Marines dumping their tank units

[Belmont31R]

SOCOM, and SOF in general, are victims of success. They became the easy button. They were simply very good at executing the missions with minimum fallout, and quietly. Even during the Obama years, where the taxpayer didn’t want to know we were doing anything but pulling out. But, rest assured that dudes were out putting in work. All over the place. All the time. And being on recall leashes between rotations. Getting run ragged. Burnout was very real, and got studied a few years back in depth by USSOCOM, with a few changes made to try to mitigate the effects.

There were Generals and Admirals that advised the civilian leadership of this, but I’m not sure they cared. Why would they? The guys put in the work, and the politicians could pick and choose which missions they wanted to take the credit for with the voters.

All of the organizations are changed now due to the GWOT and the second and third order effects from the way they were employed. SF, SEALS, Rangers, Delta, PJ’s, the entire USMC, all shifted into roles they were not made for.

Bold part mine.

The entire military was not made for the GWOT, and deployment after deployment. The military at the start of the GWOT was still Cold War equipped and focused after the 90's neglect and reductions. Entire divisions and bases got wiped off the map. Then they were told to go invade two countries. SOF is no different in that regard and took a long time to catch up to the mission.

The harder part for SOF is that the training pipeline to get a new qualified dude takes WAY longer than conventional forces so you can't just have a recruiting surge or change entry requirements on the fly. If you look at something like Army SF taking a guy from a civilian off the street to a qualified 18 series, getting them to a team, and then doing a deployment work up, doing a deployment, and then coming back home could eat up almost all of a typical 4 year initial enlistment. You can recruit someone as an 11B, send them through OSUT, and on a deployment in less than 6 months. I went to basic in June 03 and was deployed by January 04 with IET that took longer than 11B OSUT.

[1168]

Those things also.