Seth Harp
The Rise of the US Military’s Clandestine Foreign War Apparatus. The 2020s are shaping up to be one of the most violent decades in modern history, with American-sponsored proxy conflicts and shadow wars smoldering all over the world, from Ukraine to Yemen to Gaza. The United States enables and prolongs these wars not by sending troops to fight in them, but by trafficking arms to the belligerents, providing intelligence to its favored proxies, and using covert operations, especially assassinations, to shape geopolitical conditions. At the forefront of these clandestine US military machinations is the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which despite its relative invisibility to the public is far and away the most powerful organization in the military, and one of the most influential institutions in the US government. But it was not always this way.
As I discuss in my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, the rise of JSOC does not date back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the wars that the United States waged in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. Rather, the origins of JSOC’s takeover from within are traceable to the darkest days of the Iraq War, about five years after 9/11, when things were going considerably worse for American war planners and foreign policy officials, and—in a backlash that would lead to the election of President Barack Obama—the public was turning sharply against US involvement in foreign wars.
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