Air Force Special Operations

It is Time To Think About Withdrawing Troops From Syria

Opinion: The President surely opened up a can of worms when he spoke about withdrawing our military troops from Syria and soon. Just last week, Trump said “We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon,” before a Pentagon spokesman calmed our allies fears by stating that the United States was committed, at least until the Islamic State had been defeated.

Then on Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his announcement stating that “it’s time” for the United States to get out of Syria. “It is very costly for our country, and it helps other countries more than it helps us,” he said. “I want to get out, I want to bring our troops back home.”

Now most of the President’s own administration and even most viewpoints from the left, consider it catastrophic and would leave a power vacuum that could invite the Islamic State back in.

When the United States entered the fray a few years ago in 2014, the country was in a shambles. The civil war was raging and there WAS a huge power vacuum where ISIS moved in created its own “caliphate.” When the American and coalition troops deployed there, their stated mission, the only one was to work by, with and through the Kurds to defeat ISIS.

The U.S. wasn’t tasked with overthrowing Assad or stopping the civil war. ISIS was the goal and now, they’ve been pretty much kicked to the curb and are doing what they’ll continue to do. Retreat to another state to lick their wounds and return in another form. They’ll never fully be eradicated as long as politicians allow them to leave with their families, as we saw the mass exodus play out months ago.

So Trump’s announcement certainly wasn’t welcome news for the Kurds and the Israelis, the two regional peoples figuring to be most affected by the decision if the U.S. does withdraw.

The Israelis have never been fond of the Syrians and the Assad regime. Now even less so with the Syrians inviting the Iranians in. Iran wants a permanent presence in Syria, preferably on the Israeli border.

Just a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought that he and President Trump were in concert as far as Iran is concerned in Syria. “We don’t have any limits on our action in Syria,” Netanyahu said. “We see eye to eye,” he said of Israeli and U.S. policy.

But the Israelis are getting mixed signals from Washington. On one hand, Trump is saying they’ll be pulling out soon. On the other, Monday, Pentagon officials were stating that they’re sending dozens more troops to the 2000 or so that are already there.

The Israelis rightfully fear that a U.S. pullout will not see a resurgence of ISIS but a power vacuum where the Iranians move in. The Russians have said in private to the Israelis that they may have to get used to a permanent Iranian presence in Syria. I don’t see the Russians putting up with that for long.

The IDF has already bombed an Iranian base and if need be, the Israelis will act unilaterally. With or without U.S. support. Israel will no doubt bomb Iranian positions in Syria if the Iranians establish a supply line to Hezbollah, the “Lebanese” militia that Iran essentially leads. Hezbollah is aiding Syria in the civil war and looks to establish a permanent presence in the country.

The Israel government worries that the Russians will intervene on the behalf of Iran.

The SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces of the Kurds are stuck in the middle, as they were in Iraq and have little prospect for any kind of self-determination, even with the U.S. remaining.

The Turks, who consider them terrorists, are attacking SDF strongholds from the north. The Assad regime, with heavy Russian backing, are in the south. There is no peace plan and likely will never be one between the Turks and the Kurds.

As they were in Iraq, they’re getting screwed and will be forced to leave their homes or be eradicated themselves. There will be no mass caravan of Kurds leaving with their families being protected to do so. It sucks but what are the alternatives?

But by pulling out of Syria, what truly changes for the U.S.? The last thing we want is to get into a shooting fight with the Turks. The U.S. has a major airbase there and prior to this mess with Erdogan, the Turks had been one of the United States’ closest allies.

The U.S. isn’t going to try to overthrow Assad now, with just 2000 troops in the country. For what end? With the help of Putin and the Russians, Assad has weathered the storm and is stabilizing his hold on the country.

But the Iranian presence in Syria? It probably isn’t sustainable. The Russians don’t want them there, and even for Assad, they were an ally of convenience. He trusts the Russians much more than he’ll ever trust the mullahs in Tehran.

Our troops have what’s left of ISIS, the Turks are attacking the Kurds, who we trained, funded and led, the Russians, Syrian Army and the Iranians all facing them. Now what? After 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, we don’t need our troops getting into another open-ended war in Syria.

The Russians already have tested our resolve when they foolishly and recklessly used “mercenaries” to attack a US base before the US and Allied air support blew them all to hell. It wasn’t a mistake or an error in judgement. They won’t make that mistake twice.

Our government sent the troops there to stem ISIS. That part has been accomplished and is nearly done. And once it has, the government doesn’t need to dawdle any further. There is no quick, easy answer for the quagmire of Syria. Get our troops out of there.

Use any and all political means to ease the suffering of the Kurds. Reinforce our support for the Israelis and if necessary, front load some troops there for their defense.Then get the troops the hell out of Syria.

Photo: Wikipedia

Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 2, Day 5

Continue to prep for the UBRR and focus on some speed work today with the runs. Speed work will help with your endurance and explosion. Work on using perfect form when doing your exercises.

The cadre at Selection are meticulous at grading form. The time to get it right is now. Then the graded test in the course will be much easier. Remember, everyone gets graded the same.

Training:

5 x 1-mile run Go as quickly as you can with a minimum of 5-minute rest between runs. Record your average mile time.

5 x 30 seconds of Pushups.

5 x 30 seconds of Sit-ups

1 x 20 Knees-to-Elbow hanging from the pull-up bar, or until muscle failure

2 x 10 pull-ups or until muscle failure

Stretch well after completion

Trump Wants to Get Out of Syria, But Military Advisors Say Not Yet

President Trump says it is the time to get all of the U.S. military troops out of Syria, which they entered the civil war to deter ISIS, but have since been embroiled in other fighting.

The president’s comments appear to contradict U.S. military and national security advisors, who were speaking simultaneously at the U.S. Institute of Peace about the future fight against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.
“As far as Syria is concerned, our primary mission in terms of that was getting rid of ISIS. We’ve almost completed that task, and we’ll be making a decision very quickly in coordination with others as to what we’ll do,” Trump said Tuesday at the White House.
“I want to get out. I want to bring our troops home.”
Contrary to Trump’s statements, Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy for the global coalition against ISIS, told a forum Tuesday that the U.S. mission in Syria was far from over.
“We are in Syria to fight ISIS. That is our mission, and our mission isn’t over, and we are going to complete that mission,” McGurk said.
Echoing those sentiments, Army Gen. Joseph Votel, who oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East as the head of Central Command, said that while the presence of ISIS in the region had diminished, “it is not gone.”
Votel estimated that more than 90 percent of the terror group’s territory had been recovered by U.S.-backed forces. He added that the next step for the approximately 2,000 U.S.troops in Syria would be to help stabilize the region.
“The hard part, I think, is in front of us, and that is stabilizing these areas, consolidating our gains, getting people back into their homes,” Votel said alongside McGurk.
“There is a military role in this. Certainly in the stabilization phase.”

Trump is correct here, keeping the U.S. in a stabilization phase is doing what? Stabilizing the Assad regime? With Russia’s backing, Assad has held on and Russian troops (mercenary or not) have already attacked American troops. Adding in the Turkish incursion, it is time to get out of that quagmire.

Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 2, Day 4

We’re going to do a smoker this morning of pushups, sit-ups, and crunches that you can either do at the gym or on the ground and then head back out on the rucking trails. Let’s pump these out as quickly as possible, understanding that there isn’t a time limit but to build up your endurance.

Training:

More Preparation for the UBRR:

100 pushups (no time limit)

100 sit-ups (no time limit)

100 crunches

5-Mile Rucksack march: Go as hard and as fast as possible without running. Log your time in your workout log book and hydrate, during the ruck.

Stretch well after completion

Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 2, Day 3

Tuesday is a leg day at the gym. These exercises build strength and explosion in your lower body and you’ll need both in Selection. These will also help your times with both running and carrying a rucksack. We’re going to go for heavier squats today with fewer reps, at other times we’ll go lighter and more reps.

Make sure you are hydrating enough during the workout and do a good stretch before and after. No one likes Leg Day but learn to embrace it and drive through. Eventually, it will become one of your favorite days.

Training – Prep for UBRR:

3 x Pullups 10 reps

3 x Squats 10-8-6 reps (Heavyweight barbell)

3 x Deadlifts 10-10-10 reps (Heavy weight)

3 x 10 Leg Extensions

3 x Sled Push or Fireman’s Carry

30 x “V” Ups

3-mile run (24 minutes minimum)

Stretch well after completion

The Atomic Bomb That Fell on a Farm in South Carolina

Not many farmers can say a nuclear bomb fell less than 100 yards from the farmhouse and remained to tell the story but a family in South Carolina can.

Sixty years ago, on March 11, 1958, an Air Force bomber dropped a nuclear weapon on a farm in the rural Mars Bluff community outside Florence. The radioactive payload either wasn’t loaded in the warhead or didn’t detonate — the stories differ.
But the TNT trigger for the bomb blew a crater in Walter Gregg’s garden some 24 feet deep and 50 feet wide. The blast shredded his farmhouse about 100 yards away. Hudson, a cousin, had been playing with two of Gregg’s children in the backyard.
The atomic warhead would have been 30 kilotons — twice as powerful as the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in World War II. Florence, five miles away, would have been obliterated. Most of the rest of the 30,000 residents of Florence County would have been wiped out or sickened by radiation.
You’d think the crater site would be one of those ghoulish attractions that become a heavily promoted tourist site. But today it sits almost in obscurity on private property, in the woods at the edge of the backyard of a home in a modest neighborhood near Francis Marion University.
An information kiosk and a wooden silhouette of the 10-feet-tall, 7,600-pound bomb stand near what’s left of the hole, which is silting in. Hurricane debris limbs have been tossed along its rim and a few Pepsi and Bud Lite cans are scattered around. There’s no sign from the road to show it’s there.
No one died or was seriously injured in the Mars Bluff blast. But the Gregg family came away with little more than the clothes on their backs.
Walter Gregg eventually sued and was awarded $36,000, according to the exhibit at the Florence County Museum. That wasn’t enough to rebuild the house, much less replace the possessions lost or stolen in the aftermath, Holladay said.
“My daddy resented it all his life.”

The military had several mishaps with nuclear weapons in the 1950s including another drop outside Tybee Island, GA where a nuclear weapon was dropped and landed in the silt where it remains offshore.

To read the entire article from Charleston Post & Courier, click here:

Photo courtesy AP

4/2 Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 2, Day 2

After the rucksack march of Sunday, we go back to the gym with some prep for the Upper Body Round Robin (UBRR) followed by a 3-mile run. Set the pace for as fast you can and try to better the standard and the time of your last run.

When doing the pushups, don’t worry about speed so much right now, ensure that you’re using very strict form. The cadre at Selection are sticklers for perfect form. Get in the habit now and the PT Test will be a breeze when you take it for real.

Training:

More preparation for the UBRR

2 x 30-seconds Pushups

2 x 30-seconds Sit-ups

2 x 30-seconds, Crunches

2 x Dips as many as possible to muscle failure

3-mile run (24 minutes maximum)

Stretch well after completion

Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 2, Day 1

Time for our Sunday morning rucksack march, we’ll warm up with quick exercises and a stretch and then hit the trail for a 5-mile march over varied or uneven terrain. Make sure that ruck fits correctly and the same for your boots and socks. You can reference some of our earlier pieces for any information on those.

Try to push as hard as you can without running. Do the best that you can. And remember to drink plenty of water on the course, and don’t let yourself get dehydrated.

Training:

Warm up 30 seconds Mountain Climbers

Warm up 30 seconds Spider-Man Planks

5-mile Ruck march over varied terrain with a minimum 45-pound ruck (75 minutes max)

Stretch well after completion

Special Operations Forces Selection PT Preparation Week 1, Day 7

Let’s kick off this Saturday morning right and head back to the gym for a shoulder and back workout. Pull-ups, Rows, Deadlifts and Shoulder work. Followed by a three-mile run. Log your numbers down in the workout notebook

Training:

More Preparation for the UBRR:

3 x 10 Lat Pulldowns, rear

3 x 10 Barbell Dead Lift

3 x 10 Wide Grip Pull-ups

3 x 10 Seated Rows

3 x 10 Dumbbell Side Raises

3 x 10 Seated Bent-Over Delt Raise

3 x 10 Dumbbell Shoulder Press

3 x 10 Arnold Dumbbell Press

3-mile run (24-minutes maximum)

Stretch well after completion

Technology Is OK But Carrying a Ruck Will Always Be a Question of Will

The Selection courses put a great amount of stock as well as time and effort into seeing what the troops ( I almost wrote men, but now women are allowed to attempt), are made of. The running and timed runs in the courses are one thing. But carrying a rucksack is quite another.

Because of the reputation (which is well deserved) and the sheer physical nature of it, it causes more angst among the candidates than perhaps anything else and leads to more people withdrawing from the course than arguably all else.

One of the biggest smokers was the rucks around the airfield at Camp Mackall. I don’t know what the roads around it are like today, but in the early-to-mid 1980s they were deep, soft sand and it always seemed you weren’t making progress and the end was farther away than before like a mirage in the desert. We did the airfield rucks in the evening, in the mornings we go on other trails that were equally as challenging.

The key was to learn how to relax and stay loose and even today, I still enjoy rucking and do it frequently but not quite as fast as in days of yore. After becoming a cadre member at Selection, when marching with the candidates on the way out of the compound, I’d listen to the rhythm of their boots and recall another time, and the words of Kipling would ring clear.

Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa—
(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again!)
There’s no discharge in the war.

Those who have been to SERE are well acquainted with that piece. But as a cadre member at the back of the student formation, that would always come to mind. We hadn’t even gone a half-mile and there’d already be a few candidates who would stop momentarily and do that small bunny hop and lean forward, where their ruck would ride up a bit higher on their backs.

Seven—six—eleven—five—nine-an’- twenty-mile to-day—
Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty-two the day before—
(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again!)

At times it would be almost comical, the words of that piece, which I swore I’d never listen to again would keep coming back as the quiet morning air of the pines in North Carolina were broken only by the sound of the shuffling boots and the occasional cough.

Rucking is the big equalizer in Special Operations. You can be the best shot, the fast runner, the guy who can invent two different types of rocket fuel, but if you can’t handle a rucksack, you won’t last very long.

The troops today have the best equipment money can buy, but it wasn’t always that way. During the nonsense in Panama during the time there, the conventional units, notably the 7th Inf. Division had much better gear than we did. But it isn’t about the gear yesterday, today or tomorrow. Bottom line is, it still comes down to doing the basic things right. And that is carrying the rucksack for long distances and being able to function as a unit after you get there. Special Operations guys have to be able to tote the pain pill.

One of the favorite tactics the cadre used during the old days and I’m sure they still do was to ruck the students up the hill by the obstacle course and in the back gate. The candidates believing that they’ve survived begin to relax but the cadre then pick up the pace and head straight out the front gate. It would always seem to get one or two who would fall for that old ruse. Remember, you’re always being evaluated…

Yes, those shoulder straps would seem like they were cutting into your muscles at times and the heat would cause you to sweat like you never thought…before at least, possible. And your calves at times felt like they were made of wood. But those who finished successfully were the ones who could persevere through it.

As I mentioned before, I still ruck today and it is unfortunately and sometimes thankfully a solitary experience. There is something to be said for the solitude and doing it on your own. I have rucked recently for a couple of good causes and it is a way to keep doing what we love while at the same time making money for some good charities that look after our own.

I’ve missed my partner through the winter months, my bulldog is a frequent companion during the other three seasons but since I’ve been doing the #Ruckyourdog2018 ruck marches, she’s been back out in the cold, somewhat reluctantly but out there nonetheless.

Of course with a bulldog, I have to carry her water as well. She hasn’t learned how to drink out a Camelback system yet. Maybe this spring. However, with the winter possibly finally behind us, we can start getting out together more often. Although the dog has to get back in shape a bit too. We have many more miles to go this spring.

And sometimes with the right set of circumstances, her four paws trudging along on the trail thru the leaves will get that old familiar rhythm going…

’Tain’t—so—bad—by—day because o’ company,
But—night—brings—long—strings—o’ forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again.

I—’ave—marched—six—weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
It—is—not—fire—devils—dark or anything,
But boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up an’ down again,
An’ there’s no discharge in the war.

Don’t let the rucksack dictate terms to you, keep driving on and remember, No Days Off.

Happy Rucking…DOL.

Photo Courtesy: US Army