Free Republic

America’s in-demand global force against terrorists is showing signs of stress and appears to be gliding toward a decline in readiness, says a Pentagon budget overview on special operations forces. With the end of U.S. military operations in the Iraq War, the thought was that fewer deployments would give some relief to special operations forces after a dozen years of overseas fighting. But the 2015 budget overview says demand for special operations forces is up, not down. It talks of “significant stress on the force” and notes that the demand for Delta Force troops, Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other...

Listening to domestic-extremist/right-wing-AM-radio, heard a news report about 2 guards being found dead on the Maersk Alabama in Seychelles. The report identified the guards as 'former Navy SEALs'. Tragic. If it's posted anywhere, I can't find it and it's not indexed in search engines yet. I can't say with certainty whether it was Bloomberg news or Fox News, as this station mixes it up and I didn't catch that.

The special operations branch of the Korean People's Army, tasked with conducting asymmetric warfare against the United States and South Korea, is reported to comprise 200,000 soldiers, according to the Seoul-based Chosun Ilbo. As the South Korean government's defense white paper noted in 2010, North Korean special forces consist of 60,000 specialized troops and 140,000 light infantry soldiers. General Walter Sharp, the former commander of the South Korean-US Combined Forces Command stated that the infantry soldiers are lightly armed and trained to infiltrate deep behind enemy lines to destroy key installations and engage in black ops. Specialized troops may infiltrate...

To the extent that art really does imitate life, every American owes it to themselves and to our troops to see the blockbuster film, Lone Survivor. Panned by cynical elites as "shameless war-porn," in reality this movie portrays the heroism and sacrifice of four members of Seal Team 10 during a mission gone bad in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2007. Operation Redwings was designed to track the location and movements of an Afghani terrorist, Ahmad Shah, with the ultimate goal of taking him out. The mission was compromised when a group of goat herders stumbled across the Americans and...

Unwarranted NSA surveillance, the passage of NDAA, stop and frisk programs, and the rise of warrior cops, have essentially turned America into a centralized police state. Blurring the lines between the U.S. military and local sheriff departments sets a dangerous precedent that erodes freedom and civil liberties.Those lines are being blurred right now in South Carolina.According to The State, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department will participate in secretive joint exercise Monday and Tuesday with unnamed units from Ft. Bragg.The drills are scheduled to run up to midnight on both days and occur primarily in Lower Richland, around Hopkins and Eastover....

As the war in Afghanistan winds down, and as the American public is increasingly “war weary” (a phrase I find fascinating since at any given time only 0.6 percent of Americans are in uniform, and the vast majority of Americans have endured not one single second of sacrifice for the war effort since 9/11), anti-military and anti-American sentiment may be rediscovering its Vietnam-era voice. The vehicle for the latest two minutes’ hate is a bit curious, however. Lone Survivor tells the story of a SEAL mission gone wrong and the resulting firefight where a small band of SEALs displayed remarkable...

The biographical film’s wide opening of $38.2 million set the record for highest major debut for any war film since 9/11

Nearly a decade after Mohammad Gulab and his fellow villagers rescued and protected wounded Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, they remain Taliban targets—but they’ve never regretted their kindness. Nearly eight-and-a-half years after Mohammad Gulab and his fellow villagers harbored and saved the life of a gravely wounded U.S. Navy SEAL, they say they are still proud of their courageous action and would do it again in spite of the disappointments and troubles that have followed. In the face of point-blank Taliban threats to overrun the small village of Sabray in remote Kunar Province, along the porous and mountainous frontier with Pakistan,...

The world is changing. The question is whether or not we will realize it soon enough for any of us to make a single bit of difference. Behind the scenes, a debate has taken place about to what extent the People’s Republic of China has engaged in a controversial practice called gene-doping. Gene-doping is a series of techniques for genetic manipulation and modification. You may have heard of it in the past as being called gene-therepy, a practice which manipulates genetics in order to help sick people. Whether you call it gene-doping or gene-therepy depends if you are using the...

The Navy Jack is the flag flown by United States Naval Vessels. It's motto of "Don't Tread on Me" is emblazoned on a Red and White Striped background with a rattlesnake stretched across it. The flag has a long and revered history in America's Navy spanning back to the time of our country's fight for Independence. However, Navy SEAL commanders are now banning the historical symbol. The question is, who is behind the ban?

A new U.S. Navy directive mandates that SEALs replace the traditional “Don’t Tread On Me” Navy Jack on the sleeves of their uniforms with the American flag. The original Navy Jack was made up of 13 horizontal stripes — seven red and six white. A rattlesnake was later added diagonally across the flag, along with the words, “Don’t Tread On Me,” on the lowest white stripe. More recently, the jack was replaced with white stars on a field of blue, with the number of stars representing states in the union, like the American flag. After the 9/11 attacks, all U.S....

An Afghan army special forces commander has defected to an insurgent group allied with the Taliban in a Humvee truck packed with his team's guns and high-tech equipment, officials in the eastern Kunar province said on Sunday.

So blares the revised headline from the Washington Times. When this story ran in the print edition, it was the headline story entitled “Was SEAL Team 6 crash an inside Job?” The sub-head screamed “Families demand answers from the worst day of war in Afghanistan.” Excerpt: Sith Douangdara, whose 26-year-old son, John, was a Navy expeditionary specialist who handled warrior dog Bart, said he has lots of unanswered questions. “I want to know why so many U.S. servicemen, especially SEALs, were assembled on one aircraft,” he said. “I want to know why the black box of the helicopter has not...

Past US strikes on Al Shabab leaders, even successful ones, have not diminished the group.A commando unit from the US Navy’s Seal Team Six launched an amphibious raid on a Somali town, but failed to confirm a capture or kill of their Al Shabab target, suspected to be linked to Nairobi’s Westgate mall terror attack. The operation could have opposite its intended result of discouraging further attacks. Analysts warn that even earlier successful targeted strikes against Al Shabab, a Somalia-based Islamist militant group, failed to curb the group's capacity to carry out international terror attacks, and that failed missions could...

AUDIO Interview at link. (CNSNews.com) – Many commanders in the Department of Defense are violating the religious rights of service members, forcing them to be quiet about their moral opposition to homosexuality and gay marriage, for instance, and, in effect, imposing a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on Christians, said Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William “Jerry” Boykin, the former commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command. In an interview, CNSNews.com asked Gen. Boykin, now the executive vice president of the Family Research Council (FRC), “Given the violation of religious liberties that have been going on, do you think that, ironically, Christians...

Highly sensitive U.S. military equipment stored in Libya was stolen over the summer by groups likely aligned and working with terrorist organizations, State Department sources told Fox News -- in raids that contributed to the decision to pull Special Forces personnel from the country. The stolen equipment had been used by U.S. Special Forces stationed in the country. Lost in the raids in late July and early August were dozens of M4 rifles, night-vision technology and lasers used as aiming devices that are mounted on guns and can only be seen with night-vision equipment. "This stuff is how we win...

'I believe someone on their side definitely made a deal with somebody on our side' More than two years after President Obama reassured the father of a member of SEAL Team 6 that the government would look into the death of his son, the father is still waiting for a response, and his suspicions are growing. On Aug. 9, 2011, Taliban forces were waiting for a Chinook helicopter carrying members of the elite unit SEAL Team 6 to approach its landing site. The helicopter was attacked from three sides in a coordinated ambush.

What really happened to Navy SEAL Team 6? In August 2011, the elite special forces unit suffered the worst battlefield calamity in its history. A Taliban fighter shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying 22 Navy SEAL Team 6 members in Afghanistan. All 38 persons on board — the Navy SEAL warriors, other U.S. military personnel and seven Afghan soldiers — were killed. Grieving family members have been demanding answers. They may now get some as Congress finally opens an investigation. Navy SEAL Team 6 has attained international prominence for one reason: They were responsible for killing Osama bin Laden. They...

The Pentagon has placed its elite cadre of special operations teams on full alert to launch preemptive attacks against suspected al Qaeda targets across the globe, according to reports. The American special forces teams have spent the past week waiting for U.S. military and intelligence officials to confirm the whereabouts of the terror cell plotting to attack U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Mideast and North Africa. Unnamed sources told CNN on Monday that the teams were poised to carry out the preemptive strikes, but declined to comment on where the U.S. forces were located or which potential targets the Pentagon...

JERUSALEM – In a bombshell admission that has until now gone unreported, Martin Dempsey, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that highly trained Special Forces were stationed just a few hours away from Benghazi on the night of the attacks but were not told to deploy to Libya. In comments that may warrant further investigation, Dempsey stated at a Senate hearing Wednesday that on the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, command of the Special Forces – known as C-110, or the EUCOM CIF – was transferred from the military’s European command to AFRICOM, or the United States...