pithy truisms such as 'it takes a network to defeat a network,' and a prolific coiner of acronyms like F3EAD, which stood for Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate. Despite the ungainly initialism, the F3EAD cycle was not a complicated concept. It typically meant tracking down a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found on their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list, and then killing them too, sometimes just a few hours later. The hidden surge, in which the Army component of JSOC, known as Delta Force, played the leading role, was greatly enabled by the widespread adoption of cell phones in Iraq, a technological development that coincided with the first few years of American occupation. JSOC's screen-filled headquarters at Camp Anaconda received an influx of personnel from the National Security Agency, who found it trivial to intercept unencrypted calls on Iraq's burgeoning mobile networks, and could easily transform cell phones into listening devices. Television and film depictions of the Global War on Terrorism often portray American operators and spies as able to speak the local languages, suavely lobbing savvy quotations from the Koran at their truculent Islamist antagonists. But in a startling admission with sobering implications, McChrystal states in his memoir that JSOC in Iraq was 'hindered by an almost complete lack of Arabic skills within our force,' suggesting that nearly all of those whom Delta Force killed were targeted not on the basis of the content of telephonic intercepts, but on pseudoscientific 'nodal analysis,' tips from paid informants, and arbitrary guesswork. 'We were not death squads,' McChrystal writes. But armed with NSA intercepts, backed by newly developed Reaper drones, and joined by fierce Kurdish mercenaries called Mohawks, that's exactly what JSOC became during the covert surge in Iraq, which lasted into 2008. The body count from Delta Force's killing spree, and the proportion of Iraq's hundreds of thousands of war dead who were gunned down in JSOC night raids, will never be known because it wasn't recorded in the first place. That these events are lost to the historical and photographic record was by design. What Vickers dubs the 'hidden surge' was a side of the Iraq war never intended to be seen by the public, who were fed images of conventional, uniformed troops on patrol, but never any footage of the plainclothes men who did nearly all of the nighttime wet work. 'From 2006 on, 90 percent or higher of insurgent deaths were from targeted, offensive SOF operations,' said a former Delta Force sergeant major who served in Iraq during the surge, using an acronym that refers to special operations forces in general. 'Going out night after night, on purpose, and getting in firefights with bad guys—that job fell to us.' Instead of mounting patrols and reacting to fire like conventional infantry, Delta Force operators identified their targets from a distance, in advance, and took them by surprise, often making use of perfidious techniques such as disguising themselves as Iraqis, using wigs, brownface, and prosthetics. They posed as Red Cross personnel, United Nations inspectors, western businessmen, or European diplomats. With the help of female support soldiers, they passed themselves off as husband-and-wife pairs, masquerading, for instance, as married schoolteachers who'd come to teach English to Iraqi kids. They even copied the enemy's tactics and blew up targets with roadside bombs. Among themselves, the bearded, long-haired operators called each other by their first names, eschewed divisions of rank, and dressed in a mishmash of civilian attire. When they did wear uniforms, the unit patches they sported were purely fictitious: hometown police badges, the seals of various states, Spartan helmets, Crusader shields, the Confederate battle flag, or jokey tabs that said things like 'HATCHET FORCE' or 'FUCK AL QAEDA.' No camera crews ever went on night raids with Delta Force. Their operations were not the subject of news documentaries, nor do we possess any oral histories, because silence is the unit's chief point of pride. But over time, these strictures inevitably loosen, if only a little. In recent years, many former special operators have gone on podcasts to discuss their military careers in a certain Army 'special mission unit' or 'compartmented element.' And once-rare photos of JSOC operations have found their way onto social media, including images of Delta Force in Iraq under McCrystal's leadership. 'Several of my rotations to Iraq [were] composed of just my team and a small HQ element,' a former Delta Force troop sergeant major named Jesse Boettcher wrote in an Instagram post dated February 28, 2022. 'While I had the full force of the US government just a radio call away, there were very few of us on the ground getting dirty. Our small element was able to execute and refine the entire F3EAD cycle almost daily, with very little outside assistance.' In the photo accompanying the post, Boettcher, then in his mid-thirties, sits at a table dressed in soiled civilian clothes. In back of him is a whiteboard. Much of the writing on it has been blacked out, but you can still read random words, including 'meeting,' 'explosives,' 'liaison,' 'interrogation,' and 'safehouse.' Taped on the wall behind the whiteboard is a grid of 55 mugshots of brown-skinned men. Almost all of them have been crossed out with an X. Another picture, posted January 19, 2022, shows the rest of Boettcher's team, a group of seven unkempt white men. 'It might look like a ragtag bunch of ruffians, but this crew were straight-up Pipe-Hitters,' Boettcher wrote, using an obscure term considered a high compliment in the special operations community that derives from the concept of a soldier who is so fearless, daring, and addicted to war that he can be likened to a smoker of crack cocaine. 'The guys in front,' Boettcher wrote, referring to three fresh-faced, clean-shaven young men kneeling in the foreground, 'have killed more people than cancer.' Excerpt adapted from The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp. Published by arrangement with Viking. Copyright © 2025 Seth Harp.
Washington Post
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Soft power for a tough world
William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral, was commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014. The Defense Department is our hard power; the carriers, the jets, the bombers, the tanks, the infantry, the use of direct action and kinetic power are there to deter, defend and defeat our adversaries. The State Department is always depicted as soft power — as if to imply that the work it does is somehow less demanding, less effective and less critical than that done by those of us in uniform.
News18
01-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
The US Is Worried About Pakistan's Nukes, Does It Have A Secret Plan To Grab Them?
Last Updated: The US sees Pakistan's nuclear missile program as an emerging threat as they believe it will soon develop missiles that can strike the US mainland. Pakistani ministers this week engaged in nuclear sabre-rattling after accusing India of planning a military incursion. The Pakistani government did not condemn the Pahalgam terror attack, in which terrorists from and trained in Pakistan killed 26 people, many of them tourists in Baisaran, and instead threatened India with nuclear weapons amid rising tensions. Pakistan retains the option to use nuclear weapons first against non-nuclear military threats. India, on the other hand, follows a No First Use (NFU) policy, which states that it will not use nuclear weapons unless attacked with them first. Pakistan minister Hanif Abbasi, its ambassador to the US Rizwan Sheikh and defence minister Khawaja Asif — who said Pakistan would use nuclear weapons if 'there is a direct threat to its existence" — have all, in both veiled and direct terms, issued nuclear threats to India following the terror attack in Pahalgam. Sheikh also urged US President Donald Trump to help defuse tensions between both nations (with a veiled nuclear threat) but if a nuclear crisis arises over Kashmir, does the US have a contingency plan to 'snatch-and-grab" Pakistan's nuclear weapons? A report by broadcaster NBC News from 2011 claims that US officials and armed forces have discussed such a plan in the past. The United States has drawn up contingency plans to secure Pakistan's nuclear weapons in case of a crisis. These discussions date back to the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush and continue to remain a top priority for the US intelligence community and the White House, the report said. Among the scenarios considered are internal chaos in Pakistan, a terrorist strike on a nuclear facility, an extremist takeover of the military or government, or an outbreak of war with India. The concern over Pakistan's arsenal intensified after the 2011 operation that killed Osama bin Laden inside the country, the report added, with many in Washington convinced that a rapid-response plan, often referred to as a 'snatch and grab", may be feasible. Former Pakistan military ruler Pervez Musharraf warned that any such attempt would provoke 'total confrontation" with the country. Prominent physicist Pervez Hoodboy also cautioned that it could trigger war and should 'never be attempted". Despite these warnings, the report suggests that the subject has remained active in US security discussions, war games and planning exercises. Jeffrey T Richelson, an intelligence historian, wrote in his 2009 book Defusing Armageddon about the possibility of a US military mission targeting Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. He said the US Nuclear Emergency Search Team along with Joint Special Operations Command could lead such an effort. While exact details remain classified, Richelson cited a 2006 comment by Gen Peter Pace who discussed US operations aimed at preventing nukes from falling into the hands of militants like al-Qaida. The US concern about Pakistan's nuclear weapons also resurfaced in December when, at a security forum hosted by the Arms Control Association (ACA), US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Pakistan was working on advanced missile technology that could one day allow it to strike targets beyond South Asia, including the United States. 'Pakistan, which was granted major non-NATO ally status in 2004, is pursuing increasingly sophisticated missile technology that eventually could enable the country to strike targets well beyond South Asia, including the United States," Finer had said. Senior US officials have said Pakistan has for years been trying to improve the range and payload capacity of its medium-range ballistic missiles. They believe Pakistan is doing this with support from entities in Belarus and China. According to them, Islamabad could develop long-range missile capabilities of more than 3,000 kilometres within the next ten years, a report published by the ACA said. These officials shared this assessment during a January 3 briefing with members of the forum and said Pakistan had rejected American proposals aimed at building trust and transparency. The US has now imposed new sanctions on a Pakistani state-run organisation as well as companies in Belarus and China that are allegedly providing missile-related equipment to Pakistan. The goal of these sanctions is to slow down the missile programme. In response, Pakistan said the US comments lacked logic. Pakistani officials insisted their country has never had any hostile intent towards the United States. They said the nuclear and missile systems are meant to deter threats from the region. However, these experts argued that the idea of needing long-range missiles to counter India does not hold up. Pakistan already has the Shaheen-III missile which was first tested in 2015 and can hit targets up to 2,750 kilometres away. This means it can already reach any location in India. Pakistan is believed to have around 170 nuclear warheads deployed on short and medium-range missiles. These are considered sufficient to cause devastating damage across the subcontinent. Get breaking news, in-depth analysis, and expert perspectives on everything from geopolitics to diplomacy and global trends. Stay informed with the latest world news only on News18. Download the News18 App to stay updated! tags : donald trump Pahalgam attack Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: May 01, 2025, 17:53 IST
Boston Globe
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump officials split over how hard to go on Mexican cartels
In discussions, American officials have delivered vague ultimatums and unclear policy demands that Mexico dismantle the cartels or face the full force of Washington's power, according to three people familiar with the preliminary negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly, leading to confusion among Mexican officials. Much of the confusion stems from the division inside the Trump administration on dealing with the cartels, several of which were recently designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. Advertisement One camp is being led by Sebastian Gorka, President Trump's senior director for counterterrorism within the White House National Security Council, according to three current and former officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. Gorka, a combative defender of Trump, has been working with a former officer in the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees highly secretive military special operations, in an effort to push toward using US military power to take down Mexican drug lords and their operations on the ground, the current and former officials said. A more cautious stance has been staked out by the White House's Homeland Security Council, which is led by Stephen Miller. Miller has staffed his group with federal law enforcement officials who have deep experience in investigating, prosecuting, and running capture operations in Mexico against cartel leaders with local counterparts. According to two people familiar with the talks, Miller's more measured approach is over concern that to go too hard against the cartels could shut down the broader cooperation with Mexican forces on one of his signature policy priorities: stopping migrants from reaching the border. Advertisement Officials at the National Security Council denied there was any divergence of opinion within the Trump administration. 'Everyone from the president to his administration staff is committed to having all options on the table as it relates to addressing terrorist threats,' said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for council. 'There is no debate about how we will use all means necessary to protect Americans from Mexican drug cartels.' More clarity may come this week, as Omar García Harfuch, Mexico's secretary of security, and his delegation meet with their American counterparts. The delegation arrives as Trump repeated his threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexican imports as retribution for the Mexican government not doing enough to counter the flow of fentanyl. The arrival of the delegation came with news from the battle against the cartels. Mexico has extradited drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a US DEA agent in 1985, to the United States with 28 prisoners requested by the US government, a Mexican government official said. The official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, confirmed Caro Quintero's extradition. Mexico's Attorney General's Office said in a statement that the 29 prisoners extradited Thursday faced charges related to drug trafficking among other crimes. The draft security framework calls for more cartel leader arrests and the creation of more Mexican units vetted by American law enforcement to target everything from money laundering to fighting drug groups on the ground, according to three people familiar with it. It is also expected to address migration and the border. Advertisement The stakes for Mexico could not be higher. When the State Department designated six Mexican cartels as terror organizations this month, that action set up the potential for Pentagon and intelligence resources to be deployed against the drug organizations, should Washington choose to do so. As calls from Trump administration officials grow louder for a military solution to the cartels and to counter drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, the Mexican government has strongly pushed back. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has demanded that any US military action against cartels be done in cooperation with Mexican forces and has vowed to protect Mexico's sovereignty. On Tuesday, Sheinbaum said in a news conference that her government 'does not want operations of US forces in Mexico,' adding that there is currently vast sharing of intelligence and information with American authorities. Mexico aims for 'coordination or cooperation, never invasion or subordination,' she said. Sheinbaum added that her government would pursue amendments to the constitution to curb the work of foreign agents in Mexico, to ensure they do not operate independently. In an effort to aid the Mexican government, the CIA has stepped up secret drone flights over the country, although the agency has not been authorized to use the drones to take any lethal action on its own, officials have said. For now, CIA officers in Mexico have been passing information collected by the drones to Mexican officials. 'Sovereignty is not negotiable, that is a basic principle,' Sheinbaum told a news conference this month, after the CIA drone flights were revealed by The New York Times. Advertisement Mexican forces have ramped up their fight against the cartels. In Sinaloa state, the hub of Mexico's most powerful criminal syndicate, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mexican government has carried out high-level arrests, drug lab busts, and drug seizures that have disrupted fentanyl-production operations there. In December, Mexican authorities also seized more than 20 million doses of fentanyl in Sinaloa, their biggest-ever synthetic opioid bust. On Tuesday, Mexico's defense secretary said that US drones had been used in the effort to apprehend top figures in the Sinaloa Cartel. Mexican officials recently announced the arrest of José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza, said to be right-hand man of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, a son of the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
