Things have apparently changed quite a bit since my first trip to Syria.  When I got there in 2014, the war was still young and Kurdish held Syria (called Rojava) had not yet been saturated by hipster journalists looking for a scoop.  While there, I met the first wave of foreign volunteers.  There were former […]

On March 25th, several hundred Trump supporters marched in downtown Phoenix as a part of the Make America Great Again march group.  Across the street were about forty counter-protesters including, “members of the Brown Berets, Anti-Fascist Action Phoenix and John Brown Gun Club,” AZ Central reported.  The counter-protestors also showed up wearing tactical gear and carrying weapons. […]

A fellow Special Forces veteran recommended the Hagakure to me several years ago, and I regret not picking it up until recently.  As it turns out, a number of my friends read it.  One of them even carries his Hagakure around as his war book.  Written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo in the late 1600’s, the Hagakure […]

I’m not big on conspiracy theories.  They sound interesting but the moment you start digging for actual facts you are almost certainly going to be disappointed.  There is one so-called conspiracy theory that has been digging at me for a long time, something I’ve been following on a surface level at least for many years.  It […]

In 2015, SOFREP interviewed Polad Talabani, the commander of Kurdistan’s elite Counter-Terrorism Group or CTG.  At the time, he spoke about how he wanted his men to get back to conducting real Special Operations missions behind enemy lines, rather than engaging in conventional infantry operations alongside the Peshmerga as they had been in places like […]

Yesterday a judge in Leavenworth, Kansas denied the continuance of a trail for former Physician Assistant Mark Wisner, who was described to SOFREP by one of his patients as, “the Jerry Sandusky of Veterans Affairs.”  The former Ranger went to Wisner for a checkup in January of 2014 with a follow up appointment a week […]

My recent research on Asian SOF based units has taken me back in time for another look at the Korean War, often referred to as America’s Forgotten War due to it taking place in the aftermath of World War Two, being much shorter than that war (1950-1953), and Americans turning a blind eye to a […]

The U.S. embassy wanted the DEA and their Bolivian Leopardos to raid a finca, a ranch, out in the remote northern part of the country, and they wanted a rush put on it. DEA Agent Larry Leveron and Navy SEAL Hershal Davis rode on Bolivian UH-1 Huey helicopters with the Bolivian police, flying toward the finca, when […]

A new report from the Wall Street Journal, quoting “U.S. and Asian officials,” says that the Trump Administration is considering “increasing financial penalties on Chinese companies in response to growing evidence of their support for North Korea’s weapons programs.” Such as: In a case that particularly alarmed the Trump administration, a North Korean businessman attempted […]

Has anyone else picked up on how every movie portrayal of Special Operations personnel that they always got our guys wearing a kafiya?  You know those local neck scarves that they sell in the souk but people don’t actually wear that often in the Middle East?  The look has become so ubiquitous that I’ve even seen […]

Many years ago I was sitting in a hangar on a summer afternoon at Fort Benning.  I was a 19-year-old soldier going through the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP) to hopefully become a member of the Ranger Regiment.  An older gentlemen came and sat down next to me.  We were all wearing our T-10 Charlie static […]

This week the Marine Corps has been rocked by a scandal involving Marines United, a private Facebook group in which some thirty thousand members (many active and former Marines) shared revenge porn of ex-girlfriends.  In some cases, members threatened to rape fellow service members and in at least one instance a female Marine was stalked. […]