КОНЦЕПЦІЯ ОПЕРАТИВНИХ СИЛ ТА СПРОМОЖНОСТЕЙ НАТО ЯК ІНСТРУМЕНТ РЕФОРМУВАННЯ ТА ЗБІЛЬШЕННЯ БОЙОВИХ СПРОМОЖНОСТЕЙ ПІДРОЗДІЛІВ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОГО ПРИЗНАЧЕННЯ (СИЛ СПЕЦІАЛЬНИХ ОПЕРАЦІЙ)

ABSTRACTIn the post-9/11 era the United States’ (US) Special Operations Forces have become an increasingly prominent feature amongst the country’s vast military options. This article is the first to examine US Special Forces through a critical discursive lens. The article examines the conditions of possibility that US security discourse constructs for its Special Forces, who use some methods of warfare which are more commonly associated with US enemies in constructed notions of US warfare. The article argues that the Special Forces’ representation as an ‘elite’ fighting force in popular US discourse acts to stabilize the Special Forces within the wider discursive structures of US security. This is supplemented by a narrative of mystique and the willingness of the Special Forces to ‘fight fire with fire’ against imagined radical threats. In doing this it is possible to highlight the damaging effect of the Special Forces on understandings of the US Self, which constructs its identity in part through how the US ‘should’ fight wars. Despite the difficulty in articulating the Special Forces as part of the ‘American way of war’, US security discourse has proved remarkably flexible in reconciling the Special Forces within its existing structures.

: The purpose of this paper is to analyze and suggest possible roles for special operations forces in homeland security and homeland defense. The paper reviews the obstacles to the use of military forces in the domestic environment under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and then introduces special operations and special operations forces competencies. The paper then analyzes the current National Strategy for Homeland Security and injects suggestions for using special operations forces to bolster the Strategy. After an overview of United States Northern Command, the Department of Defense's supported command for the homeland defense mission, the paper recommends establishing a sub-unified organization under Northern Command to provide special operations command and control, planning, and mission execution. Underlying the entire discussion is the critical need to incorporate special operations forces early in the campaign plan, rather than waiting for mission execution to blend them into the force structure. Regardless of the role special operations forces play or the structure that exercises their command and control, commanders will reap the benefits these highly specialized forces provide only if they understand who they are, what they do, and how to integrate them into the missions of homeland security and homeland defense.

We consider the provisions of the need to strengthen the physical fitness of the special operations forces and the Main Intelligence Directorate, caused by the tendency to add to the special groups lineup people who possess high-level skills in modern computer technologies. In the special operations forces units and the Main Intelligence Directorate, there is a high selection of employees in terms of physical condition and perfect mastery of the electronic equipment skills, while at the same time, the equipment is constantly being improved. On a massive scale, objectively team cannot equally possess the skills of working with computer technology, only particularly unique specialists are able to perfectly work in this direction. The life of these military personnel in the process of warfare must be preserved first of all. This causes a tendency to increase the level of physical fitness of the personnel of these special forces, especially when exercising the load against the backdrop of complex fatigue.

: The article introduces the United States as the sole superpower. As such the U.S. is obligated to assist other countries in need or threatened by adversaries, as long as it's in our national interests. Future U.S. military involvement will not necessarily be driven by what our armed forces perceive to be a threat to our national security or interest, but how American society at large and our elected officials view threats, determine our national interests and how we wage war as a nation. Special operations forces today are global, joint and versatile. They operate world wide, with little fanfare, often in parts of the world where disease, poverty and civil strife riddle the countryside. They serve in extremely harsh, as well as permissive, environments, under the cover of darkness and increasingly, in the high-tech realm of cyberspace. They can operate as a cohesive joint service team or as a single service unit. A hallmark is frequent operations with coalition forces and other foreign militaries. Special operations forces support conventional forces in major conflicts, and they respond to conflicts or crises such as insurgencies, subversion, sabotage, narcotics trafficking and terrorism. They are not structured or expected to win wars single- handedly, but they can help prevent and deter them. As part of a theater joint task force, they can enable conventional forces to achieve victory. By anticipating changes in world development, analyzing our special operations force employment trends and examining American societal and cultural trends, will help prepare special operations forces for the future. Also in preparing for the future means considering what DoD's expectations will be for the use and role of special operations forces. General Shelton expects we will need special operations forces more th% ever in traditional roles, but they must also prepare for nontraditional environments and more sophisticated threats.

: The nature of the Global War On Terror (GWOT) has driven U.S. Conventional Forces (CF) and Special Operations Forces (SOF) to unprecedented levels of cooperation on the battlefield, and the historical conventional mistrust of SOF is being overwritten today by successful combined SOF/CF operations. The joint force and the Services must continue to improve the ability of SOF to conduct C2 and integrate C2 with their own capabilities. Integrated SOF and CF command and control is a base requirement for maximizing SOF effects in the irregular and asymmetric environments characteristic of the GWOT. This paper will analyze the C2 integration between SOF and CF in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the current main effort of SOF and the U.S. military, and make recommendations for force-wide changes in doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities as appropriate. Command and control of all aspects of SOF is too broad of a subject to explore in this paper. This paper concentrates on the C2 issues that most pertain to units conducting integrated ground operations, primarily Army Special Forces (SF), Navy SEALs, and U.S. Army and Marine conventional forces.

: Special Operations Forces (SOF) within a Joint Task Force are controlled by a Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF). Presently, JSOTF headquarters are formed around the core of the Theater Special Operations Command (TSOC), a service SOF headquarters, such as a Special Forces Group, or from a composite staff. These methods have significant shortcomings; the TSOCs ability to support SOF throughout the theater is reduced, a Special Forces Group is not trained or staffed to run a JSOTF at the component command level, and a composite staff element requires a substantial amount of time to operate effectively. This paper suggests an alternative way of providing a JSOTF headquarters that avoids these pitfalls. The recommendation is to establish a standing JSOTF headquarters within each TSOC. Included is an analysis of the major benefits and drawbacks of the proposal, an examination of alternative and interim solutions, and a proposed organizational structure for a standing JSOTF headquarters. Forming standing JSOTF headquarters is a controversial issue. No unit or service is anxious to give up personnel to support an organization whose role is invisible to most except during a crisis. Some will contend that there is no real problem. JSOTFs formed in the past where ad hoc and they managed to get the job done. Our country, though, has now been attacked on its own shores and as a consequence, the nation is fully engaged in a global war on terrorism. Winning this war is our military's top priority, but to win it, we must be agile and global in depth. Standing JSOTF headquarters would give SOF an almost immediate command and control capability that is effective at the earliest moments of a crisis. They could provide this capability without detracting from the TSOCs ability to support other, perhaps simultaneous SOF operations in the theater. SOF will lead the military's war on terrorism.

To investigate resilience in American Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel. A qualitative descriptive exploratory design was used to interview Special Forces and Navy SEAL participants about their perspectives on and experiences of resilience. Assumptions that high resilience inversely correlates with suicide risk in SOF drove our primary research questions and study focus. Questions were based on Holling's theory of ecological resilience. Participants provided insightful and detailed data of their resilience and were often self-effacing or self-critical. Responses indicated that although quite resilient, SOF personnel express their resilience in ways known to become pathological and precipitate suicidality if left undetected. Extracted subthemes indicated commitment to others over self and a nexus of trait variables linked to suicidality. Estimated neurotrauma from repetitive blast exposures should be incorporated in future models. Findings challenge prevailing beliefs that dysfunctional behaviors and suboptimal resilience drive SOF suicide. Results herein justify future research and changes to command postures and U.S. Department of Defense initiatives regarding relationships between and among variables of resilience, neurotrauma, and suicide in SOF. [Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 63(5), 26-38.].

THE RECENT WAR in Iraq was, among other things, a powerful advertisement for the effectiveness of the United States' storied special operations forces. Americans are just now learning what role these commandos played in the conflict, but already it has emerged that, during the early days of the fighting, they managed to secure crucial airfields in western Iraq, protect the country's oil fields from saboteurs (fewer than lo Iraqi oil fields were ignited, compared to the more than 700 Kuwaiti fields that were set ablaze in 1991), and, most famously, rescue Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital. Yet these achievements, although impressive, do not fully explain the unprecedented prominence currently enjoyed by special operations forces within the U.S. military. True, such troops may have been well suited to the kind of missions they were given in Iraq. But they also happen to fit precisely into the model of a leaner, more flexible military that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is fighting to create at the Pentagon. And Rumsfeld has made no secret of his plans to thrust special forces into the lead role in the war on terrorism, by using them for covert operations around the globe. The special forces' success in Iraq has also obscured a more ominous consequence of their newfound popularity: that expanding their role in the way Rumsfeld intends could be very dangerous for U.S. foreign policy. Thanks to the vagueness of U.S. law governing covert action,

HEDAfghanistan, Changing Room of Empires Adrian Bonenberger (bio) First they fell slowly, fort by besieged fort, province by province, then all at once. When Kabul collapsed it happened with the speed and fury of a thunderclap. Alongside the video of desperate Afghans chasing and falling from planes were photos and videos of the Taliban, dressed like US special operators. They emulated the iconic photo of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima and strutted into an air hangar, M4 rifles pointed toward the ceiling, massed at a checkpoint with night-vision devices perched paradoxically above the wraparound "operator" sunglasses popularized by special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries. While visually arresting, these scenes didn't come as a surprise. We've seen this happen repeatedly throughout history, the conquered rising to conquer in their turn. Before its fall over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., Western Rome's military and those of its neighbors had come to mirror each other in important ways, both in terms of tactics and aesthetic preferences. Drawing heavily on Germanic tribes (Goths, Vandals, Alans, Burgundians), Western Rome's military (and, given the role its military played in culture and politics, Rome itself) came to resemble the tribes it fought. Romans lived alongside their Germanic neighbors for nearly four centuries and progressively intermingled until in some places little meaningful distinction existed (and none, in the end, worth fighting for—the ultimate measure of a culture's durability). The Afghans have spent much of the last four decades living side by side with the militaries of the USSR and the US. Culture shifted more slowly back when it moved at the speed of a horse-drawn wagon or sail. Now, culture moves at the speed it takes to upload a video to TikTok or Instagram. It seems beyond question that Afghans have been observing and internalizing the violence they experienced at Soviet and American hands. Watching the History Channel, playing Call of Duty, reading accounts of SEALs, Afghans have come to understand power the way Americans have applied it. Many of them received tactical training from American and other Western militaries. Too, ISIS and the Taliban received extensive training from [End Page 14] Western forces, with those members who survived battles gaining firsthand experience of American, Russian, and European military capabilities and adapting to counter them. Literature on or in Afghanistan over the past forty years has tended to focus on the experience of the country that's deployed there. The Soviet Afghansi with their various permutations (Soviet Baltic, Ukrainian, Russian, and other ethnicities from within the USSR) are the protagonists (or, occasionally, antagonists, if one's watching or reading from the perspective of the US), as are British colonial troops described by writers like Rudyard Kipling, as are Americans and those allied countries deployed alongside the US. The closest one gets to the Afghans or Iraqis is through their cuisine, to which soldiers escape for variety, or their clothing—especially the distinctive pakol cap and shemagh headwrap, which make appearances in (almost every?) novels and short fiction collections about Afghanistan or Iraq published in the last two decades. The food, caps, and scarves do little to change how Western militaries operate in the countries to which they have deployed, and have made a consequently superficial impact on those militaries. One place where the Afghans especially have made a more lasting impact on the US and British militaries is in the tendency of Western special operations units to adopt beards. Originally, this was made out of diplomatic expediency—special forces units embedded with locals claimed that they needed the beards to "fit in" and develop rapport with their counterparts—but the beards quickly became a signifier, a way to demonstrate that one's unit was elite and didn't need to obey the same rules as more conventional units. Some writers exploring Afghanistan refer to this phenomenon through the voice of the Afghans, who refer to special operations units as "the men with beards." In my own short fiction collection, The Disappointed Soldier and Other Stories from War, I write satirically about a conventional unit that contracts beards and the equipment of special...

S ince the late 1980s, and especially since the tragic events of 11 September 2001, two phenomena, both known for their pragmatic and controversial nature, have come together to pose challenges for US policymakers.The first phenomenon is the rise in importance of special operations forces (SOF).This is evident in the 1987 creation of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) later followed by the Bush Administration's 2004 decision, through the Unified Command Plan, to assign USSOCOM the primary responsibility for prosecuting the Global War on Terrorism.In light of the need for anti-terrorism and counterinsurgency expertise and the asymmetric nature of many current threats, SOF have been described as a "logical military response," one that, for General Peter Schoomaker, provides "an array of expanded options, strategic economy of force, [and] 'tailor to task'capabilities." 1 Despite the logicality, however, such an approach threatens to exacerbate divides, real and perceived, between the conventional and unconventional military communities.In addition to aggravating concerns related to shares of limited resources, the skimming of individuals with high leadership potential, and differing opinions regarding how military organizations should look and act, there is the possibility of antagonism as SOF are often presented as a panacea or a "silver bullet." 2 In the United States and other Western countries, these concerns regarding the utility and implications of SOF vis-à-vis their conventional brethren have existed since the creation of special units in World War II; it is not surprising that they continue today.Parameters

Features of selection of Military Special Operations Forces personnel of foreign countries by the criterion of physical preparedness are considered. Scientific, methodological literature on the research topic was studied, specialists were interviewed. Selection of candidates for special operations forces is consists of several stages. It has been established that the physical fitness of candidates is checked at all stages of selection. Determining the aerobic and strength endurance of candidates is a mandatory element of testing their physical preparedness. Tests are selected based on the requirements of the future professional activity of the fighters. Also take into account how these tests correlate to injury risk or professional tasks performance. The main tests for determining strength endurance choose exercises with local load distribution. Long-distance running is the main exercise for determining the level of aerobic endurance of military personnel. Swimming exercises is included in the selection programmes for most special operations units. The speed and coordination abilities of servicemen are tested with the help of various variants of the shuttle run. There is no gender or age differentiation when assessing candidates. The selection of candidates is made from several phases and involves complication of standards. The selection program also includes applied physical exercises that are performed in uniform, namely: swimming, marching, overcoming an obstacle course, etc. The system of selection is based on the motivation of servicemen. They tend to score more points than their competitors.

Musculoskeletal injury mitigation is a priority in military organisations to protect personnel health and sustain a capable workforce. Despite efforts to prevent injury, inconsistencies exist in the evidence used to support these activities. There are many known limitations in the injury surveillance data reported in previous Special Operation Forces (SOF) research. Such studies often lack accurate, reliable, and complete data to inform and evaluate injury prevention activities. This research aimed to achieve expert consensus on injury surveillance methods in SOF to enhance the quality of data that could be used to inform injury prevention in this population. A Delphi study was conducted with various military injury surveillance stakeholders to seek agreement on improving surveillance methods in SOF. Iterative questionnaires using close and open-ended questions were used to collect views about surveillance methods related to injury case definitions and identifying essential and optional data requirements. Consensus was predefined as 75% group agreement on an item. Sixteen participants completed two rounds of questionnaires required. Consensus was achieved for 17.9% (n = 7) of questions in the first-round and 77.5% (n = 38) of round two questions. Several challenges for surveillance were identified, including recording injury causation, SOF personnel’s injury reporting behaviours influencing accurate data collection, and surveillance system infrastructure limitations. Key military injury surveillance stakeholders support the need for improved data collection to enhance the evidence that underpins injury prevention efforts. The consensus process has resulted in preliminary recommendations to support future SOF injury surveillance.

This study provides an examination of approaches to United States Government (USG) resourcing interventions on a national scale that enhance psychology support capabilities in the Special Operations Forces (SOF) community. A review of Congressional legislation and resourcing trends in the form of authorizations and appropriations since 2006 demonstrates how Congress supported enhanced psychology support capabilities throughout the Armed Forces and in SOF supporting innovative command interests that address adverse affects of operations tempo behavioral effects (OTBE). The formulation of meaningful metrics to address SOF specific command interests led to a personnel tempo (PERSTEMPO) analysis in response to findings compiled by the Preservation of the Force and Families (POTFF) Task Force. The review of PERSTEMPO data at subordinate command and unit levels enhances the capability of SOF leaders to develop policy and guidance on training and operational planning that mitigates OTBE and maximizes resourcing authorizations. A major challenge faced by the DoD is in providing behavioral healthcare that meets public and legislative demands while proving suitable and sustainable at all levels of military operations: strategic, operational, and tactical. Current legislative authorizations offer a mechanism of command advocacy for resourced multi-functional program development that enhances psychology support capabilities while reinforcing SOF readiness and performance.

Special Forces Algorithm: A novel meta-heuristic method for global optimization

ABSTRACTThis case study describes the unconventional warfare techniques used by Allied special operations forces during their campaign against Axis occupiers of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1945. The Yugoslavia campaign was destined to be among the first in a series of twentieth-century unconventional warfare efforts, culminating in the campaign conducted by the United States and United Kingdom covert and special operators. This region of the Balkans was extremely active with occupying German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and various client government militaries pitted against largely unconventional forces to include Soviet backed partisans under Tito and loyalist Chetniks backed by Allied Forces. The planning considerations, preparation, and precise military actions conducted during this conflict continue to reemerge in contemporary discussions on special operations theory. The experiences of the past continue to enable successes in the evolution of modern special operations forces that began with the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS and employment of special operations forces in Yugoslavia during World War II.