The US military's special ops has slowly fallen back to its roots — and it's paying off in Iraq and Syria

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May 10, 2017 8:32 PM

Since 9/11, special ops were often used for direct action strikes, but they are increasingly being used in more indirect ways in the fight against ISIS.

A member of the US Army take position at the US section of a base for Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces in Makhmour, southeast of Mosul, Iraq, December 23, 2016.

The US military's special operations forces (SOF) are increasingly returning to their roots of advising foreign militaries to fight for them — and it seems to be paying dividends in Iraq and Syria.

There have been three big changes in how SOF has been used against ISIS, and if successful, these new tactics might be used in future conflicts, Linda Robinson, a senior analyst with RAND, writes at The Cipher Brief.

As Robinson notes, special ops are dispersed with local forces at the front, and they provide crucial fire support to local forces.

In the late 1940s, SOF were seen to have little purpose in a new world where atomic weapons and strategic bombers reigned. But that changed with the emergence of the Cold War, where proxy wars and insurgencies became more prevalent.

One of the first examples of the new way SOF were used was in the 1950s when the 10th Special Forces Group was tasked with establishing guerrilla forces behind Communist lines in eastern Europe. "That was the moment Special Operations warriors point to as their birthday," Dwight John Zimmerman and John D. Gresham write in "Beyond Hell and Back: How America's Special Operations Force Became The Best Fighting Force In The World."

After 9/11, however, SOF began to be used in more "precision, highly kinetic strike forces enabled by technology and linked through a digitally networked battlefield." But by and large, the new counter-terrorism strategy in Iraq and Syria may prove to be something of a reset to SOF's former tactics.

The number of SOF in Iraq and Syria has now reached about 10,000, giving them the means to provide "meaningful support

Over the last year, SOF has increasingly provided more fire support. US Apache helicopters were first used in June 2016 to capture

n March that US Marines near Raqqa "had One of the canons they used in these strikes was the M-777 Howitzer, which fires 155mm shells and has a range of up to 25 miles.

SOF has also recently helped position 500 local forces near the strategic Tabqah Dam

Check out the full article at The Cipher Brief >

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