In the aftermath of 9/11, the bread and butter of the defense industry shifted in many ways from focusing on big-ticket Cold War items like tanks and fighter jets to the world of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. With this new paradigm came waves and waves of self-appointed experts, clueless academics, and hucksters trying to sell crap […]

“Special Forces have expertise in developing the community, shaping the community, and winning the hearts and minds. Our Special Forces are like your Special Forces, what your Special Forces did in Afghanistan. There are small groups of Special Forces who go into the community and win their hearts, then the community helps you fight against […]

“We are the worst nightmare of the enemy,” Lieutenant Colonel Rapi told me while speaking of the Philippine Scout-Rangers when I met him at Special Operations Command at Fort Magsaysay. To find out why the Scout-Rangers are so formidable, I had to travel to the Philippines southernmost major island called Tawi-Tawi. It was early in […]

Read Part 19 HERE “I’ve worked with a lot of different nations and Korea is one of the best in Asia. Singaporeans are pretty good, Japanese are good, but Koreans are well structured, disciplined, and well equipped,” Tae said. With American help the damage caused by the war would be minimized however. The North Korean […]

Read Part 18 HERE Back in Korea, there was a pretty good dust-up as the U.S. Army Institute of Heraldry decided that Detachment K would now be known as Special Forces Detachment 39. Special Forces veterans and careful researchers may note that Det 39 is actually the designation of the now-deactivated Detachment A in Berlin, while […]

Read Part 17 HERE When 9/11 came, South Korea had already been taking terrorism far more seriously than the United States ever did. The Detachment wanted to go to war but found themselves stuck in South Korea. “Me and the commander came up with the international play of sending the Koreans. SOCKOR took it to […]

Read Part 16 HERE Despite other successes, Delta Force concluded that the 707th still had some work to do. Many allied foreign counter-terrorism units come to visit and train on the Delta Force compound at Fort Bragg. “We would embrace them if we knew and liked them and if we didn’t we would feel them […]

Read Part 15 HERE The 1990s brought good times and bad, with some Det K members being relieved for cause. But as one Det K soldier remarked about the time, “Keep your mouth shut, do some ‘hooah’ PT every day, and the world will keep turning is always my recommendation whenever an SF soldier finds […]

Read Part 14 HERE Serving on a combat diver team in the mid to late 1980’s, Hand and his team mates would plan to static line parachute into the Team Spirit exercise but that never happened. Instead they helo-casted from a CH-47 helicopter in the ocean off the coast of South Korea with their Zodiac. […]

Read Part 13 HERE In the bloody aftermath of the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes, the raid on Entebbe, and Germany’s GSG-9 storming of an aircraft in Mogadishu, the western world had to take a hard look at their military capabilities and figure out how they would address the growing threat of terrorism. The United […]

Read part 12 Here Fears of North Korean infiltrations continued, but by this time Det K and other Special Forces teams had been working with the Korean Special Forces for a long time. Gone were the Wild West years of the 1960s. By now, the South could stand on its own two feet and deter […]

Read Part 11 Here A second-order effect of the 12/12 incident was the Kwangju Rebellion of 1980. General Chun had by now taken control of both the army and the KCIA, and while high-ranking Korean military officers continued to make political maneuvers in smoke-filled rooms, relations with the United States had more or less stabilized—although […]