I was in my senior year of high school when 9/11 happened. Al-Qaeda was behind the attack, and we were now at war. I joined the Army and served in American special operations units in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, I got to see the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other jihadi militants up close, confirming beyond any […]

This guest post is an excerpt from “Across the Fence” by John Stryker Meyer. Christmas Day 1968 was just another day for Spike Team Idaho. Early that morning ST Idaho was loaded onto Kingbees and flown to the Quang Tri launch site. The early morning rush came to a halt at Quang Tri, as there […]

This is a very interesting article about Russian para-military contractors in Syria.  By some accounts, these guys are the ones doing the real fighting on the ground inside Syria, with Russian Special Operations Forces only backfilling the areas that Vegner and others capture so that there are actual troops for Russia Today to interview. -Jack […]

In recent years, many Americans (and other nationalities for that matter) have asked the question of why Turkey is allowed to stay in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Created during the Cold War to balance power against the Warsaw Pact nations of the Soviet Union, NATO consists of America, Canada, and 26 European nations […]

No one is more skeptical of so-called “reality” television than I am. On those very rare occasions when I actually watch cable TV (who does these days other than our parents?), I quickly flip past any and all reality television shows. They aren’t reality, but are rather cheaply made faux dramas that only exist so that the big […]

Now that Aleppo is all but wrapped up from a military point of view, we can buckle up and get ready to do it all over again in Idlib and Raqqa.  This isn’t a mistake, but rather part of a strategy.  You may have noticed that whenever the Syrian regime, the Kurds, or others pushed […]

ISIS managed to scare the living hell out of the Middle East as well as hand wringing Americans who were terrorized by their own news media, but the war has now turned a corner.  Yes, feast your eyes on this flea ridden pile of Jihadi beards.  A lone Iraqi soldier stands over the beard graveyard […]

The US Embassy in the Turkish capital city of Ankara is currently locked down and citizens are asked to avoid the compound until tomorrow.  Whether there was a second terror attack, possibly coordinated with the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey this morning, remains undetermined. Taken in totality, today’s terrorist attacks include the assassination […]

The most disturbing trend in American politics for me personally is not the election of Obama, Trump, or the near miss we had with Hillary.  What really concerns me is how Americans increasingly see our republic as a zero-sum game in which there are two ideologies represented, one good, and one evil.  The Sith versus […]

I thought you guys might enjoy this video I discovered the other day, it gives a nice peek into the world of our Vietnam-era Special Operations units: Before SOCOM: LRRPs, Rangers, UDT/SEALs, Special Forces, MACV-SOG, Force Recon… This article originally published on SOFREP 04.01.2012

Denzel Washington was recently asked about the difficulty of film making, but brought the other actors and directors sitting at the table back down to earth with some real talk about how difficult it is to be a soldier, or the parent of one, as opposed to being an actor in a fiction film.

I am somewhat infamous for my negative reviews of movies about special operations forces. I’m not one of those guys who watches these films expecting some high degree of hyper-technical accuracy. Fictional films are just that. However, I find a lot of these films to be silly, as they claim to recreate something with authenticity, […]