No shit, there I was in a West African country. A friend and I were asked if we would like to visit a local fortune teller by our local guide whom I will call Kate.  There is a form of Sufi mysticism in the region but this fortune teller practiced an older form of indigenous […]

On Christmas Eve, Santa prepares his manual, ballistic, and explosive breaching techniques for entry into millions of homes.  Maybe you should just leave the door open for him instead…

I’d like to continue the FID tips series by writing about how your status as an American factors into how you engage with host-nation partners. Being a cheeseburger-eating, barrel-chested, freedom-fighting American has both pros and cons as you try to build a relationship with indigenous forces. One of the major drawbacks is that you probably […]

The South African Recces are one of the most accomplished units in the history of special operations, but their successes have largely been ignored by the history books until recently.

I’ve decided to start a new series on SOFREP about foreign internal defense (FID)—a topic that touches upon subjects such as unconventional warfare (UW) and espionage as it is related to source handling and eliciting information. To make a long story short, FID is a mission in which Special Forces teams deploy to an allied nation, […]

Jack Murphy recently had a chance to sit with Chris Martin, author of the Beyond Neptune Spear and Shaping the World from the Shadows series. Jack and Chris talk about the book, Modern American Snipers. Some would say that the military non-fiction genre is over-saturated, but you managed to write a book that is filled […]

We’ve published three books that work as a surreal trilogy about the current events in the Middle East.  In Benghazi: The Definitive Report, Brandon and I wrote about how the Arab Spring migrated across the Middle East, eventually blowing up into the Libyan Civil War. While the Arab Spring had been a series of protest […]

It was a snowy night in Prague. I bought a round of beers for my Ranger buddy and two Brits we had just met at the bar. One of the Brits decided to show me a small pin he had stuck inside his wallet. “You know what that is?” he asked. I knew what I was […]

SOFREP’s future is quite simple. Hire a bunch of ex-Green Berets, Rangers, SEALs, and other assorted lunatics to travel to and write about third-world war zones. Our writers understand the terrain and can write about it from a much more informed point of view.

One YPG member told me about a Daash fighter he shot four times with a Dragonov sniper rifle. The jihadist went down but kept trying to get back up.

Prepare for a smart-ass answer to this question. Memes and rumors spread like wildfire via social media, and the most dubious sources are claiming that ISIS is encouraging their supporters to go out and specifically target U.S. military veterans. First off, any idiot on an anonymous Twitter account can post anything they want. A Twitter post does […]

Virtually every YPG fighter has a rule: Save the last bullet for yourself. In the war against ISIS, which they call the Daash, it is far better to choose your own way out rather than be captured by the jihadists and their so-called Islamic State. One source on the ground in Rojava (Kurdish-held Syria) told me […]