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IPFS News Link • Military

America's Commandos Deployed to 141 Countries

• https://original.antiwar.com by Nick Turse

Nick Turse began covering what might be thought of as the secret history of American war in this century – the rise and spread of American Special Operations forces – for TomDispatch in 2011. That was the year when he first revealed that special-ops deployments had doubled from 60 countries annually (already a striking enough number) at the end of the Bush administration – the years of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq – to about 120 countries or 60% of the nations on this globe of ours.

That was stunning enough and, by then, the personnel in those secretive forces embedded inside the U.S. military had already reached 60,000 – larger, that is, than the entire militaries of so many other nations. And that, mind you, was just the beginning of the process. Ever since, as Turse has shown over the years, those numbers have only risen, as has the special-ops budget, as have the countries in which they are deployed, whether to fight this country's semi-secret wars, train allies, or do who knows what. They hit 149 in 2017, Donald Trump's first year in the White House, by which time the force itself had risen to about 70,000. As he reports today, at 141 countries, the number for 2019 was similarly staggering, representing as it does 72% of the nations on this planet.


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