The theme of the book is blowback. America went to war in Afghanistan, was unable to achieve goals with conventional means, attempted to achieve goals using unaccountable death squads, the lack of accountability provides structural support for other crimes like drug trafficking, drug abuse and casual violence, then members of death squads come home. Blowback stateside comes in the form of drug violence, domestic violence, deaths of despair/addiction, PTSD, and ex-operators that act as a reserve pool of labour for clandestine wet work, foreign and domestic.

The best part of the book was his discussion of the evolution of the war in Afghanistan/Iraq and the growth in the importance of JSOC in the invasion/occupation. Harp paints a good picture of this trajectory. I wish this aspect of the book had been expanded as I think there is a lot to dig into there: the distribution of opium from Afghanistan out and connection to real international cartels, the budgetary/decision making implications for this unaccountable state-within-a-state, the implications of reliance on special ops on American force projection (I don’t think the US could fight a peer war now, let alone win). The book focuses on specific people and crimes, not broad analysis. For newsheads who don’t need to be convinced that these people are monsters, the relative absence of structural analysis is a bit disappointing. Maybe in a followup book.

Early in the book Harp makes a throwaway comment about how there are two types of special forces operators: heavily tattoo’d outlaw biker types and straight laced, religious teetotalers. The book centers on the outlaw biker types, specifically the three guys whose murders are discussed. Crashing out into spectacular murders and wild drug crime is by definition more visible and high profile than not crashing out and continuing to quietly do the work of empire. The current activities of JSOC/special forces/general black ops is discussed in the book in general terms, but is not the focus because by definition these things are not as visible as a tweaked out operator murdering his friend in front of both their daughters. The spectacular crashouts by the outlaw types are like the visible portion of the iceberg while the quieter, more stable work lurks invisibly.

Another thing that struck me is that the imperial machine really chews these operator types up and spits them out. I frankly have no sympathy for them on a moral basis, but nevertheless I think it is correct to identify how the machine does not support its elite soldiers as they crash out. I have a bit more sympathy for the young women who joined JSOC and were sexually harassed while they provided administrative support to facilitate the act of extrajudicial murder, but also is it your first fucking day? Who do you think these guys are?

After reading this book I rewatched Sicario from 2015. It is a glamorization of these kinds of guys applying the skills of war crimes against Mexican cartels. The disdain for anyone not part of the unit, the culture of bravado and machismo, insider/outsider attitude, and brutal violence all line up with the world that Harp portrays, though of course that movie is generally dumber and not grounded in any kind of geopolitics the way that Harp’s book is.

The killing in October underscores the complex political and security landscape as the United States begins working with interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in the fight against remnants of IS. According to relatives, Khaled al-Masoud had been spying on IS for years on behalf of the insurgents led by al-Sharaa and then for al-Sharaa’s interim government, established after the fall of former President Bashar Assad a year ago. Al-Sharaa’s insurgents were mainly Islamists, some connected to al-Qaida, but enemies of IS who often clashed with it over the past decade. Neither U.S. nor Syrian government officials have commented on al-Masoud’s death, an indication that neither side wants the incident to derail improving ties. Weeks after the Oct. 19 raid, al-Sharaa visited Washington and announced Syria would join the global coalition against IS. Still, al-Masoud’s death could be “quite a setback” for efforts to combat IS, said Wassim Nasr, a senior research fellow with the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank focused on security issues. Al-Masoud had been infiltrating IS in the southern deserts of Syria known as the Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the extremist group have remained active, Nasr said. The raid targeting him was a result of “the lack of coordination between the coalition and Damascus,” Nasr said. In the latest sign of the increasing cooperation, the U.S. Central Command said Sunday that American troops and forces from Syria’s Interior Ministry had located and destroyed 15 IS weapons caches in the south.

Confusion around the raid

The raid occurred in Dumayr, a town east of Damascus on the edge of the desert. At around 3 a.m., residents woke to the sound of heavy vehicles and planes. Residents said U.S. troops conducted the raid alongside the Syrian Free Army, a U.S.-trained opposition faction that had fought against Assad. The SFA now officially reports to the Syrian Defense Ministry. Al-Masoud’s cousin, Abdel Kareem Masoud, said he opened his door and saw Humvees with U.S. flags on them. “There was someone on top of one of them who spoke broken Arabic, who pointed a machine gun at us and a green laser light and told us to go back inside,” he said. Khaled al-Masoud’s mother, Sabah al-Sheikh al-Kilani, said the forces then surrounded her son’s house next door, where he was with his wife and five daughters, and banged on the door. Al-Masoud told them that he was with General Security, a force under Syria’s Interior Ministry, but they broke down the door and shot him, al-Kilani said. They took him away, wounded, al-Kilani said. Later, government security officials told the family he had been released but was in the hospital. The family was then called to pick up his body. It was unclear when he had died. “How did he die? We don’t know,” his mother said. “I want the people who took him from his children to be held accountable.”

Faulty intelligence

Al-Masoud’s family believes he was targeted based on faulty intelligence provided by members of the Syrian Free Army. Representatives of the SFA did not respond to requests for comment. Al-Masoud had worked with al-Sharaa’s insurgent group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in its northwestern enclave of Idlib before Assad’s fall, his cousin said. Then he returned to Dumayr and worked with the security services of al-Sharaa’s government. Two Syrian security officials and one political official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly, confirmed that al-Masoud had been working with Syria’s interim government in a security role. Two of the officials said he had worked on combating IS. Initial media reports on the raid said it had captured an IS official. But U.S. Central Command, which typically issues statements when a U.S. operation kills or captures a member of the extremist group in Syria, made no announcement. A U.S. defense official, when asked for more information about the raid and its target and whether it had been coordinated with Syria’s government, said, “We are aware of these reports but do not have any information to provide.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a sensitive military operation. Representatives of Syria’s defense and interior ministries, and of U.S. envoy to Syria Tom Barrack, declined to comment.

Increased coordination could prevent mistakes

At its peak in 2015, IS controlled a swath of territory across Iraq and Syria half the size of the United Kingdom. It was notorious for its brutality against religious minorities as well as Muslims not adhering to the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam. After years of fighting, the U.S.-led coalition broke the group’s last hold on territory in late 2019. Since then, U.S. troops in Syria have been working to ensure IS does not regain a foothold. The U.S. estimates IS still has about 2,500 members in Syria and Iraq. U.S. Central Command last month said the number of IS attacks there had fallen to 375 for the year so far, compared to 1,038 last year. Fewer than 1,000 U.S. troops are believed to be operating in Syria, carrying out airstrikes and conducting raids against IS cells. They work mainly alongside the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast and the Syrian Free Army in the south.

Now the U.S. has another partner: the security forces of the new Syrian government. Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, has reported 52 incidents in which civilians were harmed or killed in coalition operations in Syria since 2020. The group classified al-Masoud as a civilian. Airwars director Emily Tripp said the group has seen “multiple instances of what the U.S. call ‘mistakes,’” including a 2023 case in which the U.S. military announced it had killed an al-Qaida leader in a drone strike. The target later turned out to be a civilian farmer. It was unclear if the Oct. 19 raid went wrong due to faulty intelligence or if someone deliberately fed the coalition false information. Nasr said that in the past, feuding groups have sometimes used the coalition to settle scores. “That’s the whole point of having a hotline with Damascus, in order to see who’s who on the ground,” he said.

At the lowest point of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln characterized the core factor between victory and defeat as finding a general who understood the “awful arithmetic” of war. War is a contest of blood and treasure; each can, and must, ultimately be counted and measured. It has been the same for every conflict before and after. Yet this arithmetic is constantly changing, and never faster than right now. If the United States cannot update its calculations to properly reflect our new era, our failure will not just cost us blood and treasure, but will drive us toward defeat. Cost imposition has long been a tenet of U.S. strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. launched expensive programs such as stealth and Star Wars not just for their tactical value, but to send a strategic signal to the Kremlin: neither your economy nor your war machine can keep up. Gorbachev, persuaded, gave up the decades-long competition with the U.S. The very same concept of cost imposition was also elemental to the most celebrated operations of the past year. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine used inexpensive drones, reportedly costing less than $500 each, to damage strategic bombers worth many millions of dollars, degrading Russia’s long-range strike capabilities for years to come. Similarly, in Operation Rising Lion, cheap Israeli drones took out Iranian surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of command and nuclear facilities worth tens of billions of dollars. In each, the tactical became the strategic through new operational concepts that leveraged the new math of new technologies.

Now contrast this with our own approaches, which overwhelmingly rely on sophisticated but costly overmatch. The most lauded U.S. operation of 2025 was Operation Midnight Hammer, our followup to Rising Lion. One estimate put its cost at $196 million, from combining B-2 bomber’s nearly $160,000 per flight hour and Tomahawk missiles’ rough price of $1.87 million apiece. (It does not count the initial purchase of the seven B-2 Bombers that cost $2.1 billion each, nor the $4.3 billion submarine that launched the missiles.) Perhaps it was worth spending one-fifth of a billion dollars to damage Iranian nuclear facilities, but the numbers in Operation Rough Rider—the strikes against the Houthis last spring—illustrate the problem more starkly. The Pentagon spent roughly $5 billion on munitions and operating costs to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping, which simply started back up this month.

The same awful arithmetic haunts the current operations in the Caribbean against the Venezuela-based, government-connected Cartel de los Soles. The entity was recently designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization, as part of its argument that US forces are engaged in an “armed conflict.” The cartel was declared by the Department of Justice to be the hub of a cocaine transport network, shipping a reported street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion in drugs (the cartel gets an unknown, but clearly lesser, percentage of that overall value in actual profit). To battle this foe, the United States has assembled a fleet that cost at least $40 billion to buy in total. The carrier Ford alone cost $4.7 billion to develop and $12.9 billion to build. The fleet is backed by at least 83 aircraft of assorted types, including 10 F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Predator drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million per), and at least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million). To be sure, all of these assets will continue to serve long after Operation Southern Spear is wound down, but this is how we are using the investment. But the current cost of operations and expendables hardly tells a better story. The Ford alone costs about $8 million a day to run. The F-35s and AC-130J cost about $40,000 per flight hour; the P-8s, about $30,000; the Reapers, about $3,500. Analysis of the strike videos on the 21 boats show that U.S. forces have fired AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 apiece in 2019), Hellfires (running about $150,000 to $220,000) and potentially GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs ($40,000). In some cases, they are reportedly firing four munitions per strike: “twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it.”

All this is arrayed to sink motorboats, 21 at last report. One of the boats was described by Pentagon officials as a 39-foot Flipper-type vessel with four 200-horsepower engines. New ones go for about $400,000 on Boats.com, but the old, open top motorbots in the videos are obviously well below that in cost. Their crews have been reported as making $500 per trip. Put in comparison, the cost of the US naval fleet deployed is at least five times what the cartel makes in smuggling. The air fleet deployed costs at least another two times more. It is roughly 5,000 times the cost of the suspected drug boats that have been destroyed. Indeed, just the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day has still not yet equaled the maximum cost the cartel paid for the boats it has lost.

dang, almost as if drugs have absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and these forces are actually arrayed there to threaten Venezuela!

In the air, the U.S. military spent roughly 66,000 times more to buy each unmanned drone in the operation than the cartel paid each man that the unmanned drones killed. The US spent between 80 to 300 times more for each bomb or missile it has used than the cartel paid each man killed by those bombs or missiles.

The math is arguably even worse when we’re on the defense. In September, a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace… The Gerbera-type drones cost as little as $10,000—so cheap that they are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. NATO countered with a half-billion-dollar response force of F-35s, F-16s, AWACS radar planes, and helicopters, which shot down four of the drones with $1.6-million AMRAAM missiles. This is a bargain compared to how challenging U.S. forces have found it to defend against Houthi forces using this same cheap tech. Our naval forces have fired a reported 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 missiles, costing about $2.1 million, $3.9 million, and over $9.6 million each. And this is to defend against a group operating out of the 187th-largest economy in the world, able to fire mere hundreds of drones and missiles. Our supposed pacing challenge, China, has an economy that will soon be the largest in the world and a combined national industrial and military acquisition plan to be able to fire munitions by the millions.

Even in America’s best-laid plans for future battlefields, there is a harsh reality that is too often ignored. The math of current battlefields remains literally orders of magnitude beyond what our budget plans to spend, our industry plans to build, our acquisitions system is able to contract, and thus what our military will deploy. As a point of comparison, Ukraine is on pace to build, buy, and use over four million drones this year. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, aims to acquire 50,000 drones next year—about 1.25 percent of the Ukrainian total. In its most optimistic plans, it hopes to be able to acquire 1 million drones “within the next two to three years.” ​​When you spend orders of magnitude more than your foe, you are in what is known as a “losing equation.” And if we don’t change this math, we will need an update to Norm Augustine’s infamous “law” of defense acquisitions. Back in 1979, Augustine calculated that if the Pentagon couldn’t curtail the cost curve of its purchasing, by 2054 we wouldn’t be able to afford a single plane. The 2025 version is that if we don’t master the new math of the battlefield, we won’t be able to afford to win a single battle.

I’m pretty sure most people don’t know that the Battle of Mogadishu was planned by Mohamed Aidid from the beginning to inflict such a sudden and severe tactical defeat on the US that it would sour US public opinion and force a withdrawal. Aidid trained at an infantry school in Rome and was hand selected by the Soviets to attend the elite Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. He calculated that a single prolonged engagement with the American forces in Mogadishu would get the US to withdraw from the county if it involved enough American casualties. He observed that the joint Delta/Ranger teams searching for him would use the exact same helicopter insertion, humvee exfiltration plan every time they raided a house looking for him. So all he had to do was let himself be seen somewhere and mass forces in the surrounding area to encircle the US forces, then set up roadblocks so the humvees wouldn’t be able to reach the trapped Americans. Aidid’s plan worked perfectly, and his prediction was 100% correct, because Clinton pulled our troops out less than two weeks after the “black hawk down” incident.

The bulk of the casualties on the Somali side were caused by random civilians picking up guns and charging out to fight the Americans. These people wanted revenge on the US force in Somalia because it had caused so much collateral damage and killed so many people during the hunt for Aidid. Aidid’s forces tried desperately to get them to put down their weapons and go home because they were just getting in the way, but there were too many of them, and they refused to listen. Aidid lost perhaps 100-200 fighters in the battle, which is an incredibly small price to pay to knock the world’s foremost military power out of your country.

This part of the story is more murky, but there’s evidence to suggest Aidid grew concerned about causing too many American casualties, inviting a military response, and made the decision to open a corridor for the trapped US troops to exit the encirclement. The quoted post makes another common mistake in missing that the SNA shot down not one but two Blackhawks. Aidid created RPG squads and dispersed them across the area, recognizing the vulnerability of the helicopters, which were always a key part of US raids. Characterizing this as “lucky” doesn’t make much sense. Aidid’s plan wasn’t complicated. His masterstroke was correctly predicting the reaction of the White House and American public (which had no interest in Somalia). Getting this wrong could have triggered escalation instead of a withdrawal.

Of over 500 Ukrainian orphans brought to Turkey under the “Childhood Without War Project”

• 253 were involved in forms of seхual assaults, physical torture
• two girls Nastya(15) & Ilona(16) were impregnated by Turkish staff
• no arrests/ case covered up

In 2022, when the conflict began, there were about 67,000 orphans, 3,500 in the frontline regions. 3,500 of these orphans would later be signed up for evacuation and relocation to foreign nations under Zelensky’s wife, Olena Zelenska. The task to carry out this project would be given to ‘Ruslan Shostak’, a Ukrainian businessman leading the ‘Childhood Without War Foundation’. 510 of these children from Dnepropetrovsk would be transferred to Turkey, many others to Germany, Poland and France. In march of 2024, two years after the transfer, an investigation was launched into the project.

It was found out that 85 adults were involved in sexual assaults or forms of physical torture on over 250 children, with two below 17yo impregnated by Turkish cooks. In 2022, after the transfer to Turkey, funds would quickly run out and children would be transported from hotels to hotels – each in worser conditions. From the report of 7 children, “Money ran out and we were forced into labor & fundraising campaigns for money” According to the kids’ statements, teachers would give permission of outsiders to interact with students and turn a blind eye to adult-children relationships. A name was constant in my research, senior teacher Oleksandr Titov who was involved in physical abuse.

In the case of 15yo Nastya who was impregnated by a 23yo would later explain that Titov threatened her to abort the child. “He called me and said, tell me if you are pregnant, we can solve this with a pill”* Nastya would return to Ukraine and have the child (2yo today). The second girl Ilona who was 16yo at the time would also be sent back to Ukraine under a vocational study cover up. She would have the child (1,5yo today). Ilona would sIіt her wrist 2months after giving birth, but was saved just in time. Investigation would secretly be ended in July 2025, with no one arrested, later exposed by independent journalists. The Director of the Boarding school, Svetlana would blame the girls for their problems. Titov would be demoted from Senior teacher to P.E. instructor.

There are many other cases we might never find out about. This same problem was reported in Germany, and Ukraine talks about Russia removing kids from the grey zone. Why should Russia ever consider returning ethnic Russian kids back to Ukraine? This is the case we are met with.

Source: Ukrainian journalists of Slidstvo.Info

(seems like the original article might be these: https://www.slidstvo.info/news/ofis-ombudsmena-vstanovyv-porushennia-prav-ukrainskykh-ditey-u-turechchyni-ale-opryliudniuvaty-tse-ne-planuvav-lubinets/, https://www.slidstvo.info/news/pislia-evakuatsii-ukrainskykh-ditey-syrit-do-turechchyny-dvoie-nepovnolitnikh-divchat-povernulysia-vahitnymy-vid-turkiv/)