On the website and cspan tv for those in house we would ask that courtesy that our mobile devices have been silenced or turned off for those watching online or in the future, youre welcome to sending questions or comments simply emailing, speaker at heritage. Org and, of course, we will post todays program on the heritage home page for everyones future reference as well. Leading our discussion today is daniel coaches, and danielle is our policy analyst and european affair and Margaret Thatcher center for freedom and focuses on transare Atlantic Security issue and writings featured in real clear world fox news. Com and breitbart. Com and provided expert analysis in over 100 regular and radio and television appearances. Hes also served as a imaginist at the transatlantic in belgium and provided parliamentary evidence to the United Kingdom house of Lord Select Committee on the arctic. Prior to joining us here at heritage and Thatcher Center he ed at a nonprofit in washington, d. C. As analyst as well as on Advisory Board company as beth a Research Associate and a associate director. Please join me in welcoming danielle coaches. Danielle. [applause] thank you john and good morning everybody on this beautiful here in washington. Were honored today to be joined by mark moyer whos book oppose any foe the rises of America SpecialOperations Forces was described by National Review as invaluable and highly readable overview of special Operation Forces history not just those for those qhor newly joining its ranks but also for anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces. Our author mark is director of the center for military and diplomating history here in washington, d. C. Hes served as professor at u. S. Marine corps. University and senior fellow of the joint spernl special Operation University and Senior Leadership of u. S. Military commands as well he holds b. A. Law from harvard ph. D. From cambridge and in addition to book that were talking about today he is also written a number of other works includes aid for elites, building partner nations and ending poverty for Human Capital that i believe that i read in grad school, strategic failure how is president obamas drone warfare defense cuts and military military amateurism have in america and question of command can that from civil war to iraq triumph fore saken vietnam war 1954 to 1965. And phoenix and birds of prey and in counterterrorism in vietnam. And with that i look forward to the discussion and turn it over to you dr. Moore. [applause] great. Thank you very much danielle for that kind introduction thanks john for inviting me here. Great to be back at the heritage foundation. Im going to talk about the book a little bit cant cover the whole thing in this presentation. But im going to hit on some of the highlights. And well have some time for question and answer at the end. Just to with to provide a little bit of background the reason i wrote this book was that while i was at the joingt special operations university, we started a course on the history of special operations and discovered that there was not a single volume that we could really look to give you a history from the origins in world war ii up through the present and most of what, i think, special Operations Forces understood about their history is episodic and certain bits and piece but havent been something to pull it altogether and i was reading this too special operations have become huge part of our overseas engagement and theres not i think enough understanding among the policy world about what actually they do and start off with a little bit had of intro. Even in the policy world theres not too many people who i think understand what the different parts especially Operations Forces are so i want to talk about that for a minute. But the top there you have special Operations Commands u. S. Socom Umbrella Organization for special operation forced in tampa talk about that how that came into existence. Below it are the Component Commands within the special operations world and all of the services have them youll up there and also jay sock second are from the right there. Join special Operations Command which is comprised of operators from multiple services and again well get into how that is important how it came into being. And theres also a lot of confusion about what special Operations Forces themselves are and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they sound like special force os. Special forces are part of the army so they fall into that bucket on the left. They special Operations Forces of the umbrella term for everything so if you can remember special Operation Forces are the not same thing as special forces if. So lets lets start off talking about world war ii because world war ii provides the First Special operation os forces and it also pave way for future force and it can trace roots back to sol degree to world war ii so special operations get going first on the u. K. Side with Winston Churchill you know after the fall of france, the british are faced with another war against germany, and churchill like a lot of brits does not want to fight another world war i style war where whole generation of young men are decimated so he tries to come up with some ways to get around this. One thing he tries to do is get russians to do fighting which works out pretty well. Then he has this strategy of raiding germany on the periphery with this new Organization Called the commandos and lightly equipped part of that is because they lost most of their equipment behind when they took off. And so this is a way to kind of be doing something without getting involved in this huge slug fest on the continent. So once the u. S. Comes in, the Roosevelt Administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the u. K. And one of the first opportunities that comes along is to work with these commandos had this an Organization Called army ranger to set up under William Orlando darby, and so they start working with commando training with the commandos, and one of the First Missions that some of rangers go on is the raid at french coast which turns out to be complete disaster that germans wipe out most of the Landing Force and as a result of this disaster the allies move away from idea of raiding on the coast a it is not working that well and not doing much to hurt the access powers by doing this. So by the time rangers are really getting up to speed theyre going to take part in the big campaigns of the war first in north africa. And subsequently italy and france. Give you a little bit from italy and take part in the landings this this sicily and antio. Initially some of their special training comes in handy with am Amphibious Landing but conventional infantry. Not a lot of opportunities to sneak around the germans as there have been with some the less capable italian and French Forces in north africa. When they get to antio, they are part of an early attempt to move inland which leads to the battle of sisterna where two of the ranger battalions are sent to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a German Division which wipes them out of troops only six of them escape from that disaster and so this shows pretty clearly that rangers are not really capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment and so we will see them mostly get phased out over time. And the marine corps. Side we have formation of the marine corps. Ratedders in january of 2042 and here president roosevelt is directly involved and he forms raiders based on advice of his advice of his son enamored of this guy evan carlson and he has a sort of romanticized view of commando and imril las running around causing problems for the japanese and marine corps. Thinks it is a crazy idea and sayst theres no way we should do this but president takes advice of his son so the marine raider battalions are formed, and as with rangers they have initial successes but when the war becomes increasingly conventional, they endure a number of setbacks including this one in the new Georgia Campaign which again will lead to fazing out those units. On navy side the frog men are created to mainly clear obstacle for am Amphibious Landings where the Marine Landing craft ran obstacles and had had their bottoms torn out. These units would go in set demolition to break away the charges and generally considered successful had many doing so. Then we have the oss has its own special Operations Forces this is the head of the oss. And he trying to find places to put forces a lot of regional commanders dont want his people there. But he does find willing partners in the china burma india theater because theres not a lot of American Forces there. And so he organized what is called attachment 101. And it was given that number because they didnt want the enemy to know that they only had had had one unit as originally just detachment one. So they partner with the ka chen forces after treel and error actually with a lot of their initial attempts dont go well theyre just not local partners they can work with. People betray them. But in detachment 101 does find a leader who is extremely capable and they form whats called american rangers, who work against japanese and scout ising breeding highly effective force. In europe oss forms units which are small three man teams that parachute in into the german rear to work with resistance organizations after dday. Locally they have a lot of success i think i argue we tend to i think overestimate their effect iiveness on scale theres 222 jetburgs that go in which is much smaller than operational groups which another oss entity and small or than 15,074 in british sas and when you about this what really caused trouble l for the germans resistance is not high on the list that Deception Campaign that was done to mislead the germans was i think most important in terms of slowing German Response and Strategic Bombing came in second. So thrftion some impact we overestimate the strategic impact but a lot of reverence for what we have now and a program today. So at the end of world war ii lmg all of the special organizations are disband sod not as effective as hoped and troughing man who retains their strength because they were perceived as being especially effective. Now the book has a chapter on korea which i will not cover in the interest of time but interesting stuff happens there too including Army Special Forces but im going to touch on kennedy period which is next really krit are call moment on kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. And hic has a romanticized view of how much they can actually accomplish but youll see when he comes in theres 2,000 he orders increase to 10,500 which seems great but when youre one of the problems you have with the unit is if you start to build them up rapidly you cant be quite so e elite so when had he comes in 90 of the people who try to qualify fail out. But failing out 30 of people so you see a certain degradation of quality. You have on the navy side navy pushes for creation of the sea air, and land team seals as we know them today which started out as counterinsurgency a force. In terms of vietnam its a mixed record of success and of some of the programs are workout pretty well and none of them are decisive becomes it does become a war by 1965. But the c. I. D. G. Program which was a program working with local forces is the Largest Program theyve ever done in pretty effective in mobilizing tribe against the enemy. So what happens next . The 70s theres a surge in hijacking and terrorism which creates a lot of conser nation and looking for things to do looks like there could be a role for special operations to play. So the first thing that happenings in 1974 the rangers are brought back to life as elite counterterrorist force. But then seeing not quite elite enough so in 1977 we have delta force which is a army unit most elite army unit and then 1980 Seal Team Six which is the navys attempt to produce equivalent to delta force. So initially these are all focused on hostage rescue. The first big Mission Operation eagle claw in 19 l 80 delta force sent to rescue iran hostages. But they they send helicopters to a base called desert one move from there, and because of mechanical problem they dont get enough helicopters there to complete the mission so they have to scratch it and when theyre trying to move theres a crash between the helicopter and aircraft as a fire and eight americans are caught in the fire killed and theyre not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave. So huge, huge setback. But it does lead to some reforms that are of great value to special Operations Forces. So the first one one of the problems identified in eagle claw was that you had an at hawk command structure it was thrown together late in the day and was not officially coordinated so this will lead to creation of jay salk who join special Operations Command. Theres also a problem with the aircraft i mentioned aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle they brought together pilots and aircraft that wrnght familiar. So to deal request this problem they create the Night Stalkers 160th special Operations Aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capable. And then next few years theres further Reform Efforts which culminate in the creation of so calm special operation os command and this is with the amendment of 1986 as a result of special operations advocates, and supporters in congress pushing for legislation. So first thing they get special operation os command as i mentioned earlier a fourstar Head Quarters in tampa. Second thing is assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict, and this gives special operation os a presence inside the pentagon where budget battle and other things go on where it is useful to have a player at that level. And msp11 Major Force Program 11 which is a separate funding line that special operation torps that felt like they were not getting their share of resources forthly they get a set of Nine Missions that are said to be special operations and specialty. So it seems coming out of this like special operations have finally gotten what they need. Theyve got great things going for them. But not as rosy as one might hope. Click this by the way the guy on the right in that picture is not Clark Griswald that is the haircut but that is senator nun. Is here question go. Went too far. So we get to desert storm 1990, and the commander of Central Command which is one of the regional imt and commands and on the right we have charl steiner who is commander of so come and he did not give the Actual Authority over president s forces that are deploy sod that authority resides with the regional commander in this case general schwartz, so its up to socom to make the case that these forces are actually valuable and so steiner goes to him and pleads with him to give his forces opportunity to attack part in the operation but not known for particularly liking special Operations Forces and eppedz up not giveing them many Important Missions and so the guys are stuck on the bench with support units not getting to do a lot of cool stuff they were hopeing to do. So the next event for special operations is 9 11. Important for all americans but perhaps for no one more important than for americas special Operations Forces. We have shortly after the attack president bush is trying to figure out a way to get back at the taliban. So he sends in the c. I. A. And Army Special Forces to work with the Northern Alliance that rebel Group Fighting against the taliban on this is this picture is some of the special forces who go in on horseback and rides around with Northern Alliance people. And the americans actually are not at all prepared for afghanistan. They have special operators a siphon this mission are all fliewngt in arabic and french because they thought middle east missions but they have one skill that turns out to be really crucial thats the ability to guide emissions so they help Northern Alliance ov