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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

It's been extremely disturbing to see how much the culture of special operations military has changed in the past 20 years. Previously, Navy Seal and Green Berets operated in silent, keeping the sausage making of military special operations quiet and secret, just doing their duty.

Now, it seems like every Navy SEAL now publically writes a book, sponsors a coffee line, or slaps their name, likeness and story all over everything from T-Shirts to gun accessories to clothing lines. It's made a complete mockery of what has always been a silent service and honorable job, and it's spawned a HUGE environment of tacticool people who want to act and look the part.

And then a lot of these special operations folks have decided to cash in on the privatization component of special operations - we've seen the Venezuelan attempted coup, and this.

Crazy times...

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The privatization of the military is one of the most corrupt and corrosive things our country has done in a while. I flew F-18s for the Navy and did a ground tour in Iraq with Special Forces. Look at the pay grades in 2020.[1] E3-E6 are making about $25-40k in salary. With some hazard pay and Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Subsistence (BAS), depending on where you live (if not in the barracks) maybe you are making $50k. A decade ago, the contractors who took none of the risks of going on ops and were just training Iraqis were clearing $1k a day. I also saw contract pilots clearing $20k+ a month. This pay differential is morale destroying and trains people to think in market terms regarding skills that shouldn’t have a market outside of government. Now we have private armies going on offensive operations (Venezuela). But this is what the owners of the contracting firms always wanted. Privatizing a military is dumb but I guess so is outsourcing your medical supply chain, an overabundance of short-term bottomlinism the past few decades.

1. https://militarybenefits.info/2020-military-pay-charts/

The privatization of the US military is a consequence of the monetization of war that went into full swing around the 2000's. Or so I read from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

I guess we moved from Eisenhower's concern about the influence of the Military-Industrial complex to concerns about the privatization of the Military-Industrial complex. Have we entered a new phase: Gig-Economization of the Military-Industrial complex?

This passage from a 2011 NPR article on the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's warning caught my attention:

Eisenhower was worried about the costs of an arms race with the Soviet Union, and the resources it would take from other areas -- such as building hospitals and schools.

https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-mil...

Seems especially prescient at the moment.

What I wouldn't give for an Eisenhower Republican resurgence and an FDR Democrat resurgence...minus the racism or segregationism allowing policies. But fiscally and socially, they were way better than anybody we've got in politics now.

That’s because we had adults voting then

Our voting population was actually much younger at the time, despite the voting age being slightly higher (21).[1]

> the median age in 1940 was 29.0 years, compared to 37.2 years in 2010

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1940-us-census-data-released-on...

I think your parent comment was referring to emotional maturity--and I would agree with his/her point.

Look closely at FDRs policies and their effects they were a disaster.

Here's a good book on it: https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depressio...

They were almost certainly not clearing $1k a day, the company who contracted them was.

I know folks who were making $250k per year as contractors in war zones over 10 years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number is higher now. These were all for skilled jobs that required TS SCI clearances.

$250k is $5k a week for 50 weeks. These folks often didn’t work 50 weeks since generous home leave was frequently given, so $1000 a day may actually be on the low side.

Also note that there are tax exemptions via treaties or war zone exceptions that can make a significant impact on take-home wages.

I've heard that one of the reasons the government is willing to pay contractors this much is that many of the benefits of being part of the military were back loaded, like early retirement, medical coverage, etc.

Do you have any estimation of the truth of such claims?

The Afghanistan Papers[0] was a bit unnoticed by many people. It is well worth a read, especially during this time. There are many, many very interesting things in there, but I want to highlight one: General Flynn's 'Lesson's Learned' Interview, 11/10/2015.

Keep that date in your head.[1]

That the interview is public at all is amazing. It is a very good overview of the man and the issues that the US dealt with in Afghanistan. Especially considering the current media tornado with Flynn, it offers an insanely unique look under the tent.

Flynn's attitude is really one of exhaustion. He's tired, after nearly 14 years fighting in Afghanistan, he's just done with it all. He's done with Congress, he's done with the White House, he's done with the military. What is especially interesting is his attitude towards the US voting public: He's done with them too. His faith is caput.

Sure enough, exactly one month and 30 minutes after the end of this interview, Flynn is shoulder to shoulder, sitting directly next to Putin in Moscow. 12/10/2015. [2] That dinner is wild by the way.

So, not only are the lower level contractors looking outside, the top line staff are as well.

Not to be too alarmist, but there is a whole whale of bad news here. There are uncomfortably large similarities to the lead up of the Social War of 91 BC afoot [3].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/guess-who-came-dinner-fly...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_War_(91%E2%80%9388_BC)

If you don't really have the time to read through it, the Washington Post did a fairly good job of highlighting the interesting bits. If you have not looked at it and don't want to read the grainy .pdf, that's ok too. The audio is free to listen to. I cannot stress enough how crazy this is. That this document is out there at all, that they went through all the highlighting and editing, that the audio tape is out there, and then the cornucopia of other info too. It's amazing technical journalism, let alone the content.

Thanks for all the good infos.

Just skimming over [2], I see... wtf is Jill Stein doing at this dinner?! Yea, that Jill Stein! How odd.

Oh, and I get why but the WaPo links are paywalled and I am not a subscriber - FYI to others.

This is really off topic but that picture of the "gala" surprised me with how dingy it looked. Looks like a shotgun marriage in a prefab church.

The numbers aren't quite apples to apples; real military don't pay income tax, while private citizens ostensibly owe taxes earned anywhere in the world. Additionally, the tax rate on contract work is higher than one might expect from W-2 work. In practice, maybe some military contractors illegally evade taxes. I am wiling to believe take-home net of legal taxes owed is higher for private contractors, but the gap is smaller than illustrated by those figures.

I think hairsplitting pre- vs post-tax income in this context is a distraction.

$20k/month is a quarter mil a year. Worst case, you live in a high tax state, you might pay $100k in total tax, state + federal + local.

That leaves a take-home of $140k/year. Still almost 3x as much as a soldier making $50k/year.

The larger point is that, yet again, we have a govt bureaucracy handling a budget in hamfisted ways. (Big rigid hierarchy >> underpay recruits >> wow, the org is bloated and still expensive >> we can save money by hiring contractors.) The bureaucracy is is callous to the incentives they're creating.

If it's a much better deal to be a private military contractor vs a soldier, what does that do for morale? For cohesion? For career trajectories? (Get trained, quit asap to go private with a big pay bump...)

This general pattern has a deep historical roots. Many countries at various points in history have hollowed out their formal military by shifting to hired mercenaries. That pattern has a bad track record.

I think I agree with you about everything you've mentioned, except that I continue to believe post-tax real income is a better frame of comparison than comparing post-tax (and missing BAH and hazard pay) to pre-tax.

(Additionally, it is not clear to me that GP's example numbers for private contractors were actually modal, or just some high numbers he heard about.)

military does indeed pay income tax, i was on active duty for 8 years and filed every year. The tax advantage is just that the housing allowance is nontaxable, because it can be optionally provided as a house on base instead in a lot of cases.

I suppose I should have qualified that with "don't pay much income tax?"

Depending on your rank and what your active duty is like, much can be excluded.[1]

> Combat pay: Compensation for active service while in a combat zone

Combat zones: much of the middle east, including relatively stable countries that aren't Afghanistan or Iraq, as well as the Balkans.[2]

> Enlisted member, warrant officer, or commissioned warrant officer. If you are an enlisted member, warrant officer, or commissioned warrant officer, none of your combat pay is included in your income for tax purposes.

For officers, the exclusion has a threshold. That threshold is:

> For 2019, the applicable amount is $8,803.50 per month

Or $105,600/yr income not subject to taxes.

In addition to BAH being excluded as you mentioned, there's also BAS, BAS, OHA, other housing benefits, moving and travel, healthcare, all not subject to income taxes.

These are all sources of income (in an accounting, not IRS sense) civilians would need to pay taxes on. As a result, active military pay a much lower tax rate on their income than civilians with the same pre-tax income.

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p3#en_US_2018_publink100017...

[2]: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/combat-zones

Majority of people are in a combat zone for about 6mo at a time, and not a lot of them ever end up going at all. I never was selected for any tax exempt duty in my 8 years as an enlisted member of the USAF, and anecdotally know a lot of people who over a 4-6 year (usual single enlistment length) career who either only were deployed once or never at all.

Why stop at the military? The privatization of most of American institutions has lead to massive corruption and terrible outcomes for the typical citizen. We're that not far from becoming a banana republic.

We already are. We're just a relatively rich banana republic. All the corruption can skim off layer after layer of profit, and there's still enough left that we can live reasonably okay lives as long as we don't get sick.

Because they are fed up with making pennies. It's the case in pretty much every country,only in the US they tend to have a little bit more so called opportunities because of mass obsession about anything military related. In my own country the guys from special forces take unpaid holidays and go abroad for some lucrative private contracts because the government pays peanuts.

I can't make any claim to expertise, as I've only known a handful of these folks in the US, but from what I've heard, they don't make pennies. They just make a lot less than what private industry is willing to pay for mercenaries.

There is, in fairness, a difference.

As true with code as with pulling triggers. Work for the Feds and pull 150k around DC and a security clearance. Some of the seniors at big contractors pull big $$$. Meanwhile, you can get a total comp of 400k or more working for a FAANGM out west while smoking weed everyday and banging foreigners.

My understanding is that the SOF and SEALs get paid well, even as enlisted folks (who get paid less than officers), but why settle for an adequate paycheck when you can have a kick-ass one? Doubly so, since the kinds of people who become Spec Ops are hyper-motivated and deliver results.

Its frustrating when people trot out FAANGM as if thats a standard take just anyone can get.

Its great if you can get through the interview process at some place decent (I did for the record).

But that's like saying "I'll just go play for the NBA".

Competition is stiff

Well,yes,it is tough,but then again,if someone's pulling $400K in total comp writing code, that's not something that just lands from the sky. Outside of tech industry you'd need to be a VP, or even a CEO to clear that kind of money,so yes, it's expected to be tough.

Totally agree with you but in the context of the comment I replied to the guy made it seem as if it's like why take this government pittance when I can just wave a magic wand and get a job and get a job at <insert your favorite top tier tech company>

I was merely pointing out that it is muuuuuch more difficult than that comment made it seem.

I mean... FAANGM for programmers is probably a fair comparison to being a SpecOps soldier, right? It's also a cream-of-the-crop type scenario.

> and banging foreigners

Wait, what?

Pretty sure GP is talking about restricted/banned activities for government workers and contractors with clearances:

- You may not smoke marijuana - it violates federal law.

- You are required to regularly report on close contact with foreign nationals, though I'm not sure a casual hookup meets that criteria. But if you're in an ongoing sexual relationship with a foreign national the Feds will want to know.

Can't leave the country without permission.

Between their salaries, hazard pay, pensions, government hiring and contracting preferences, free lifetime healthcare, free tuition, free graduate tuition, free job retraining and zero-interest mortgages, U.S. soldiers are amply compensated, and there are plenty of legitimate opportunities available for guys from elite units like the Green Berets. None of the guys writing tell-alls or turning to a life of international crime and /or mercenary work are doing it to put food on the table, they do it because they're thrill- or fame- or money-obsessed psychos.

Is this the same free lifetime healthcare that other vets get that involves frequent denials and years long waiting lists to get treatment?

The US is pretty terrible to their armed forces - but they're quite nice to the R&D side of the military, because that's the side that's in competition with private industry.

There's no free lifetime healthcare.

It's less expensive than private health care, but it's not free, and it doesn't cover everything, and it's standard government run bullshit. And it goes away as soon as you become medicare eligible and you have to go on medicare.

"Hazard pay" is $150 per month at most. The "free lifetime healthcare" gets eroded every congressional session (for a while there they took away dental coverage), and the VA health care system has a well-deserved reputation for being a nightmare factory. There is no such thing as a "zero-interest mortgage." The only benefit to a VA loan is the zero-down-payment. The only way to retire on a full-salary pension is to serve for forty years.

There are benefits to serving, but troops are not well compensated compared to the work performed. I'd also be interested in what you think the job market looks like for someone who has spent twenty years in a combat arms MOS. Most of the officers wind up well-prepared for management roles, but I don't know any enlisted retirees who didn't have a hard time transitioning.

In recent years, there seems to have been a push to hire vets into lucrative positions in the private sector. I know anecdotes are frowned upon here, but all four veteran friends/family of my own age managed to land very good jobs immediately after discharge. None had any college degrees, one (special forces) landed a mid-level management position at a bank, two (technical MOS) went into IT for defense contractors, and the latter ended up as a manager at a construction company.

Interestingly, the last one served ~2 weeks before receiving a medical discharge due to complications from a high-school football injury. He graduate high school, did practically nothing for two years before enlisting. Comes back a month later a veteran with a medical discharge and is getting multiple job offers.

Granted, special forces is pretty difficult to get into, you have to be smart and physically capable. So I'm sure there's a healthy amount of selection bias going on there. People capable of getting into the SF are generally capable of excelling anywhere.

> Interestingly, the last one served ~2 weeks before receiving a medical discharge due to complications from a high-school football injury. He graduate high school, did practically nothing for two years before enlisting. Comes back a month later a veteran with a medical discharge and is getting multiple job offers.

Sounds fishy to me.

What's the right amount of money to get to kill people in the name of who knows what?

You should expand your understanding of the United States military mission.

Hazard pay" is $150 per month at most.

Re-enlistment bonuses in the SEALs can be as high as 6 figures...

Re-up bonuses for special operations are capped at $100k amortized over half a decade. It's good, but it's hardly wealth.

This is also how Los Zetas formed. A bunch of elite soldiers figured out they could make a lot more money as enforcers for drug cartels.

If you think about it, it's a bit odd that there are so few mercenaries in this day and age. When you look back on history then from what I can tell, mercenaries were much more common.

What makes you think there are so few? Mercenaries are basically representing both America and Russia in Syria right now.

You might find this entry on Swiss mercenaries interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries

It was new information to me but supports your idea.

I met a guy at NewSpace several years ago and we were talking about the role of the US military in space exploration. I was expressing my wariness of a militarized space force, the possibility of us ending up under a military junta, etc, but he was less worried. He kept making the point that mercenaries were the norm in the past and that the US military actually has an incredible record for never seizing control. He chalked it up to the fact that our military traditions and honor are deeply intertwined with civilian rule, and didn't think our soldiers would easily abandon that.

The US military has only been around for 250 years and look at how much the country has changed in that time. The idea of the welfare state would be totally incomprehensible to the founders[0]. I think the idea of the military as separate from the rest of the state is contingent on that state operating in the interests of the people. Or at least, not against the interests of the people. And history shows that no society has been able to do this forever.

[0]: I'm not saying we shouldn't have a welfare state, it's clearly necessary in the modern world, but the America of today is nothing like the America that was intended, for better or for worse.

I see you weren't meaning to focus on welfare state by your edit. The US is different than revolutionary times in many ways, perhaps more significantly in women's rights, slavery, prisons, illegality of many actions.

I think the whole idea of the US being the world's most powerful country and acting outside our borders would have been something the founders would have struggled with, because they fought a war to get away from the world's most powerful country.

> The US military has only been around for 250 years

And a permanent, standing, large, and fairly dysfunctional (look at descriptions of military leadership and its civilian oversight in WWII and earlier, then look at same in Vietnam, then look at the linked Afghanistan Papers documents in this thread re: same in Iraq and Afghanistan) US military is even newer, only 80ish years. Even more recent if you consider its modern form to have taken shape only after the Vietnam draft ended.

> the US military actually has an incredible record for never seizing control.

I wonder if the civil war counts here.

The US military was very much opposed to the confederate succession, so much so that they refused to hand over union/federal property, which started the civil war to begin with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

This is a good point. After the conclusion of the war, 10 former Confederate states were placed under military rule. However, I believe that happened under the command of civilian leaders. Whether or not they had legitimate authority to do so is a different debate, but I don't think it was the military acting of its own accord.

Given the increased importance of having better tech and weapons in modern warfare, maybe the modern equivalent of a mercenary should include private contractors/R&D alongside boots on the ground.

I'm sure it already does. All of those companies selling information to the police are probably selling it to well-connected private entities as well. Or hell, the mercenaries may just own these tech companies outright: look at the devos family.

>I'm sure it already does. All of those companies selling information to the police are probably selling it to well-connected private entities as well. Or hell, the mercenaries may just own these tech companies outright: look at the devos family.

I think it's very likely that entities like drug cartels already pay for things like location data for DEA agent's cellphones.

It's not an accident. Nation-states spent an awful lot of time and money building up professional armies precisely because they had long experience depending on mercenaries. They knew that there were only two ways depending on mercenaries ever ended: either the country couldn't pay the mercenaries enough, in which case they sold them out to a higher bidder; or it could, in which case the mercenaries would eventually get tired of only getting part of the country's wealth, so they'd overthrow the government and take all of it. Professional armies let the nation-state escape this trap.

Unfortunately professional armies fail the one test that matters these days, which is the number of opportunities they provide for private actors to siphon money into their own pockets. So we have decided to ignore the lessons of history, because private profit today is worth social collapse tomorrow.

To stop this problems and other problems, like people in places like the SEC immediately going to work for companies under SEC investigation when they leave, and other revolving doors, it would probably be worth paying higher-level people (special forces operatives, District Attorneys, EPA commissioners etc.) a much higher level of pension that starts paying immediately after leaving the job, contingent on their lifetime disbarment from certain kinds of employment. If the person wishes to go work in such a position, that money needs to be paid back immediately.

It won't stop everyone, but done correctly it could stem the most egregious of revolving doors.

In the past, mercenaries were paid with the spoils of war. Modern artillery makes that impossible - everything gets smashed to bits.

I personally know a merc, so they're more common than you think.

>This is also how Los Zetas formed. A bunch of elite soldiers figured out they could make a lot more money as enforcers for drug cartels.

And then very quickly figured out that the "drug cartel" bit was the easy part and they got rid of their employers rather quickly.

The whole Zetas story is a fascinating one. If only their employers had read The Prince:

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Charles, King of France, was allowed to seize Italy with chalk in hand;"

I believe inside the special operations community, Navy Seals, especially Team 6, gets a lot of flak for the amount of insider content that comes out [1]. Perhaps some of the lessons may apply to the tech community as well.

I found this quote resonating well even for myself and tech, specifically for the adoration of tech leaders: "It’s easy to fall in love with oneself, but this is not about us...It cannot be about us". [2]

I know a certain unit that loved to remind people "You will give more than you receive". I found that quote quite helpful in helping myself decide if a certain company / team is worth my efforts. I do believe that under most circumstances we will give more than we received (monetarily or otherwise). Is that cause worth it?

1: https://www.duffelblog.com/2014/05/us-navy-seal-training-wri... (satirical)

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20200404171023/https://www.nytim...

I've was told by a friend that Seal Team 6 is kind of just a facade that the govt. puts on any spec ops operation that is successful that they need to publicize. Not that Seal Team 6 isn't full of spec ops guys, but rather that for confidentiality reasons, even if it isn't Seal Team 6 the govt. will say Seal Team 6 for obfuscation.

"All warfare is based on deception" - Sun Tzu

Well, when team 6 was founded, there were only teams 1 and 2. The number itself was a ruse.

> I believe inside the special operations community, Navy Seals, especially Team 6, gets a lot of flak for the amount of insider content that comes out

This may be true, but it also reminds me of the long and lucrative relationship between the US military and Hollywood[0]. It's pretty well established at this point that the military is willing to pay for opportunities to look good in movies, like they did in the Transformers series. There's an incredible amount of money behind the scenes influencing military presence in our media, and a lot of people don't realize it.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex

Amazingly, that Wikipedia article doesn't mention America's Army... a video game produced by the military for recruitment purposes.

It seems like entertainment overtly produced by the military is mostly outside of the scope of this particular phenomenon, which is more about the military influencing the content of entertainment-in-general.

Just to be certain, you realize that Duffel Blog is a satire site, right?

noted in the link description.

The article is an example of the flak Seals get for publishing and embellishing their stories.

The SEALs have, in general, earned a negative reputation in the past few years. Mostly centered around the leaks (mentioned by others) as well as their reputation as cowboys who don't do a lot of fallback planning and due diligence.

A joke I’ve heard is: Why does a SEAL platoon need 14 men when a green beret team only needs 12? The SEALs need to bring their cameraman and producer.

From what another commentator said, they are not making much, 54,000 a year [1] I consider them almost on a level with pro athletes given that to do the job at a high level you are done by your early 40's, in addition the numbers able to reach this field are very small[2] (about 33k based on 2014 estimates) based on overall troop count - 1.3M [3] that means that the top 2.3% of soldiers qualify for special forces, a truly elite group. I am also not keen on the flood of 'special forces merchandise' but alot of people are in a bind and need to take care of their families and when your career ends by 40 and you have mortgage payments, food bills..

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/navy-seal-pay-compared-with-... [2] - https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS21048.pdf [3] - https://beta.trimread.com/articles/16942

I'm totally ignorant on the details of this, but wouldn't someone who served in the US military for 20+ years have a great financial retirement and other benefits for life?

IIUC it's the same as anyone else being in the military for 20 years. That's not really enough IMHO for the level of training they have.

Part of the allure of the job is that it's supposed to be about abstract values like honor, duty, loyalty, patriotism etc. and not about compensation. It can't be otherwise, because then you have to accept that the job is basically just about killing people in exchange for money.

It can be about all that stuff and you can pay people well. Nothing about the latter implies you have to suddenly change your values.

And yet I'm sure there are plenty of reasons these roles can make you quite cynical about those values (specifically, if leadership has those values) and decide it's no difference. Might as well make more in private industry without needing retraining.

It depends on when you joined. Sometime after 9/11 college benefits in particular were beefed up.

I forget the details, but my dad retired from the service after 20 years.

I think he gets ~50% of his basic pay. I want to say it's inflation adjusted as well.

Their salaries are low, so it's not exactly an amazing retirement. In a low COL state with Social Security it could be helpful assuming you've got everything paid off already.

TriCare is a medical insurance component, but I don't know the details of how good it is. I think for us it was useful as it could sometimes be used as coinsurance, picking up what our other insurance did not. But I also vaguely recall having issues with it being accepted, though I was a kid and didn't pay much attention.

All in all, you're definitely not joining the military to get rich, especially as an enlisted man.

It's very, very hard to do 20 years of service. Individuals typically have very little choice in staying. They must be promoted in a timely fashion or be booted. The problem, at least with the Navy, is that the higher enlisted ranks have fewer openings, meaning more competition, and seniority becomes a factor in promotion. So you may be a great soldier, get good marks from command, and score well on the exams, but still get passed over because people four or five years ahead of you get the job instead.

Each year that you miss a promotion compounds. You can only miss so many promotions before it becomes impossible to hit the rank where you may retire.

An E8 who retires at 23 years gets about 2400 bucks a month, reduced cost socialized medical until they hit 65, and that's about it.

The mission of the Navy SEAL squad is to locate, close with, and destroy book deals.

Edit: I'm also tired of being lectured on integrity, honor, sacrifice, and duty only to see them cower in the face of questions about Eddie Gallagher.

Should be noted that a number of people in Gallagher’s unit came forward and raised issues. It’s one of the reasons he was prosecuted in the first place.

Yes. But the very vocal and public SEAL "influencers" I'll call them, say nothing. Those are the ones who lecture via Twitter, Youtube, books, and podcasts about honor, integrity, courage, doing the right thing, etc.

I worked with seals on a few projects, back when Blackwater was a thing and also more recently, and I wonder what kind of job offers these guys are getting after they leave the military. Or, frighteningly, while they’re still in it. The number and variety of corporate and private mercenary forces is much higher than most people would suspect. The size of Special Operations Command in the active duty US military is also much, much, much larger than most Americans realize.

I casually follow this topic and have observed this growth. How do people in SOC feel about this growth? Is part of the issue that the specialists are sidelined in the growth of the bureaucracy?

To an outsider it seems like a startup that's been swallowed up by an enterprise company. For the programmers at the startup they had a lot of autonomy, but now most don't have this. Other opportunities seem exciting and there is a feeling that many others are living off the success that you felt you created. I'm sure that's a bad analogy, but it's hard to know from the outside unless you have military links in the US.

>>I wonder what kind of job offers these guys are getting after they leave the military. Or, frighteningly, while they’re still in it.

They're getting gigs as paid assassins, moonlighting as military officers in other nations' Direct Action missions so they can pull in $25k/month.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...

SOCOM is around 100,000 soldiers. only the top 20 countries have militaries with more than 200,000 soldiers. if SOCOM was its own military, it would be bigger than 90% of the militaries in the world.

Yes, and this was heavily expanded by the Obama administration. Which has always been one of my criticisms about him. When I tell people this, I get blank stares.

So I know some folks in the business I think part of it is because we've glamorized special forces but there isn't always a pressing need for them. From what my friends in the business say is that it is 98% of your life is spent in miserable training, only the top elite of the spec ops forces ever see anything real. Probably in part because these forces were forged during the midst of the Cold War to combat the Red Menace across the entire world, now we're dealing with local warlords, much different threat.

Maybe it is the result of glamorizing the Navy Seals, and Delta Force and what not in movies, everyone wanted to be one because it was portrayed so cool; however just like internet communities once you become popular what made you popular died, an eternal September for Spec ops if you will.

Also the groups that are doing the sausage making are probably ones that you aren't hearing about. Such as the CIA SOG, Airborne Pararescue, or other groups you just don't hear a lot about.

During the fighting seasons in Afghanistan. US Army Rangers were doing raids every night. (Not counting in-country downtime associated with changing operation areas.)

Most raids were uneventful but contact with enemy happened often enough.

But they rarely had access to 160th SOAR helicopters because the 160th was usually busy supporting SEALs and Delta.

To your point about training, deployment was considered an easier time than being state-side because state-side time mostly consisted of high tempo training to prepare for other missions as well as get ready for the next rotation.

> Crazy times...

Are they? Mercenaries for hire have been a thing for centuries. And ultimately, mercenaries are selling a service, and need to market to their potential customers, like wealthy CEOs of huge corporations.

Today, possibly owing in part to the growing inequality in the world (though not specifically in Ghosn's case), wealthy individuals are looking for ways to protect themselves from a restive populace. One way in which they find out about the availability of private defense/security purposes is by that industry marketing themselves in some way.

Mercenaries have been marketing themselves for offensive or defensive purposes to people with a lot to lose like this for centuries, whether the medieval Hashishin (from whom we get the term assassin), or the Swiss Mercenaries (whose modern continuation is the Papal Swiss Guard of the Vatican).

Sadly, this re-privatization of mercenary services appears to be more of a reversion to a historical norm that was only brought under state control in the late 19th through mid-late 20th century.

There's always been that element of military service, and I think the experience of WWII and the cold war changed the stakes temporarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

It has definitely gotten worse since the Iraq War for a variety of reasons, and I think a big part of it is the lack of a draft has created a growing disconnect between "military people" and the population at large. There's no sense of shared sacrifice. People think they pay their taxes and that's as far as they need to sacrifice, and soldiers look around at their friends dying to secure oil fields for exxon-mobil while nobody at home is paying attention and can't help but get cynical.

> Now, it seems like every Navy SEAL now publically writes a book, sponsors a coffee line, or slaps their name, likeness and story all over everything from T-Shirts to gun accessories to clothing lines. It's made a complete mockery of what has always been a silent service and honorable job, and it's spawned a HUGE environment of tacticool people who want to act and look the part.

You can thank the propaganda machine being run through Hollywood, especially over the last few years (Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, Hurt Locker, etc.), for a lot of that.

One factor is that they're just following the trends of broader society - influencer mentality has impacted every consumer facing industry, and makes it easier for more people to be involved in building up and monetizing a public persona.

About the privatization of specops - that would seem to follow the general trend of mercenary forces. As private military contracting has picked up on the last few decades, it's natural that special operations gets roped into that.

How is this any different than FAANG type workers spinning out, creating their startup, writing a book....

Really myopic view. You may not consider it cool but this is their livelihood which they've put a lot more into than many I know.

I have personally had an opportunity to serve alongside some of the most incredible leaders. I wish they had money set for the rest of their lives and not have a need to cash in on their hard work and end up taking shots like yours.

If there was some disingenuous military folks cashing in and exploiting the system, sure I agree, those people suck.

Doesn't seem very decent for you to paint an entire community with a single brush.

But wasn't this cultural shift borne out of the Department of Defense itself under Donald Rumsfeld and the 20K private contractors they hired to conduct operations in Iraq? There was a PBS Frontline documentary about this called "Private Warrior" from around that time that's worth a watch:

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/private-warriors/

It's definitely not every seal.

Moreover, it's not really them, it's the media landscape.

Imagine if after retiring from a life of duty in which you were paid peanuts, someone offered you $2M for some stories. Which really were benign anyhow? How can we ask people to 'not tell anyone about their adventures'. It's a tiny bit of a paradox. At least they are not Kardashians.

Now it's really more about the money than anything else. You can't talk about Iraq and millitary without talking about oil and private contractors. Like it or not it became a kind of mercenary business. I can't blame the service people (Navy SEAL) though. I'm pretty sure they get the short straws from the deal anyway.

Well, the 'motivational/marketing' side makes more money than the actual job.

In the same way that Harley Davidson makes more money with merch than with motorbikes and George Foreman made more money sponsoring a kitchen grill than with his boxing career.

It’s not much different from former butlers and other staff to the royals writing books and so on. It sells and they have product.

That said all of that is different from becoming a mercenary or pseudo mercenary.

Think about all the privatized "special operations" missions that the public isn't even aware of...

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