Our policy analyst in European Affairs and the Margaret Thatcher center for freedom, he focuses on transatlantic security issues. His writings featured in real clear world, foxnews. Com, breitbart. Com and hes provided analysis in over 100 radio and television appearances. He has also served as a panelist at the transatlantic think tank conference in brussels belgium and provided parliamentary evidence to the uk house of Lords Select Committee on the arctic. Prior to joining us at the batter center he worked at a nonprofit in washington dc as a policy analyst as well as on the Advisory Board of a company as both a Research Associate and associate director. Join me in welcoming daniel coaches. [applause] thank you john and good morning everybody on this beautiful wednesday in washington. We are honored to be joined by mark moyar whose book oppose any foe the rise of americas special Operations Forces was described by National Review as an invaluable and highly readable overview of special Operations Forces history, not just for those who are newly joining its ranks but also for anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces. Our author mark moyar is director for the center of military and diplomatic history in washington dc. He has served as professor at the Us Marine Corps university and a senior fellow at the joint special operations university. He is advised the Senior Leadership of several us military commands as well he holds a ba , loud from harvard and phd from hamburg. In addition to the book we are talking about today he has also written a number of other works including 84 elites, building partner nation and ending poverty through Human Capital which i read in grad school. Tragic failure, how president obamas drone warfare defense cuts and military amateurism had imperiled america. A question of command after insurgency from the civil war to iraq. Trial or second, the vietnam war 1964 to 1965 in phoenix and the birds of prey counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in vietnam and with that i look forward to your discussion and i will turn it over to you doctor moyer. [applause] great. Thank you very much daniel for that kind introduction, thank you john for inviting me here. 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 we will have time for question and answer at the end. I just would provide a little background. The reason i wrote this book was as a joint special operations university, we started on the history special operations and discovered that the engagement. And theres not enough understanding among the policy world of what actually they do. Im going to start off by a little bit of intro. Even in the policy world theres not too many people who i think understand what the different parts of special Operations Forces are so i want to talk about that for a minute. At the top you have special Operations Command, us so, and that is the Umbrella Organization for special Operations Forces located in tampa and i will talk about how that came into existence. Although it are the Component Commands within the special operations world and all the services have them, you will see them up there and theres also jsoc, joint special Operations Command which is comprised of multiple services and we will get into how that is important and how it came into being. And theres also a lot of confusion about what special Operations Forces themselves are. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that they sound like special forces. Special forces are part of the army so they fall into that bucket on the left. Special Operations Forces is the umbrella term for everything. One thing from the thought, remember special Operations Forces are not the same as special forces. So lets start off talking about world war ii because world war ii provides the impetus for special Operations Forces and it also paves the way for future forces because most of what we see today can trace its roots back to some degree to world war ii. The special operations get going first on the uk side with winston churchill. After the fall of france, the british are faced with another war against germany. Churchill like a lot of rich does not want to fight the world war i style war where a whole generation of young men are decimated. He tries to come up with ways to get around this. One thing you guys is to try to get the russians to do a lot of fighting which ends up working well but he had this energy of rating germany on the periphery with this new Organization Called the commandos and they are lightly. ,part of that is because they left both of their equipment behind in dunkirk when they took off. So this is a way to kind of be doing something without getting involved in this huge lovefest on the continent. Once the us comes in, the Roosevelt Administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the uk and one of the first opportunities that comes along is to work with these commandos in an Organization Called the army rangers is set up underwilliam orlando darby. And they start working with commandos, they are training with commandos and one of the First Missions the rangers go on is the raid on the french coast which turns out to be a complete disaster. The germans wipe out most of thelanding force. As a result of this disaster, the allies move away from this idea of rating on the coast because its not working that well and be, theyre not doing much to hurt the axis powers by doing this. So by the time the rangers are really getting up to speed they are going to take part in the big campaigns of the war, first in north africa and subsequently italy and france. To give you a little bit from italy, in italy they take part in the major landings in sicily and then salerno and anzio. Initially some of their special training comes in handy the activity plantings but once they get ashore, they end up fighting primarily as intentional infantry. Theres not a lot of opportunity to sneak around germans as there had been with some of the less capable italian and French Forces they dealt with in north africa. When they get to anzio, they are part of an early attempt to move inland which leads to the battle of sizer not on january 30, 1944 where two of the ranger battalions are said to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a German Division which completely wiped them out. Out of 767 troops only six of them escape from that disaster. So this shows pretty clearly that the rangers are not really capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment. We will see them mostly get phase out over time. And the marine corps side we have the formation of the marine corps raiders. In january 1942 and here at president roosevelt is directly involved and the forms these raters based on the advice of his son, james who is a union marine officer. Who is enamored of this guy carlson was shown in the other picture with miles a tongue and he has this sort of romanticized view of commandos and gorillasrunning around solving problems with the japanese. The marine corps commandant , when he hears of this thinks its a crazy idea and said there no way we should do this. But the president take the advice of his son so marine rater battalions are formed. And as with the 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 ultimately to phasing out those units. On the navy side, the fraud men are created. To mainly get a clear obstacle for amphibious landings, theres a fossil where Marine Landing craft into obstacles and had their bottom sport out. And this would go in, set demolition us to break away the charges and we were generally considered successful in doing so. Then we also have within world war ii the oss has its own special Operations Forces. This is william j donovan, the head of the oss. He trying to find places to put forth a lot of the regional commanders dont want his there but he does find willing partners in the china burma india theater, partly because theres not a lot of American Forces there. So he organizes whats called the detachment 101. And it was given that number because they didnt want the enemy to know that they only had one unit, it was just detachment one so they partner with the kitchen forces after some trial and error, theres a lot of their initial attempts dont go well. Theres not local partners they can work with. People betray them but in detachment 101 does find a chin who is extremely capable and they found the american kitchen rangers who Work Together with more conventional units against the japanese scouting and breathing highly effective forces. In europe the oss forms gender units which are small threeman teams that their huge into the german rear to work with the resistance. The organizations after the game. The locally they had a lot of success. I argue there that i think they overestimate their effectiveness on strategic scale. If you look at this short, theres only 222 genders that go in. Its much smaller than the operational groups, thats another oss entity and most of those are smaller than the 1574 in the british sas. And when you think about what really caused trouble for the germans, the resistance is not high on the list. The Deception Campaign done to mislead the germans was i think the most important in terms of lowering the German Response and Strategic Bombing came in second. There was some impact but i think we can to overestimate the strategic impact but theres still only a lot of reverence for this divergence that we now have a program today. The end of world war ii, almost all of the special Operations Forces are disbanded and a lot of this has to do with the fact that they didnt turn out as effectively has been hoped. Only the frogman retained some of their strength, because they were perceived as being especially effective. Now the book goes into a whole chapter on korea which im not going to cover just in the interest of time a lot of interesting stuff happens there including the formation of the Army Special Forces but im going to touch on the kennedy. Because this is the next critical. Kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. The i think as a romanticized view of how much they can accomplish. When he comes in theres 2000, the orders and increase to 10,500. Which seems great but one of the problems you have with allegiances is if you start to build them up rapidly you cant be quite so elite so when he comes in, 90 percent of the people who try to qualify out. But in order to reach the expansion they are only failing out 30 percent of the people so you do see acertain degradation of quality. You have on the navy side, kennedy pushes for the creation of the sierra land teams or seals as we know them todaywhich originally started out as a counterinsurgency , marine counterinsurgency force. In terms of vietnam, its a mixed record of success and failure. Some of the programs worked out pretty well but none of them are strategically decisive because it does become a conventional war by 1965 but the cibc program in particular which was a program working with local forces is the Largest Program they ever done and effective in mobilizing tribes against the enemy. So what happens next, in the 70s, theres a surgeon hijacking and terrorism. Which creates a lot of consternation and as the military is coming out of vietnam and looking for things to do, this is something it seems will like where there could be a role in special operations to play. So the first thing that happens, in 1974 the rangers are brought back to life, the meat Counter Terrorist force. Then they are seen as not being early enough so in 1977 we have delta force which is an army unit, the most elite are unit and in 1980 we see field team six which is the navys attempt to produce an equivalent to delta force. Initially these are all focused on hostage rescue. The first big mission, operation eagle fall in 1980 with delta force is set to rescue the iran hostages. They said helicopters to a baseball desert one, theyre supposed to move from there to iran but the mechanical problems and other problems, they dont get enough helicopters there. To complete the mission so they have to scratch it and they try to move in theres a crash between the helicopter and aircraft. There suppliers and eight americans are caught in the fire, killed and they are not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave so its a 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 eagleclaw was that you had an ad hoc command structure. Which was thrown together late in the day and was not sufficiently coordinated so this will lead to the creation of aesop, joint special Operations Command. Theres also a problem with the aircraft, aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle. They brought together pilots and aircraft that were familiar so to deal with this problem they create the next offers, the hundred 50th Navy Special Operations aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capability. And the next few years theres further Reform Efforts which culminate in the creation of so calm, special Operations Command. This is with the non amendment of 1986. Its the result of special operations advocates. And their supporters in congress pushing for legislation. So the first thing that they get is socom special Operations Command which is a four star headquarters in. They have the second thing they get is soul which is assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict. And this gives National Operations a presence inside the pentagon where budget battles and other things go on. Which are useful to have. An employer at that level. The first thing is nfpa 11, Major Force Program 11 which is a separate funding line or special operators that they were not getting their share of resources. Fourthly they get a set of Nine Missions that are said to be special operations specialties. So it seems coming out of this like special operations have finally what they need, they got all these great things going for them. But it turns out its not quite as rosy as one might hope. I was going to say, the guy on the right, its not what griswold, he has the Clark Griswold haircut but that is senator nunn. So here we go. So okay. You get to desert storm, 1990. General sports cop is on the left, the commander of Central Command which is one of the regional combatant commands and on the right you have general carl steiner who is the commander of so calm. One of the things not going to do was give so calm Actual Authority over the forces that are deployed. Authority still resides with regional commander, in this case general schwarzkopf so so calm, that makes a case to schwarzkopf that these forces are actually valuable. So steiner goes to schwarzkopf, pleads with him to give his forces the opportunity to take part in operation schwarzkopf. Not known for particularly liking special Operations Forces, he ends up not getting any Important Missions so the summer, guys feel like this at the end, kind of stuff on the bench with support units, not getting to do a lot of cool stuff they were hoping to do. So the next seminal event for special operations is 911. Important for all americans but for absolutely no one more important than for americas special Operations Forces. He has shortly after the attack, president bush is trying to figure out a way to get back at the man. So he says in the cia and army forces to work with the Northern Alliance. A Group Fighting against the taliban. This is this picture, some of the special forces who go in on horseback and ride around with the alliance. The americans actually are not at all prepared for afghanistan. They have the special operators assigned to this mission are all fluent in arabic and french because they thought they were going to be on middle east missions but they do have one skill thats really crucial and that the ability to guide the missions. So they help the Northern Alliance over quickly overcome the talent and resistance. To defeat the taliban. And throw them out, chase out by now and this is seen i think rightly as the most single most strategically Important Role that special <