Ever since John F. Kennedy first made the Green Berets into figures of military glamour, there's always been something alluring to presidents about the U.S. military's elite special ops forces.

Still, that was then, this is now. In the twenty-first century, the Special Operations Command, which oversees those elite forces cocooned within the regular military, has gained ever more power to act in ever more independent and secretive ways. In those same years, the country's elite troops, including those Green Berets, the Navy SEALs, and the Army's Delta Force, have grown to staggering proportions, while ever more money has poured into their coffers. There are now an estimated 70,000 of them -- a crew larger than the actual armies of some reasonably sizeable countries -- and from trainers to raiders, advisers to hunter-killers, they now operate yearly in an overwhelming majority of the nations on this planet.  Moreover, they generally do so in remarkable secrecy and (as once might have been said of the CIA) their most secretive part, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), responsible for the killing of Osama bin Laden, is in essence the president's private army.