Many professional soldiers dislike the concept of “elite” units. By siphoning off experienced leaders and the best of the regular forces they reduce the combat readiness and effectiveness of line units. They tend to get first dibs on equipment which could be upgrading the regular troops. They make a somewhat artificial and potentially insulting distinction
between good soldiers in line units and “elite” soldiers which can
create unnecessary problems of morale.
Bring back RECONDO schools. Have a guy or two in each squad go to RASP-lite to come back and half-assed teach the rest of their unit.
>Have a guy or two in each squad go to RASP-lite to come back and half-assed teach the rest of their unit.
This is what the Ranger Regiment does with their NCOs. After a soldier becomes an NCO in the 75th, he has to spend time in a regular Army unit before he's allowed back in the 75th. When he's with the regular Army unit he's suppose to teach them things he's learned and motivate them to be better soldiers. But regular Army units are so bad that they often join Delta or SF to avoid going to the regular Army.
everything is fricked up because were aren't actually at war, so nothing is normal
gwot was a big mic circlejerk, not even sf will tell you otherwise
>Pareto principle.
Rangers the 20%. 80% of the military runs from plain average to actually mentally moronic. Sending specialist like Rangers to other units is pearls before swine. They can't fix what is wrong with the rest of the Army.
I'm not American but there's definitely two sides to this. Was forced to interact with younger commando types who would rotate into conventional infantry units to tick some box. A few of those guys were super far up their own ass and would constantly underestimate everybody around them. Then you could see them in the hallways slap fighting eachother with that gay ass wing chun they've learned because someone in charge must've thought it's the shit.
tl;dr having those dudes around was super bad for moral. Instead of being positive rolemodels they were basically acting like insufferable dipshits who thought they were too cool for school. Quiet professional my butt.
Imho they're not team players, in terms of the larger military. They like the image of being a badass but act like the existence of other roles disgusts them, like burger flippers or such. Meanwhile some of dudes couldn't unclog a toilet.
In my experience, the concept of "Send elite infantry/commandos/SOF/whoever the frick is special in your military to line units" is a net positive. In the United States, Rangers are SUPPOSED to, by doctrine, spend some time in Ranger Regiment and then move back to a normal line unit and actually teach and motivate. In practice, they huff their own farts. From what I see in the US, Green Berets are significantly more likely to actually enjoy teaching and working with regular grunts.
I see the same issue with Rangers in the US as I see with Royal Marines in the UK.
>RASP
Do you mean Ranger school?
No. Special Forces is a suicide cult. It’s adherents chase after a mirage of cheap, easy victory where a few Herculean men will be able to overcome insurmountable odds. Civilian politicians love the idea of SF because it’s cheap and allows disavowal and secrecy.
SF has never given a worthy return on the investments of manpower, training, money and equipment that could have been better spent on general combat forces.
Nothing has changed since the days of William Slim’s horror at being told the Chindits, the cream of the crop of his troops, had been attritioned by 80% over the span of a few months of combat in Burma. Today we witness Ukraine’s 47th bde slowly getting destroyed through attrition because all the "elite” troops were concentrated in one unit, forcing to stay in action because other brigades lack the talent and leadership to perform on the modern battlefield. Same story on the other side of the coin for the Russians and their marines and paras. It’s a death cult. Really.
Specialisation leads to extinction.
t. Robert "Yeah, I write books about fricking my mother. What about it?” Henlein.
And he was a complete moron when he cooked up that idea. Specialisation is literally the basis and reason of existence of organised civilization.
>Civilian politicians love the idea of SF because it’s cheap and allows disavowal and secrecy.
This is a huge part of it especially in modern desert wars, don't have headlines of 5 soldiers killed in afghanistan or whatever. Especially for small militaries where their entire commitment of soldiers might be SF
Why did those SOF boys get shredded in Tongo Tongo? shouldn’t these few, these happy few, nietzschean supermen have been able to bounce back their adversaries’ bullets off their ultra-roided chest? Shouldn’t they have been able to achieve a 10,000:1 K/D ratio like the superheroes of Operation Red Wing? SOF are unbeatable. They can untie knots underwater and walk really fast for a long time. How could they have lost?
>SOF are unbeatable. They can untie knots underwater and walk really fast for a long time.
>No. Special Forces is a suicide cult. It’s adherents chase after a mirage of cheap, easy victory where a few Herculean men will be able to overcome insurmountable odds.
Actually happened a couple times in history. The Brandenburgers did some big stuff.
Seizing the bridges over the Dvina in tact in July 1941 when Leningrad was totally undefended could have made it GG for the Soviet Union but Manstein pussied out (very uncharacteristically) and didn't take the city in a coup de main because he was worried about flank security and didn't move in until the city was fortified. Probably the only realistic 'what if' scenario where the Heer beats the Red Army in Barbarossa, and was made possible due to the Brandenburgers
>IPs don't even closely match post count
Did an SFAS non-select write this thread
homie what, is IP counting back or something? I don't see any
You need a PrepHole Gold account.
This is a shit thread for morons who don't understand the place SF has in warfare.
Exhibit 1. SAS wiping out the Italian air force in the desert.
Exhibit 2. Otto Skorzeny's commandos literally swooping in to rescue Mussolini from imprisonment on top of a fricking mountain
Exhibit 3. SOG in Vietnam racking up kill counts wildly in excess of regular formations.
Now this may sound harsh, but everyone in this thread should die. Including me for entertaining such morons.
You do realize that those operations were over 50 years ago. What decisive action has SOF had lately? It's largely a money suck with little payoff. SOFs contribution to the GWOT was they could be constantly deployed in LIC so the American people didn't realize they were actually at war. Modern SOF would never conduct audacious operations like those you mentioned. They would need mountains of conventional support. SOF today is little more than Wagner Group tier, with the possible exception of some CIF units and CAG.
Life is too short to read any of that shit.
TLDR:
SOF is irrelevant.
All war is attrition.
Anyone who says otherwise is not a serious person and should not be listened to.
no war is attrition
the whole point of war is overmatch
that is the only way to wage war
And how do you intend to achieve overmatch? Industrial production?
By throwing more bodies at the problem lmao
>Overmatch
Industrial production / masses of troops. Regardless, you are back to attrition.
no, generally overmatch is achieved by having systems that do not attrit.
>A system that doesn't attrit.
I see... Such as?
planes
>Aircraft doesn't suffer from attrition.
Yeah.
if nobody can shoot them down, no
SEAD/DEAD is the key to fighting wars without just throwing materiel at each other
Please tell me about this war where aircraft where not shot down, and how does this apply to the concept of "overmatch"?
>SEAD/DEAD is the key to fighting wars without just throwing materiel at each other
Anon, Sorties require material
Oh, hey! You're that one anon who thinks that the only way wars can possibly be fought is with modern US doctrine. I've seen your posts so often I started thinking I need a name for you, how do you feel about Billy?
>the only way wars can possibly be fought is with modern US doctrine
Prove me wrong.
What other way to fight a war is there?
How else do you fight a war without inconveniencing your economically productive population?
War is expensive, so throwing your economy into the dumpster to wage a war without a good ROI is a bad idea. It should be the other way around, the war should bolster your economy.
>Prove me wrong.
You're so moronic that in spite of having had all of that explained to you a million times you still refuse to listen. I've decided to call you SEADTARD because you seem to think it's a magic talisman that wards off the evil eye of air defenses and allows militaries that can't afford an air force to gain air supremacy.
If you can't afford an air force, why are you waging war?
If you're just pretending to be moronic then you've been doing it so well for so long that you might be stuck. If you're not, holy shit, that's even funnier.
>being poor doesn't matter in war
ok?
Even if they are never shot down the airframes will get beat up pretty badly, especially if they are pulling high gs evading missiles or whatever. it can be hard keeping aircraft airworthy even in peacetime where they are flying way less missions, and parts of the plane are very difficult or impossible to repair
I feel like this is nitpicking. Of course planes do attrit, but not in a way that matters during war, assuming nobody can shoot at them.
It's not at all a minor issue. Even if they aren't destroyed by wear and tear its going to be pretty hard to keep them flying as often and in as large numbers. You could start the war with 400 planes and pretty quickly with crew + plane losses and huge amounts of maintenance needed (f-16 needs 17 hours of maintenance per flight hour), that could 200 operational within two weeks. You probably have to cannibalise the most damaged planes for parts and production of new planes and parts is going to be possibly very slow and difficult, especially for older planes that are out of production like the f-22.
Absolute vatBlack person take.
This same mentality lead to recon and sniper units disbanding after war and losing institutional knowledge. Permanent recon and sniper units are a fairly recent thing. During a war officers figure out they need them, but after the war they want to disband them.
Read "Fry the Brain" by John Ford. He has a whole section on the cult of sniperism.
And yet every war it turns out the infantry needs snipers and recce specialists.
Yeah…that’s what the book talks about
It’s in favor of it, not opposed to it.
The problem with spec ops is that it’s an over correction of the problem. Sure having a spec ops team help with initial invasions and recon helps but once it’s time for the infantry they keep giving the job to the high speed guys who go in at night with AC 130 support rather than just having a few specialists in the FOB with the other grunts who can be utilized without and entire board room of generals watching on drone footage
I remember during peak Iraq, infantrymen were complaining that they were overworked; so much so that POGs were doing security when it was normally the infantry's job. SOF guys want to be overworked, that's what selection simulates.
Yeah, but if you put a ranger on guard duty it’s a waste of skillset and bad allocation of resources.
You're just making stuff up.
Rangers too and now Raiders are back.
The real advantage of special forces is concentrating soldiers who are
A. Creative enough to figure out unconventional solutions to problems, sometimes even problems nobody knew existed.
B. Driven enough to action those solutions in real life
into units that will allow them to do that stuff, rather than be stifled by the standard hidebound rules based army that is like that for a very good reason, ie. the tards in the Infantry are REALLY tarded and need a shitload of wrangling.
For example the Italians never knew that they were weak to raiders on chopped down jalopies crossing the desert because nobody had ever considered it as a thing that might happen. It's for that reason you need to keep them, so they can keep on thinking wild shit up to try. Who knows what the next war might be or what it might need?
Secondly, if you're going to have literal unironic death squads (SEALS in the GWOT), and if you're doing COIN you're going to need death squads, you don't want them mixing to much with your general infantry for obvious reasons.
The special forces hate seems to be more bullshit from the "le tanks are obsolete" crowd and mostly about trolling or even some kind of foreign glowie psyop to deprive us of a useful tool.
>Hasbeen
I see. And how were special forces a decisive factor in any war in the last 30 years?
In Gulf War 1 and 2 special forces infiltrated the border and located targets for coalition forces to bomb. Putting eyeballs on the actual sites meant that several important places were hit that otherwise would not have been. Also they helped guide laser guided munitions directly to where they needed to be from the ground.
Once again we come to the situation where the West does things so well and competently that it looks easy, and midwits start to believe that it is actually easy and doesn't require training, thought, plans and logistics work reaching back to years before conflict starts.
You'd think those morons would look at the botched Russian invasion of 2022 and realise this, but no, they'll just continue being morons. Probably because they are actually moronic.
>Decisive
And without that particular op the war would have never succeeded?
It would have been much more costly in terms of life, which as a Russian subhuman probably doesn't figure for you, but low cost of life is a win condition for Western nations.
At a certain point I have to accept you're simply a bad faith trolling moron and give up, and I think we've reached it.
>C4ISR
Nonsense. They had a war and everyone wanted to play. Regardless, today there are so many sensors at every level that it is nonsensical to think that specialized recon is needed outside of LIC. In Ukraine every system capable of indirect fire is doing their own targeting with drone spotters.
As I said before, SOF is largely a money suck and not decisive in LSCO. SOF was misused in the GWOT as essentially Wagner Group tier conventional army. Everyone in USAFC knows they lowered the standards to increase throughput. Even USAFC knows their UW skills have atrophied. Remember how NG ETTs were being used to train Kandaks because SF lost interest in their core mission?
Again, all war is attrition and the US ultimately got exhausted.
I like how America is so dominant that one of the critiques people have against us is that SF failed to win wars in which the goal is to change a nation’s political culture and identity. People really are getting dumber.
Tanks are not le obsolete. The role/capabilities of a tank will probably be demand for some time. However, tanks in their current form factor are not optimized for the current reality.
>Exhibit 1. SAS wiping out the Italian air force in the desert.
Didn't happen, the Axis as a whole lost at most 150 aircraft to LRDG and SAS raids. Out of literally 1000s of aircraft available at any given time.
>Exhibit 2. Otto Skorzeny's commandos literally swooping in to rescue Mussolini from imprisonment on top of a fricking mountain
Totally irrelevant to the outcome of the war, a complete waste of resources.
>Exhibit 3. SOG in Vietnam racking up kill counts wildly in excess of regular formations.
Kill counts don't win wars, this is also ignoring the absurd losses SOG units faced when the PAVN developed proper countermeasures.
Don’t bother. He thinks SOG had value or was worth anything at all. All he deserves is to have the wikipedia article about SOG’s operations quoted at him. It was the Chindits on steroids.
>more than three-quarters of the agents inserted had been captured either during or not long after their insertion.
>SOG had followed the CIA's failed formula for three years
>repeat a failed formula
>Hanoi continued this process year after year, learning SOG's operational methods and bending them to its purpose. In the end, it was running one of the most successful counterintelligence operations of the post-Second World War period.
How fitting the tard wishes to kill himself. A trve believer in the SF death cult.
>the Axis as a whole lost at most 150 aircraft to LRDG and SAS raids. Out of literally 1000s of aircraft available at any given time
The Axis deployed a whole division worth of infantry as rear area guards. The SAS destroyed 400 aircraft.
For comparison, the British recorded 653 aircraft lost to enemy during the campaign.
The SAS contributed significantly to keeping air superiority away from the Axis, which was ultimately instrumental in defeating Rommel by attacking his tanks and severing his supply lines.
>The Axis deployed a whole division worth of infantry as rear area guards.
It is normal for militaries to deploy infantry to defend, the luftwaffe had divisions with this express purpose. The Axis never lost 400 aircraft to SAS/LRDG actions in North Africa, they might have claimed that many but if you parse loses from individual raids they were normally half of the claims. Even then the Axis lost 8,000 aircraft during the duration of the North African campaign. The Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica lost more aircraft in the Tunisian airlift than in Stalingrad. SAS actions were insignificant to the outcome of the campaign.
Stop samegayging, schizo.,
>absurd losses SOG units faced when the PAVN developed proper countermeasures
At least for ST 1 and ST 2, this never happened. Vietnam style STs were probably the best use case and set up for SF, since it's not like the Navy had any real use for roided out BMs and GMs and so gave them trivial resources and told them to have fun.
>special operations
Translation: regular infantry that is trained in advanced maneuvers to rescue, operate outside “pleb rules” of typical infantry, and occasional “off the books” assassinations. In other words, actual old school military work.
I like flecktarn 🙂
> Many professional soldiers dislike the concept of “elite” units. By siphoning off experienced leaders and the best of the regular forces
Hold the frick on. Wasn't that Brit a pedo?
OP asks, "Are special ops/SF worth it?", posts picture of a German tanker.....
He's not a tanker. That's Ansgar Meyer head of the KSK
quads wasted on a moron unable to read filenames
>By siphoning off experienced leaders and the best of the regular forces they reduce the combat readiness and effectiveness of line units.
Some soldiers want to do more than what the regular soldier does. If SOF was not an option for these men, they'd simply just leave the military.
It's true these type of men escape from maximum security compounds to become soldiers of fortune
Small (like a few hundred guys in the unit and 1-10 on a mission) doing insanely risky suicide missions behind enemy lines like sneaking into enemy harbors to attach mines to ships are fine as it's low risk, high reward and the units are small enough and secret enough to not cause issues with taking away from regular troops and morale.
Large units of "elites" like the British paratroopers or entire regiments or divisions of elite troops nearly always fail in practice. No matter what their alleged speciality is they will always be used poorly and outside their role. They are the best we have so lets put them wherever the fighting is fierciest and we need a unit to plug the gap, and then they get attrited hard.
British Paratroopers spent more time in Northern Ireland than any regular army units, standing around at checkpoints, shooting civilians and getting bombed, not a parachute in sight.
IDK that much about soviet guards units in ww2 and beyond but that seems like it would be a classic case of a negative morale effect + it was being handed out way too generously. When something like half of your divisions are guards, it means little and soldiers in a non guards division are thinking damn we must suck, we aren't even average.
>like sneaking into enemy harbors to attach mines to ships are fine
does that even still need to be a thing? Look at all the work the Ukranian navy has been putting in against the Russian Navy. No Ukrainian frogmen involved, just a shitload of drones. The ultimate result is the same, and it isn't like one is really more deniable or anything.
Ukraine isn't America.
Is recon even still a major part of SFs purpose any more, now that satellites can tell if there's milk in your coffee?
Those satellites cost more than every reconman we have right now.
Sounds like a reason to put them to use instead of letting them rot.
Yes, satellites can only do so much.
A satellite can look at the roof of a building, but it can't look through the windows. Also guys on the ground have technology that lets them hear through windows.
[citation needed]
Fundamentally there is a use for people who are specially trained to perform specific, high-risk missions and who are dumb enough to go on these high-risk missions.
But also, this stuff doesn't come up nearly as much as people want it to.
It is the gleam in the soldiers eye, not the glint of the bayonet that wins battles.
bro cant even bench 2 plates
how do these homies get in?
They are posterboys for recruiting.
They draw in stupid young guys who think they become navy seals and ending up cleaning decks.
That’s why the army’s doesn’t care if the retired seals lie their asses of with theire books and films, like American sniper or lone survivor.
That’s what they are supposed to do
I think if Special Forces are fine if used as they are doctrinally intended, as a specialized force which is trained to do mission which conventional forces are not (foreign internal defense for example). The larger problem is that in the west because of political incentives, Special Operations Forces have effectively become the “General Forces”. In that they perform all operations, even those grossly outside of their mission set because decision makers have become enamored with the idea of super-soldiers.
We should not strive to make ‘Elite’ units, only specialized units which do something specific that it is not practical to train main-line units for, Hostage Rescue forge example. Elite Units basically never produce an effect proportional to the resources they consume. Wars are won based on the average qualities of their forces not a few specific individuals. Furthermore, (as we’ve seen so often), it reenforces the misconception that many tasks in war are so difficult as to require specificCorps D’elite.
SOCOM as it exists right now is bloated, extremely so, and should be cut by at least 50%, especially in support roles which largely can be filled by conventional units.
>because of political incentives
Like what?
>even those grossly outside of their mission set
Can you give some examples?
> like what
Propaganda to get the COD kids roped into the military
> outside their mission set
They had a whole bomb of navy seals and there entire operations IN THE DESERT
*book
>They had a whole bomb of navy seals and there entire operations IN THE DESERT
Why do I never see people complain that Marines were also in the desert?
because you you didn't read the brief on why the commandant thinks treating the USMC as a second army is stupid.
>he doesn't know about the sand divers
Navy seals fricking up in afganistan and getting their whole team killed