Practically, why are there not militia groups with Navy SEAL/Delta-level tactical abilities? Or at least near to that? Is it personnel selection effects or bc that level of training requires time/money investments that are out of the reach of non-professional organizations?
Also, in experience with self-organized volunteer organizations in different fields (not militias, etc.), the lack of discipline, organization, motivation, just basic thought is often shocking. The dysfunction can be overwhelming. I'm not surprised that very few have developed real capabilities.
> Navy SEAL/Delta-level
Maybe you didn't mean it literally, but that is a pretty high standard. It's like asking why you don't see local basketball players with NBA-level ability. 99.x% of military personnel, with years of training and experience, don't reach those levels.
But that may get back to your point about discipline, motivation, intelligence, etc.
Re SEAL/Delta-level: I guess I'm asking two distinct questions.
1) To use your basketball analogy: while NBA-level skills may be an unreasonable expectation, why do the videos seem to show middle school or JV-level competence? I'd expect that D3 college-level competence wouldn't be super difficult, but evidently that isn't a correct assumption.
2) What is the practical requirement for a world-class tactical unit (or near that level, e.g. D1 basketball or a bad pro team)? I wouldn't expect current militias to be at that level, but what about less developed nation-states?
Highly trained tactical teams are useful for precision strikes. Most goals of a militia don’t require that much precision, if I had to guess.
That seems like a narrative someone might tell, but I don't know it's true at all, or if it's part of their training. Lots of PSTD out there, even among elite soldiers. Look at the person who blew up the vehicle in Las Vegas.
I've read interviews with them saying that killing is unnatural and you never get used to it.
2) World class units require world class funding. Training and equipment are not cheap. The amount of money spent on the military by the US government is a big factor in tactical superiority, not just for the front-line units themselves, but also the massive amount of logistics it takes for them to operate at that elite level anywhere on the planet at the drop of a hat.
One common form of US military aid is training elite units in partner militaries, often in less developed countries. This has an evil history, training death squads and other war criminals, knowingly or unknowingly. It also has a cost-effective and good history, training Ukraine's elite units, for example.
(My impression is that it's a cost-effective compromise solution to a very difficult, expensive problem: The institutions of militaries are sometimes highly corrupt and incompetent; the Afghan military is an example. Fixing that problem would require building a new military, which could take 20 years at great cost and may be impossible: The corruption usually comes from the government, whose corruption comes from elites and from society-wide political problems.)
You can find some competent people and create a small, isolated organization, and train and equip them, and do it cost-effectively. The Afghan military was hopeless; their elite units were reportedly very good.
I think it boils down to their ability to make money as well as practice their craft. Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa. They can be hired out by rival cartels fighting against each other too. They can have jobs to protect loggers from eco-terrorist or to protect swaths of forest from illegal logging.
There isn't much "work" for private militias in the US. Private security has demand but it's fairly small scale. Their isn't really the opportunity to field brigades with 1000s of well trained soldiers for regular off the books military action.
There's a great deal of work for private US militia's, China has a substantial contract with a subgroup spun off from the private contractor formerly known as Erik Prince's Blackwater.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Services_Group
TBH it's a full time investigative exercise keeping track of them all. The linked article gives a very partial overview of one arm of many and tails off after 2021.
There's not really much domestic demand for American PMC services. In Brazil the militias are locals that primarily have other income.
The US is paying a billion dollars to a PMC to secure the green zone in Iraq, but it's not like all those people will be militia in the US in a certain area.
FWiW one general definition of militia is:
A militia is a military or paramilitary force that comprises civilian members, as opposed to a professional standing army of regular, full-time military.
The militias on the other hand are more so made up of normal people moonlighting as soldiers.
> Militias in Brazil will be paid in secret by the government to fight drug traffickers and vice versa.
these "militias" in Brazil are not militias by your criteria.
From my PoV the described activities carried out by paramilitary groups in Brazil are similar to the activities carried out by US PMC's, and there's as much of that kind of work available to US contractors as there is for Brazilian operatives.
They can only exist, because someone else paid to train their people. The training would otherwise be far too expensive.
Probably important to consider that everything you know about SEALs etc are filtered through a massive PR system anyways. So you might not be comparing the same level of quality of video either. Good editing can do wonders.
I saw a joke about Navy Seals awhile ago that went something like:
A Navy Seal and a Delta Force operator are chatting in a bar. The Navy Seal immediately starts talking and bragging for hours about all the amazing things he and other Seals have done. The entire time the Delta Force operator smiles and nods.
I think the militias don't get the top-of-the-line retired military people. They get the wannabes, the people who love the trappings of being tough and deadly, without the actual skills or training. Putting on my amateur psychologist's hat, I'd guess that the militia types mostly washed out in the military, but are still looking for what they went into the military to try to find - a sense of belonging and identity.
The real SEAL/Delta level people don't go into a militia to try to find that - they found it for real in the real military.
Also “mil-spec”, and in a totally different context i.e. big box retail, “contractor grade”.
I guess not enough of an overlap between anyone anti-mask and any convenient promotional memes.
A trope of many action/thriller movies is groups of top-notch professionals becoming disenchanted with democracy and forming terrorist organizations. While movies aren't reality, it's striking that even watered-down versions almost never seem to happen. Maybe the military is just that good at filtering out those types during psychological testing, or maybe belonging is far more important than ideology.
The more mundane reason is probably because it's more appealing to use those skills to enter law enforcement or become a private military contractor than knowingly and overtly breaking away from society to form and maintain an organization that uses violence to achieve specific political aims.
„In 2018, the German Federal Criminal Police Office uncovered a plot involving unknown KSK soldiers to murder prominent German politicians such as Claudia Roth, Heiko Maas and Joachim Gauck among others, and carry out attacks against immigrants living in Germany.[7] Also, earlier that same year in a separate investigation, the State prosecutors in the city of Tübingen investigated whether neo-Nazi symbols were used at a "farewell" event involving members of KSK.[8][9]
In June 2020, German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced that the unit would be partially disbanded due to growing far-right extremism within the ranks.[10] The KSK had become partially independent from the chain of command, with a toxic leadership culture. One of the force's four companies where extremism is said to be the most rife was to be dissolved and not replaced.[11]“
Let's set aside talent, access to experience trainers, facilities and equipment and just look at time on task: real special forces operators spend 30-60 hours per week, 48 weeks a year (assuming 4 weeks of leave) working on their craft. Finding people that can put that kind of time in would be rare.
When you look at the other factors, the gap widens.
So if the militia doesn't hold a candle to the SEALs the why do they matter? Because of modern point and shoot repeating and guided weapons. We're seeing that in how the Russians are taking people off the streets and out of prisons, giving 1-3 week of training and throwing them at the Ukrainians. We saw that with the Ukrainians when they stopped huge Russian armored columns with man-portable anti-tank missiles. Bullets, grenades, ATGMs and drones really don't care about the experience level of their target. Artillery, even portable stuff like a pack mortar or repeating grenade launcher takes out any Spetznaz or Rangers in the general area you aim at just like it does any other soldier. The age of the super-proficient ended with the US Civil war: the revolver, repeating rifle and machine gun level skill gaps pretty quickly..
Examples from the past are easy to come by (COINTELPRO), but a recent example would be the failed 2020 kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan at the time.
Thirteen arrests were announced, and the FBI has admitted to using three informants and two special agents. The defense argued that there were at least twelve.
Using the official number as a conservative guess, that's still 5 feds for 13 arrests (a 38% ratio!)
Now imagine if instead of 13 dudes trying to kidnap a governor, it was a local militia trying to arm and train hundreds or thousands of people. The full power of the US government to crush opposition is terrifying.
FYI an informant is not a fed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_SEAL_sele...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Boat_Service#Recruit...
Because SEAL/Delta units are made up of statistical outliers who can keep their cortisol levels low under conditions that 99% of us absolutely cannot.
[1] https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...
It feels like the "no scammers" thing you see on Craigslist ads; as if some scammer would say, "Darn, and I was really hoping to cash in on THIS one; I guess I'm out."
To your point, the groups will likely continue to train (seemingly illegally), but the quality of the groups will definitely be degraded due to the more limited pool of qualified trainers driven by the presumably high-deterrence of state laws. The original comment above asked why we don't see high(er) performing militia groups, and these types of state laws seem like a strong contributing factor.
This exactly - a few 300-pound dudes taking a break from their McDonalds to look like they really mean it by firing long barrelled weapons at some cardboard target. All this escape and evasion training, with all the wilderness stuff too - it's nonsense, little guys playing soldier is all.