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FOCUS: We're at War With Coronavirus. And Bernie Should Be Our General. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53747"><span class="small">Dustin Guastella, Jacobin</span></a>
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Friday, 20 March 2020 11:00 |
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Guastella writes: "Containment isn't enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
We're at War With Coronavirus. And Bernie Should Be Our General.
By Dustin Guastella, Jacobin
20 March 20
Containment isn’t enough. We need a wartime mobilization to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, trace, and treat coronavirus. And Bernie Sanders must play a major role in advocating for more aggressive measures.
 he United States government is not doing nearly enough to handle the coronavirus pandemic. While containment methods have been sharply increased through the implementation of social distancing, the effective reduction of traffic in public spaces, and the closure of nonessential businesses, the rate of infected persons will likely increase exponentially in the days to come.
What’s more, with too few staffed hospital beds, even with a highly effective containment strategy many will die from lack of treatment as health care facilities become flooded those in need of urgent attention. And while Congress scrambles to deal with the economic fallout of the crisis many of the existing policy ideas are essentially variations on a fundamentally defensive theme: tax rebates, tax cuts, relief checks, paid sick leave.
We can surely slow the spread of the virus through these policies, that is, we can buy time. Yet to really solve the crisis we need aggressive government action that goes beyond epidemiologic or economic containment. We need economic planning and a wartime-like mobilization of existing resources, personnel, and infrastructure.
Expand Coverage
Firstly, we need an emergency Medicare expansion to cover the costs for treatment and testing for all citizens. It’s clear that government health care has been far more effective at handling the crisis than patchwork systems, with South Korea as the world’s leading example.
While all countries are using the strong containment methods employed in the United States, those with integrated health care systems and universal coverage are better able to quickly steer their health systems in the direction of treatment and testing. With a single system, countries are able to aggressively test, treat, and trace cases while slowing the spread of the disease. But slowing the spread is only effective insofar as we can treat cases effectively and this means we need to greatly expand the state’s capacity to handle infected patients.
Expand Capacity
Expanding capacity would require a massive expansion of medically staffed beds for the sick with the goal of ensuring that the elderly and those who are seriously ill are able to receive critical care. New York governor Andrew Cuomo rightly argued for the use of the Army Corps of Engineers to build new facilities but the conversion of existing public schools, which are currently sitting empty, into care centers for those with mild cases could provide a major expansion of staffed beds.
Of course, next we would need to figure out how to staff those beds. Luckily, we have the best funded and most highly organized pool of potential care center workers anywhere in the world: the United States Armed Forces.
The rapid expansion of frontline medical personnel requires that we train soldiers (alongside volunteers) in frontline medical treatment to be deployed throughout the country but especially in hot spots to help triage with local medical staff.
Only the military has the ability to move thousands of people across the continent to meet urgent needs, and it’s a far better use of their resources than anything else they could be doing right now.
In a matter of weeks the Public Health Service working in coordination with nurses unions and physicians associations could train thousands to become “mild care” front-line medics — for those who are in too severe of condition to be trusted with self-quarantines but in too mild of condition to justify ICU.
Expand Production and Distribution
Now even if we were able to expand health coverage and hospital bed capacity we still have one major obstacle: the production and distribution of needed medical supplies. Right now — some forty-four days out from the projected peak of the crisis — we are falling well short of producing enough supplies to properly test and treat the disease caused by coronavirus. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy requested over 2 million respirators but received only 84,578.
Here is where the greatest level of economic planning for the production and distribution of goods will be needed. The government must sequester — or at least commandeer the management of — existing manufacturing plants in order to rapidly expand the production of N95 masks, portable respirators, medical gowns and gloves, protective face-shields, and of course, antiviral medicines and other pharmacological products needed to treat the disease.
Further, the government must use its existing distribution system, the United States Postal Service, to distribute these materials to needed facilities and hot-spots on command.
Given the rapid spread of the virus the capacity to treat it will be greatly diminished without a massive coordinated effort across public and private institutions. Yet in a country with well-funded and highly organized permanent armed services, and with existing public infrastructure available for conversion in every zip code, the crisis could be contained and the toll on most Americans could be seriously lessened. But this all supposes the political will (and skill) is available and to make that happen.
Bernie Sanders Is the Leader We Need
Bernie Sanders fared about as badly as many of us expected on Tuesday and yesterday he sent an email to his supporters sending a clear message that he is mulling over his options.
Ironically, it is now when his popularity could be marshaled to the greatest effect. Bernie is the most trusted politician in the country when it comes to health care and further, he is the most forceful and imaginative policymaker in the Democratic caucus.
The Democrats are currently getting badly outflanked by the Trump administration, with Kamala Harris laughably proposing less than half of what her GOP counterparts were suggesting for stimulus. Further, Democratic leaders — relying on a commonsense view of a political consensus which no longer exists — have failed to properly criticize those Republicans with economic solutions to the crisis, many are actually attacking Trump from the right.
And if the Trump administration succeeds in their plans to offer immediate relief, while the Democrats squawk like stodgy budget hawks, the GOP could be in office for decades to come — even if their woefully inadequate policies end up resulting in many more needless deaths.
In order for the Left to steer the ship though, we cannot just offer different versions of GOP talking points around paychecks and paid sick leave. To fight on Donald Trump’s terrain — to quibble over commas and decimals in budgetary proposals for stimulus bills, or to question the distribution method for basic income proposals — is surely a losing strategy. We need to be more aggressive, and we need a set of policy solutions built around the need to use the federal government’s tremendous power to expand coverage, capacity, and production in order to test, treat, and trace the virus.
We need to talk about this like we were mobilizing for war. This isn’t just good policy, it’s good politics. We need to show that with a coordinated planned effort, and a little bravery to take on the corporate elite, we can win.
And who better to do this than the only senator who wishes to resurrect the spirit of the New Deal.
Sanders can lead the effort to reimagine government right now if he focuses heavily on leading the Democratic response to the crisis. And we need leadership right now, clear and concrete leadership from the only person who understands what to do.
After all, Bernie can be credited as the architect for the present emergency tax-rebate basic income proposals, which are largely based on policies he suggested to handle the dot com crash of the early aughts. And his current proposals, released Tuesday night, far outpace the Trump administration and congressional Democrats. They embody the kind of sweeping agenda that could make this crisis point a moment that ushers in the end of neoliberalism and the beginning of a new era in economic policy.
Bernie’s presidential future looks grim but his ability to fundamentally reshape government in the service of staving off a crisis of global proportion has never been greater.
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The Coronavirus and the Climate Movement |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 20 March 2020 08:22 |
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McKibben writes: "My daughter - full grown and accomplished, but still my daughter - asked me the other day, 'Do you think we're going to go on having crises like this my whole life?'"
One frustration of the coronavirus pandemic is that it's interrupting the movement-building that is necessary to beat the fossil-fuel industry. (photo: Patricia De Melo Moreira/Getty)
The Coronavirus and the Climate Movement
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
20 March 20
 y daughter—full grown and accomplished, but still my daughter—asked me the other day, “Do you think we’re going to go on having crises like this my whole life?” Probably not quite like the coronavirus (pandemics are fairly unique among disasters, in that they attack the whole world at the same time), but I’ve long feared that the result of heating the Earth will be an ongoing, accelerating series of disasters, eventually overwhelming our ability to cope. The pace of those events has been increasing in recent years, and our ability to keep them at something like a manageable level depends, above all, on the speed with which we transition off of gas, oil, and coal.
That’s why, for me, one frustration of the coronavirus pandemic is that it’s temporarily interrupting the movement-building that is necessary to beat the fossil-fuel industry. Just as basketball and Broadway have had to take a break, so have some forms of protest. Greta Thunberg asked school-strikers to go digital for a while: “We young people are the least affected by this virus but it’s essential that we act in solidarity with the most vulnerable and that we act in the best interest of our common society,” she told her four million Twitter followers. The Sunrise Movement—the inspiring young people who made the Green New Deal into a cause célèbre—asked organizers “to avoid mass physical gatherings,” saying, “as a generation shaped by the Internet and social media, it’s time to innovate, esp. digitally.”
When not writing this newsletter, I’ve been volunteering as an organizer for Stop the Money Pipeline, which has been trying to persuade banks, insurance companies, and asset managers to cease their funding of the fossil-fuel industry. (My interest grew out of a piece that I wrote for The New Yorker last fall.) Some of us went to jail, in January, to launch the campaign, which was going to crest with a wave of acts of nonviolent civil disobedience with the occupation of hundreds, or thousands, of Chase Bank branches, on April 23rd, the day after Earth Day’s fiftieth anniversary. (JPMorgan Chase is the world’s single biggest funder of fossil fuels.) But now we can’t—as soon as the potential for community spread of COVID-19 became clear, so did the cruelty of perhaps introducing it into the correctional system. I’ve spent just enough time in jails to know that they’re usually dirty, overcrowded, and full of people (many of whom do not need to be there) in constant motion between holding cells, prisons, and the courts. It’s going to be hard enough to keep inmates healthy without additional germs making their way inside from unknowing protesters. And people really should not be gathering in numbers now, anyway.
Digital activism is rarely as effective as in-the-flesh nonviolent action, but, for the time being, that is what people can engage in. On Monday, Paul Engler, one of the best strategists of nonviolent action, wrote that “we should draw both on the possibilities of new technology that allow for decentralized action and some time-honored lessons from past social movements.” And when the pandemic passes? Here is how Extinction Rebellion U.K. put it: “Nothing will feel the same and we need to be ready”—ready for resuming civil disobedience “when the time is right.”
Climate School
In case you’re wondering why activists are so enraged at banks, read this report from the California-based N.G.O. Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, about the “dirty five” financial institutions enmeshed in oil drilling in the Amazon rain forest. Someday, people may look back in wonder at a moment when bankers thought it proper to profit from damaging what the report calls “part of the Earth’s natural ‘thermostat’ ” in order to extract hydrocarbons that would wreck the climate system.
A paper published last week by the journal Nature Communications found that large ecosystems, including the Amazon, tend to collapse “disproportionately faster” than smaller ones. “The findings imply that shifts in Earth ecosystems occur over ‘human’ timescales of years and decades, meaning the collapse of large vulnerable ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest and Caribbean coral reefs, may take only a few decades once triggered,” it said. As the lead researcher, John Dearing, of the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, told reporters, “the messages here are stark.”
Although it was mostly lost amid the news of the escalating pandemic, the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis held an important hearing last week on the risks that global warming poses to financial markets and the energy transition required to avert them. The testimony of Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, was particularly powerful, an American version of the warning that Mark Carney—who was, from 2013 until earlier this month, the governor of the Bank of England—has been providing for the past half decade. Raskin said that, while financial-industry exposure to the fossil-fuel industry risks turmoil, a turn away from oil and gas implies “a sweeping reallocation of resources and technological revolution”—a reallocation that “would generate new, creative investment at a pace, by some estimates, of roughly quadruple the present rate.”
Passing the Mic
Tara Houska is Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe, from Minnesota, an attorney who works on indigenous land issues, and the founder of the Giniw Collective, which describes itself as an “indigenous womxn-led frontline resistance to protect our Mother, defend the sacred and live in balance.”
You’ve been engaged in the Line 3 fight for a long time now. Remind us of the basics of that struggle, and why it’s so important to indigenous communities.
Line 3 is a massive tar-sands pipeline proposed from Alberta to the shores of Lake Superior. Just that single line is a ten-per-cent expansion of Canada’s oil production. Expanding tar sands, in the face of the climate crisis—it’s total madness. Minnesotans and tribal nations have been fighting tooth and nail in the system for years, but we’ve reached the point of final permitting by the state. I’ve been living in a pipeline-resistance camp in the forest for nearly two years, keeping tabs on the ground movement and land. The bulldozers are here.
For the Anishinaabe territory that the proposed route passes through, Line 3 could eradicate the heart of our culture: wild rice. Wild rice is of such importance to our people. It is the only grain mentioned in any treaty ever made between Native nations and the United States. Pipeline construction through wetlands—through more than two hundred bodies of water and watersheds into wild-rice beds—irrevocably harms the water quality and ecosystems that wild rice needs. Upstream and downstream, Line 3 is a continuation of violating the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of future generations to have a world that can sustain human life.
Indigenous leaders have been at the forefront of the climate fight in recent years. What are they bringing to this work that makes their presence so important?
Native folks aren’t new to defending land—it’s what we’ve done since colonization showed up at our doorstep. But the rise of independent and social media has brought new light to our narratives and fights for justice. Indigenous peoples are just five per cent of the global population, holding eighty per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Indigenous peoples have other ways of living, other value systems, that hold the basic knowledge that too many human beings have forgotten and need to remember. We cannot drink money. We are supposed to live in balance, as caretakers.
You spend a fair amount of time in the woods, hunting and so on. What role does the natural world play in your life?
Nature helps me figure out what truly matters in the short lifetime I have. Out here, the simple truths of life are tangible, and priorities are clear. Everything is hard work, every being has both purpose and fluidity. Everything has a spirit and must be treated with respect. It is life in the circular.
Scoreboard
Donald Trump has won few plaudits for the speed of his Administration’s response to the coronavirus. But a big fall in the value of oil-company stocks at the start of last week caught his attention, perhaps because some of his biggest contributors lost billions. By the week’s end, he’d instructed the Department of Energy to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve “right up to the top,” in what Oil Change International called an example of putting “the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities.”
The effort to figure out the effect of the virus on global warming’s future continues. A big variable is how China might react to the downturn in its economy. After the 2008 financial crisis, China’s recovery depended on huge infrastructure projects (such as airports) that lock in lots of fossil-fuel use, and, according to the South China Morning Post, that strategy is a possibility again. The World Resources Institute suggests that the better option, not just for China but for the world, would be to invest in low-carbon energy.
Warming Up
This feels like a week when real comfort is required—everyone’s nerves are jangled as we try to adjust to new realities. The song that most reliably puts me back on an even keel is “O-o-h Child.” (There’s even a solar-power message.) The original hit, by the Five Stairsteps, is undeniably great, and you should definitely sit down with Kamasi Washington’s wonderful mix. But, for sheer pull-up-your-socks-it’s-going-to-be-O.K. reassurance, it’s Nina Simone’s take all the way.
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Bernie Sanders Is Modeling a Serious Response to Coronavirus |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53743"><span class="small">Natalie Shure, In These Times</span></a>
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Friday, 20 March 2020 08:22 |
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Excerpt: "We are facing an emergency that will lay bare every gross inequality in American life."
Bernie Sanders is one of the few legislators offering bold solutions to the crisis. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Bernie Sanders Is Modeling a Serious Response to Coronavirus
By Natalie Shure, In These Times
20 March 20
Democrats make a huge mistake by shying away from a robust material response to the crisis.
he escalating coronavirus pandemic, still in its early days in the United States, has already upended American life. Within days, the country’s residents have begun to transition into an unprecedented phase of social lockdown: many workplaces have required or encouraged employees to work from home, and over 40 states have temporarily closed some or all schools. Across the country, public gathering spaces including theatres, arenas, bars, restaurants and retailers are also shuttered, furloughing or laying off thousands of workers.
The longer that major sectors of the economy—largely kept humming by low-waged and tipped workers—go without customers, the worse the aggregate impact of these developments will be. As more and more workers lose their income amid the coming major economic downturn, their ability to secure basic needs like food, utilities, housing and healthcare will be seriously threatened.
Those who will see their pay fall due to closures, business slumps or care duties in light of canceled classes will still face ruinous financial obligations. Precarious and poor workers will have little wiggle room as small business owners struggle to keep shops open. Healthcare access will be hampered by tighter family budgets and widespread loss of employer-sponsored insurance. This dire situation clearly demands a dramatic political response, but so far many Democrats have been reluctant to rise to the political moment.
To stave off the extreme harms promised by the pandemic, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has resisted universal measures, opting instead for means-testing in the face of unprecedented social chaos. The two-week sick leave bill she championed contained major carve-outs, comprising up to 80% of the total workforce. The bill exempts employers with 500 workers or more, and allows small employers to opt-out as well. Moreover, as Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare point out at Jacobin, the bill contains no provisions for often precarious freelance and gig workers, leaving them more vulnerable to the dual pressures of lost income and illness.
While Pelosi’s defenders may be inclined to defend the move as the best possible result of a painful compromise, that’s not the argument she herself made: “I don’t support U.S. taxpayer money subsidizing corporations to provide benefits to workers that they should already be providing,” Pelosi tweeted. Her deputy chief of staff was even more explicit: “As congress considers the next steps, the Speaker believes we should look at refundable tax credits, expanded UI & direct payments - but MUST be targeted.”
Their hesitation is especially troubling given that Republicans appear to be publicly coalescing around the idea of universal cash relief. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) expressed early support for the idea, proposing a $1,000 pay out to every American. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters at a press conference Tuesday that the Trump administration planned to send out checks within two weeks, while Pelosi reportedly remained steadfast in her opposition. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), for her part, has put forward a plan calling for $500 in payments to each family—a far more paltry sum.
To be sure, this rhetorical divergence hardly suggests that Republicans are on the verge of becoming a workers’ party, especially as many of their plans include means-testing. But that they’re able to occupy even a rhetorical space to the left of a disjointed message from elected Democrats is a failure—what Kate Aronoff at the New Republic calls a “realignment from hell.” While expansions on the widely panned bill are being debated among House Democrats, it’s unclear whether these will replace, supplant or simply act as bargaining leverage over further legislation.
The coronavirus pandemic presents an opportunity to make an urgent case that very few elected officials so far are making: We are facing an emergency that will lay bare every gross inequality in American life, and the only hope of mitigating the mass suffering that lies ahead is a colossal public investment in what’s necessary to ensure dignified lives.
Keeping families stable requires universality and equity, which can be corrected later through progressive taxation. Forcing people to contend with administrative quagmires in the midst of a crisis guarantees that far too many fall into the cracks. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has presented a bold $2 trillion plan including direct monthly cash payouts of $2,000 to every household, 100% payment of unemployment benefits for everyone who loses their job as a result of the crisis as well as moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, utility shutoffs and loan payments. A similar set of proposals was put forward Wednesday by House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, including billions of dollars in grants to small businesses.
These are the types of policies begin to meet the scale of the crisis—and represent the clear way forward for a party that claims to represent working people.
When asked by a reporter about his plans for his ailing presidential campaign in light of the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday, Sanders responded, “I’m dealing with a fucking global crisis…right now I’m trying to do my best to make sure we don’t have an economic meltdown and that people don’t die. Is that enough for you to keep busy today?”
That’s the type of urgency this crisis requires, and Sanders, Waters and other left-leaning officials are showing what real leadership looks like under these dire conditions. Democratic leaders should join in and get busy with them.
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America's Commandos Deployed to 141 Countries: And 'Criminal Misconduct' Followed |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7517"><span class="small">Nick Turse, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Thursday, 19 March 2020 12:53 |
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Turse writes: "Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has leaned ever more heavily on its most elite troops. While U.S. Special Operations forces (USSOF or SOF) make up just 3% of American military personnel, they have absorbed more than 40% of the casualties of these years, mainly in America's conflicts across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa."
A joint special forces team moves together out of an Air Force CV-22 Osprey aircraft, Feb. 26, 2018, at Melrose Training Range, N.M. (photo: Air Force Senior Airman Clayton Cupit)
America's Commandos Deployed to 141 Countries: And 'Criminal Misconduct' Followed
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
19 March 20
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a reminder that, for a $100 contribution to this site ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can still get a signed, personalized copy of Adam Hochschild’s superb new book, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, The Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. Check out my note above his recent TD post for more on it and the New York Times review of it. Ann Levin of the Associated Press just wrote, “Adam Hochschild is among the most readable of historians. With his latest book... he has latched on to an extraordinary love story, with echoes of the classic fairy tale, set in a time of enormous social upheaval during this country’s first Gilded Age.” Now, head for our donation page and go for it!
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 ast October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying U.S. commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib Province where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his bodyguards, and some of his children were spending the night. The helicopters opened up with their machine guns, while military jets circled above and 50 to 70 members of the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force stormed into a compound just outside the village of Barisha. When it was all over, Baghdadi’s home was rubble, an unknown number of people living in the area, including civilians, had been killed, and he and two of his children were dead -- victims of a suicide vest worn by the ISIS chief.
That commando raid in Syria was the highest profile U.S. Special Operations mission of 2019, but it was just one of countless efforts conducted by America’s most elite troops. They also fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq while carrying out missions, conducting training exercises, or advising and assisting local forces from Bulgaria to Romania, Burkina Faso to Somalia, Chile to Guatemala, the Philippines to South Korea.
Last year, members of the Special Operations forces -- Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Raiders among them -- operated in 141 countries, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). In other words, they deployed to roughly 72% of the nations on this planet. While down from a 2017 high of 149 countries, this still represents a 135% rise from the late 2000s when America’s commandos were reportedly operating in only 60 nations.
As General Richard Clarke, chief of Special Operations Command, told members of the House Appropriations Committee last year:
“Our worldwide access and placement, our networks and partnerships, and our flexible global posture enable the Department [of Defense]... to respond across the spectrum of competition, especially below the threshold of armed conflict where our competitors -- particularly Russia and China -- continue to hone their skills and advance their strategic objectives.”
This near-record level of global deployment came as questions swirled about mounting malfeasance by some of America’s most elite troops and was accompanied by handwringing from leaders at Special Operations Command over possible ethical failings and criminal behavior among their troops. “Recent incidents have called our culture and ethics into question and threaten the trust placed in us,” Clarke wrote in an August 2019 memo. Those “incidents,” ranging from drug use to rape to murder, have spanned the globe from Afghanistan to Colombia to Mali, drawing additional attention to what actually happens in the shadows where America’s commandos operate.
Special Operations Forces Deployed to 82 Countries Weekly
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has leaned ever more heavily on its most elite troops. While U.S. Special Operations forces (USSOF or SOF) make up just 3% of American military personnel, they have absorbed more than 40% of the casualties of these years, mainly in America’s conflicts across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa.
During this period, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has grown in every way imaginable -- from its budget and size to the pace and the geographic sweep of its missions. For example, “Special Operations-specific funding,” which stood at $3.1 billion in 2001, has, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw, increased to approximately $13 billion today.
There were roughly 45,000 SOF personnel in 2001. Today, about 73,000 members of Special Operations Command -- military personnel and civilians -- are carrying out a broad range of activities that include counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, security force assistance, and unconventional warfare. In 2001, an average of 2,900 commandos were deployed overseas in any given week. That number now stands at 6,700, says SOCOM’s Ken McGraw.
According to statistics provided to TomDispatch by Special Operations Command, more than 62% of those special operators deployed overseas in 2019 were sent to the Greater Middle East, far outpacing any other region of the world. This represented a rebound for special operators in the Central Command, or CENTCOM, area of operations. While more than 80% of America’s commandos deployed overseas at the beginning of the decade were stationed there, that number had dropped to just over 50% by 2017 before beginning to rise again.
The remainder of America’s forward-deployed special operators were scattered across the globe with just over 14% active in Africa, more than 10% in Europe, 8.5% in the Indo-Pacific region, and 3.75% in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. During any given week, commandos are deployed in about 82 nations.
Traditionally, America’s elite forces have placed a heavy emphasis on “security cooperation” and “building partner capacity”; that is, the training, advising, and assisting of indigenous troops. In testimony to members of Congress last April, for instance, SOCOM commander General Richard Clarke asserted that, “for developing countries, security cooperation activities are key tools for strengthening relationships and attracting new partners while enabling them to tackle threats and challenges of common concern.”
Common concerns are not, however, always of the utmost importance to the United States. In that same testimony, Clarke made special mention of so-called 127e (“127-echo”) programs, named for the budgetary authority that allows U.S. Special Operations forces to use certain local troops as proxies in counterterrorism missions, especially those directed at “high-value targets.”
“It allows,” said Clarke, “small-footprint USSOF elements to take advantage of the skills and unique attributes of indigenous regular and irregular forces -- local area knowledge, ethnicity, and language skills -- to achieve effects that are critical to our mission objectives while mitigating risk to U.S. forces. This is especially true in remote or politically sensitive areas where larger U.S. formations are infeasible and/or the enemy leverages safe havens that are otherwise inaccessible to USSOF.”
Used extensively across Africa and the Middle East, 127e programs can be run either by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces.” In Africa, these programs typically involve small numbers of U.S. special operators working with 80 to 120 specially trained and equipped indigenous personnel. “The use of 127e authority has directly resulted in the capture or killing of thousands of terrorists,” Clarke claimed.
So-called direct action missions have led to the deaths of Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden, and countless other supposedly high-value targets, but some experts question the utility of these many attacks. Retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan, including as the combined joint special operations component commander there, as well as the chief of Special Operations Command Africa from 2015 to 2017, is one of them. Now running for the Senate in New Hampshire, he is critical of what he sees as an obsessive focus on killing one leader after another while not putting in the hard work of training local forces to achieve actual security and stability without U.S. technology and assistance. “You just can’t kill your way to victory,” Bolduc told TomDispatch.
Commando Crimes
In addition to questions about the efficacy of their tactics and strategy, Special Operations forces have recently been plagued by scandal and reports of criminal activity. “After several incidents of misconduct and unethical behavior threatened public trust and caused leaders to question Special Operations forces culture and ethics, USSOCOM initiated a Comprehensive Review,” reads the executive summary of a January report on the subject. But that review is itself a bit of a puzzle.
SOCOM commanders have repeatedly called out wrongdoing by America’s elite forces. In November 2018, then-SOCOM chief General Raymond Thomas co-authored an ethics memorandum for his troops. A month later, he also sent an email to them in which he wrote: “A survey of allegations of serious misconduct across our formations over the last year indicates that USSOCOM faces a deeper challenge of a disordered view of the team and the individual in our SOF culture.”
In February 2019, SOCOM underwent an ethics review followed by a 90-day “focus period on ethics.” Not long after, Thomas’s successor also decried moral turpitude within the command. “In the recent past, members of our SOF units have been accused of violating that trust and failing to meet our high standards of ethical conduct this command demands,” SOCOM commander General Richard Clarke told members of the House Appropriations Committee in April 2019. “We understand that criminal misconduct erodes the very trust that enables our success.” Clarke, in fact, inherited self-assessments of SOCOM components ordered by Thomas and used them as the basis for that Comprehensive Review issued in January.
“This is a very detailed review that takes a hard look at ourselves,” Clarke wrote in a letter to the SOF community released with the report. But despite employing a 12-person advisory team and an 18-person review team, despite their “55 engagements” and canvassing of more than “2,000 personnel across the SOF enterprise,” there’s no evidence of the review being “detailed” or the look all that “hard.” In fact, the 69-page report fails to offer even an inkling of what “misconduct and unethical behavior” it was examining.
In 2019 alone, however, many examples came to light that could have been included in just such a review. For instance, a Marine Raider, Staff Sgt. Kevin Maxwell, Jr., pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in military prison for his role in the killing of Staff Sergeant Logan Melgar, an Army Green Beret, in Mali in 2017. Navy SEAL Adam Matthews was also sentenced to a year’s confinement and a bad conduct discharge after pleading guilty to conspiracy, unlawful entry, hazing, obstruction of justice, and assault with battery, among other charges, in the attack on Melgar by fellow special operators. (It was meant to be a sexual assault, but led to the Green Beret’s strangulation and death.) Another Navy SEAL and a Marine Raider accused in Melgar’s death both face life in prison.
Last July, reports emerged that not only had members of SEAL Team 10 been caught using cocaine, but that commandos had long been cheating on urinalysis screenings. That same month, an entire platoon of Navy SEALs from SEAL Team 7 was removed from Iraq following reports of serious misconduct, including the rape of a female service member attached to the unit. Meanwhile, there have been rumors about even more serious misbehavior involving another SEAL Team 7 detachment in Yemen. In September 2019, three senior leaders of SEAL Team 7 were fired for failures in leadership that led to a breakdown of good order and discipline.
That same month, a complaint filed with the Department of Defense Inspector General accused Naval Special Warfare commander Rear Admiral Collin Green of "duplicitous actions" that were "done in an attempt to bolster his own reputation and protect his own career." A month later, four members of the Naval Special Warfare Command were arrested in Okinawa on various charges related to unruly behavior.
Accounts of rampant drug use among SEALs also emerged in the court martial of SEAL Edward Gallagher who, in a circus-like case, was acquitted of charges that he had killed noncombatants in Iraq, but convicted of posing for photographs with the corpse of a teenager he was accused of murdering. (After Navy officials sought to discipline Gallagher, potentially stripping him of the Trident pin that signifies membership in the SEALs, President Donald Trump intervened to reverse the decision.)
And all of this followed a string of black eyes for elite troops in recent years, including allegations of massacres, unjustified killings, murder, prisoner abuse, child rape, child sexual abuse, mutilations, and other crimes, as well as drug trafficking and the theft of government property by Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Air Force special operators, and Marine Raiders.
Despite this startling record of malfeasance, SOCOM’s Comprehensive Review came to an unstartling conclusion. The review team (whose members were almost exclusively connected to the Special Operations community) largely absolved the command and its commandos of responsibility for much of anything. The team claimed that special operators had only been involved in “several” incidents of misconduct and unethical behavior instead of a laundry list of criminality. The review appeared to conclude that, instead of criminal activity, Special Operations Command’s greatest failing was actually its insistence on not failing -- what it termed (11 times in 69 pages) a culture focused on “mission accomplishment.” And the report ultimately concluded that SOCOM did not have a “systemic ethics problem.”
With thousands of commandos operating -- with little visibility -- in scores of countries on any given day, it’s little wonder that discipline has eroded to a point where the command could neither fully gloss over nor cover it up. “I am forming an implementation team that will follow through on these findings and recommendations, assess results, and refine our policies accordingly,” Clarke announced following the release of the Comprehensive Review.
But can an organization producing a report that avoids outside oversight, reads like a whitewash, and won’t even name all the countries it operates in be counted on to be honest with the American people? Special Operations Command still has an opportunity to, as their report promises, “ensure transparent accountability.” If they’re serious about such outside oversight, they should feel free to contact me.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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ell, it finally isn’t funny anymore – the grandiosity, the ignorance, the cruelty, the bullying, the racism, the petty insults and incessant stupidity. But especially the non-stop lying.
