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Review of SOF Structure and Culture
- Thread starter USNSCC_Guru
- Start date
Grunt
Verified Military
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2010
- Messages
- 4,937
policemedic
Verified SWAT
Jaknight
Member
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2018
- Messages
- 626
As a regular Joe It’s my opinion that in a way we civilians are too blame as well. We regard you men in SOF community as Greek heroes come to life and our movies and video games encourage our perspective. We eagerly consume any and all books written by SOF and none have been given more press than the SEALS who to many are freaking Achilles and can do no wrong. Hell till I joined this forum I had no idea that the SEALS were even conducting themselves badly which shows how ignorant our perspective is on the culture you have
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We find ourselves in the military (SOF and Conventional), law enforcement and first responders to be held to a higher standard than those who don’t answer the call. People rely on us to hold that standard and be Guardians to the public’s way of life. To endure hardships for those that can’t otherwise protect themselves.
When we do anything to tarnish that trust in us, the public takes it especially hard.
It’s not the public’s fault. We know what we signed up for. It’s our responsibility to hold and live up to the standard every day.
Devildoc
Verified Military
This kind of culture and behavior transcend special operation forces, I imagine anyone who's been part of an elite athletic team, around them, or any kind of environment in which there is a group of people who see themselves as better or different from the rest, can empathize with similar issues with poor culture. Military, medicine, business, sports, this particular topic transcends all of humanity.
I don't want choir boys, and if this is the thing they are perceiving, they're missing the point entirely and still exacerbating the very issue.
I don't want choir boys, and if this is the thing they are perceiving, they're missing the point entirely and still exacerbating the very issue.
Brill
SOF Support
Nor do I.
I want a SF commander like @Viper1 ; I want a Raider commander like @Teufel ; I want a G2 like @Marauder06 ; but make no mistake, I want to work with @Box cuz I want to chuckle when shit doesn’t make sense.
SOF is full of all of the above but their collective successes don’t “sell”.
This is the key here. Every organization has bad apples. Conventional units, in my experience anyway, are built in a way that enables them to quickly identify and remove personnel who demonstrate character failures. A lot of good people will fall into this trap, however, as the infantry battalions often cut away a lot of good tissue to remove cancers. SOF units, on the other hand, tend to operate in distributed and fairly independent sub-units. This makes it much easier to mask bad behavior because the team serves as a strong net to protect the individual. There comes a time, however, when SOF have to decide when protecting a teammate is damaging the institution. Some units do this better than others. At what point do you stop covering for the SEALs and Raiders who murdered SSgt Melgar? Do you address this problem when they are violating General Order #1? How about when you catch them stealing operational funds? How about when they tell you that they are going to haze someone? I think that everyone here would agree to stop them from killing their teammate but it's important to understand that murder wasn't the first step they took on their path to criminal activity. This almost certainly could have been prevented through intervention at any other step down the character ladder. This is the core of this conversation we are having about unit culture. Turning a blind eye to drug pops and condoning unauthorized behavior creates an environment where the rules don't matter. That's unacceptable in any military unit, special or otherwise.
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They've been an open book, man.
You'd be surprised how much you can learn about the culture through open-source, inside sources, contacts, active duty and veteran friends of the community, (something I did professionally for 26 years). But they've made it easy. Do you have any idea how many books SEALs and former SEALs have written and published? They love to talk about themselves. I could spend a year reading SEAL books.
They've made themselves fair game for criticism.
I get what you're saying, Brother, but we're way beyond exercising discretion on a subject that's no longer discreet.
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I disagree. Just because you can read open source info about every aspect of Ranger School does not mean you know what really goes on there.
Man, I get what you're saying but I don't need to be personally acquainted with Bill Cosby to know I shouldn't let him pour drinks for my daughters.
Ultimately we all work for the American people and we have to treasure the trust and confidence they have in our military forces. It is one of the few remaining elements of our government that enjoys near universal support from our society. There was a time when special operations escaped the media's attention because of a now apparently anachronistic sense of deep humility and quiet professionalism. This gave way to an era where a special operations service component literally released a b-grade action movie with active duty SOF actors to get more likes on social media. Today it seems that articles about SOF misconduct now outnumber stories about SOF heroism. That's not a good position to be in, and the first step in Attention Whores Anonymous is admitting you have a problem. I don't want to be rude, and I know this will sound very aggressive in a social media post, but at the end of the day no one cares what, "really goes on there". Perception here, and in most things honestly, is reality and everyone reading this should accept and understand this. Most people here live at the tactical level of war where your capabilities translate into mission success or failure. Spend some time in the machine and you will learn that the DOD, and most of the government, is not really influenced by tactical realities but rather is driven by the almighty dollar. Unfortunately for everyone here, that spending is not determined by someone's shot group. It's allocated according to whatever our policy makers believe is important, or lobbyists convince them is important. Why do you think SOCOM has such a huge footprint in DC? It's not because they have great shoot houses there.
I know there are a lot of great SEALs out there. Several of my friends are there now lamenting all the attention these miscreants are bringing to their commands. Unfortunately these bad apples will have an outsized impact on the future of their communities. This is especially true of people like Eddie Gallagher who can't find a way to lower the volume and stop bringing negative attention to themselves and their brothers. There is no cross-examination period or objections in the court of public opinion. You go right from accusations to judgment and sentencing. The commanders of NSW, and other elements of SOCOM, are trying to right the ship and convince our policy makers, and the American people, that SOCOM is on the right track. I hope that the SCNOs and NCOs who truly drive organizational culture realize this and try to help our their HHQ and not work against them. That would be a mistake and could have lasting affects on SOCOM if they don't figure this out.
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You've vastly oversimplified my response to your post.
Apparently in your view the only people qualified to offer comments or criticisms in this thread are members of SEAL teams...which would exclude almost everyone here.
The various notorious incidents involving members of NSW transcend SEAL "culture" and are quite openly issues of unacceptable military--and human--behavior.
I don't have to be a SEAL team member to know that it's wrong militarily to stab a wounded enemy POW in the neck or sodomize and strangle to death a fellow American serviceman. Or invent twenty different lies to cover up my transgressions.
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That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is unless you are in that team room how do you know what's really going on?
I'd probably be a shitty G2.
But if you want someone to find the bad guys so the good guys can go kill them, and then sift through the dead bad guys' stuff to find more bad guys for the good guys to kill, ad infinitum, and then do a "Pred porn" montage of the drone footage of everything, set to heavy metal music, I'm your guy.
ThunderHorse
Verified Military
Serious question: If members of a certain unit commit war crimes and crimes in general is that not a reflection of the culture of that unit?
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