This post first appeared in TomDispatch.

There is, of course, a certain logic to imagining that the increasing global sweep of these deployments is a sign of success. After all, why would you expand your operations into ever-more nations if they weren’t successful?

They’re some of the best sol­diers in the world: high­ly trained, well equipped, and experts in weapons, intel­li­gence gath­er­ing, and bat­tle­field med­i­cine. They study for­eign cul­tures and learn local lan­guages. They’re smart, skill­ful, wear some very icon­ic head­gear, and their 12-mem­ber teams are ​“capa­ble of con­duct­ing the full spec­trum of spe­cial oper­a­tions, from build­ing indige­nous secu­ri­ty forces to iden­ti­fy­ing and tar­get­ing threats to U.S. nation­al interests.”

They’re also quite suc­cess­ful. At least they think so.

“In the last decade, Green Berets have deployed into 135 of the 195 rec­og­nized coun­tries in the world. Suc­cess­es in Afghanistan, Iraq, Trans-Sahel Africa, the Philip­pines, the Andean Ridge, the Caribbean, and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca have result­ed in an increas­ing demand for [Spe­cial Forces] around the globe,” reads a state­ment on the web­site of U.S. Army Spe­cial Forces Command.

The Army’s Green Berets are among the best known of America’s elite forces, but they’re hard­ly alone. Navy SEALs, Air Force Air Com­man­dos, Army Rangers, Marine Corps Raiders, as well as civ­il affairs per­son­nel, logis­ti­cians, admin­is­tra­tors, ana­lysts, and plan­ners, among oth­ers, make up U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces (SOF). They are the men and women who car­ry out America’s most dif­fi­cult and secret mil­i­tary mis­sions. Since 9⁄ 11 , U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand (SOCOM) has grown in every con­ceiv­able way from fund­ing and per­son­nel to glob­al reach and deploy­ments. In 2015, accord­ing to Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces deployed to a record-shat­ter­ing 147 coun­tries — 75% of the nations on the plan­et, which rep­re­sents a jump of 145% since the wan­ing days of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. On any day of the year, in fact, America’s most elite troops can be found in 70 to 90 nations.

There is, of course, a cer­tain log­ic to imag­in­ing that the increas­ing glob­al sweep of these deploy­ments is a sign of suc­cess. After all, why would you expand your oper­a­tions into ever-more nations if they weren’t suc­cess­ful? So I decid­ed to pur­sue that record of ​“suc­cess” with a few experts on the subject.

I start­ed by ask­ing Sean Nay­lor, a man who knows America’s most elite troops as few do and the author of Relent­less Strike: The Secret His­to­ry of Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand, about the claims made by Army Spe­cial Forces Com­mand. He respond­ed with a hearty laugh. ​“I’m going to give who­ev­er wrote that the ben­e­fit of the doubt that they were refer­ring to suc­cess­es that Army Spe­cial Forces were at least per­ceived to have achieved in those coun­tries rather than the over­all U.S. mil­i­tary effort,” he says. As he points out, the first post‑9/​11 months may rep­re­sent the zenith of suc­cess for those troops. The ini­tial oper­a­tions in the inva­sion of Afghanistan in 2001 — car­ried out large­ly by U.S. Spe­cial Forces, the CIA, and the Afghan North­ern Alliance, backed by U.S. air­pow­er — were ​“prob­a­bly the high point” in the his­to­ry of uncon­ven­tion­al war­fare by Green Berets, accord­ing to Nay­lor. As for the years that fol­lowed? ​“There were all sorts of mis­takes, one could argue, that were made after that.” He is, how­ev­er, quick to point out that ​“the vast major­i­ty of the deci­sions [about oper­a­tions and the war, in gen­er­al] were not being made by Army Spe­cial Forces soldiers.”

For Lin­da Robin­son, author of One Hun­dred Vic­to­ries: Spe­cial Ops and the Future of Amer­i­can War­fare, the high num­ber of deploy­ments is like­ly a mis­take in itself. ​“Being in 70 coun­tries… may not be the best use of SOF,” she told me. Robin­son, a senior inter­na­tion­al pol­i­cy ana­lyst at the Rand Cor­po­ra­tion, advo­cates for a ​“more thought­ful and focused approach to the employ­ment of SOF,” cit­ing endur­ing mis­sions in Colom­bia and the Philip­pines as the most suc­cess­ful spe­cial ops train­ing efforts in recent years. ​“It might be bet­ter to say ​‘Let’s not sprin­kle around the SOF guys like fairy dust.’ Let’s instead focus on where we think we can have a suc­cess… If you want more suc­cess­es, maybe you need to start rein­ing in how many places you’re try­ing to cover.”

Most of the spe­cial ops deploy­ments in those 147 coun­tries are the type Robin­son express­es skep­ti­cism about — short-term train­ing mis­sions by ​“white” oper­a­tors like Green Berets (as opposed to the ​“black ops” man-hunt­ing mis­sions by the elite of the elite that cap­ti­vate Hol­ly­wood and video gamers). Between 2012 and 2014, for exam­ple, Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces car­ried out 500 Joint Com­bined Exchange Train­ing (JCET) mis­sions in as many as 67 coun­tries, prac­tic­ing every­thing from com­bat casu­al­ty care and marks­man­ship to small unit tac­tics and desert war­fare along­side local forces. And JCETs only scratch the sur­face when it comes to spe­cial ops mis­sions to train prox­ies and allies. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces, in fact, con­duct a vari­ety of train­ing efforts globally.

A recent $500 mil­lion pro­gram, run by Green Berets, to train a Syr­i­an force of more than 15,000 over sev­er­al years, for instance, crashed and burned in a very pub­lic way, yield­ing just four or five fight­ers in the field before being aban­doned. This par­tic­u­lar fail­ure fol­lowed much larg­er, far more expen­sive attempts to train the Afghan and Iraqi secu­ri­ty forces in which Spe­cial Oper­a­tions troops played a small­er yet still crit­i­cal role. The results of these efforts recent­ly prompt­ed TomDis­patch reg­u­lar and retired Army colonel Andrew Bace­vich to write that Wash­ing­ton should now assume ​“when it comes to orga­niz­ing, train­ing, equip­ping, and moti­vat­ing for­eign armies, that the Unit­ed States is essen­tial­ly clueless.”

The elite war­riors of the war­rior elite

In addi­tion to train­ing, anoth­er core role of Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces is direct action — coun­tert­er­ror mis­sions like low-pro­file drone assas­si­na­tions and kill/​capture raids by mus­cled-up, high-octane oper­a­tors. The exploits of the men — and they are most­ly men (and most­ly Cau­casian ones at that) — behind these oper­a­tions are chron­i­cled in Naylor’s epic his­to­ry of Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand (JSOC), the secret coun­tert­er­ror­ism orga­ni­za­tion that includes the military’s most elite and shad­owy units like the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force. A com­pendi­um of more than a decade of der­ring-do from Afghanistan to Iraq, Soma­lia to Syr­ia, Relent­less Strikepaints a por­trait of a high­ly-trained, well-fund­ed, hard-charg­ing coun­tert­er­ror force with glob­al reach. Nay­lor calls it the ​“per­fect ham­mer,” but notes the obvi­ous risk that ​“suc­ces­sive admin­is­tra­tions would con­tin­ue to view too many nation­al secu­ri­ty prob­lems as nails.”

When I ask Nay­lor about what JSOC has ulti­mate­ly achieved for the coun­try in the Oba­ma years, I get the impres­sion that he doesn’t find my ques­tion par­tic­u­lar­ly easy to answer. He points to hostage res­cues, like the high pro­file effort to save ​“Cap­tain Phillips” of the Maer­sk Alaba­ma after the car­go ship was hijacked by Soma­li pirates, and asserts that such mis­sions might ​“inhib­it oth­ers from seiz­ing Amer­i­cans.” One won­ders, of course, if sim­i­lar high-pro­file failed mis­sions since then, includ­ing the SEAL raid that end­ed in the deaths of hostages Luke Somers, an Amer­i­can pho­to­jour­nal­ist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher, as well as the unsuc­cess­ful attempt to res­cue the late aid work­er Kay­la Mueller, might then have just the oppo­site effect.

“Afghanistan, you’ve got anoth­er fair­ly dev­il­ish strate­gic prob­lem there,” Nay­lor says and offers up a ques­tion of his own: ​“You have to ask what would have hap­pened if al-Qae­da in Iraq had not been knocked back on its heels by Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand between 2005 and 2010?” Nay­lor calls atten­tion to JSOC’s spe­cial abil­i­ties to men­ace ter­ror groups, keep­ing them unsteady through relent­less intel­li­gence gath­er­ing, raid­ing, and man-hunt­ing. ​“It leaves them less time to take the offen­sive, to plan mis­sions, and to plot oper­a­tions against the Unit­ed States and its allies,” he explains. ​“Now that doesn’t mean that the use of JSOC is a sub­sti­tute for a strat­e­gy… It’s a tool in a policymaker’s toolkit.”

Indeed. If what JSOC can do is bump off and cap­ture indi­vid­u­als and pres­sure such groups but not deci­sive­ly roll up mil­i­tant net­works, despite years of anti-ter­ror whack-a-mole efforts, it sounds like a recipe for spend­ing end­less lives and end­less funds on end­less war. ​“It’s not my place as a reporter to opine as to whether the present sit­u­a­tions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen were ​‘worth’ the cost in blood and trea­sure borne by U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces,” Nay­lor tells me in a fol­low-up email. ​“Giv­en the effects that JSOC achieved in Iraq (Uday and Qusay Hus­sein killed, Sad­dam Hus­sein cap­tured, [al-Qae­da in Iraq leader Abu Musab] Zar­qawi killed, al-Qae­da in Iraq evis­cer­at­ed), it’s hard to say that JSOC did not have an impact on that nation’s recent history.”

Impacts, of course, are one thing, suc­cess­es anoth­er. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand, in fact, hedges its bets by claim­ing that it can only be as suc­cess­ful as the glob­al com­mands under which its troops oper­ate in each area of the world, includ­ing Euro­pean Com­mand, Pacif­ic Com­mand, Africa Com­mand, South­ern Com­mand, North­ern Com­mand, and Cen­tral Com­mand or CENT­COM, the geo­graph­ic com­bat­ant com­mand that over­sees oper­a­tions in the Greater Mid­dle East. ​“We sup­port the Geo­graph­ic Com­bat­ant Com­man­ders (GCCs) — if they are suc­cess­ful, we are suc­cess­ful; if they fail, we fail,” says SOCOM’s web­site.

With this in mind, it’s help­ful to return to Naylor’s ques­tion: What if al-Qae­da in Iraq, which flow­ered in the years after the U.S. inva­sion, had nev­er been tar­get­ed by JSOC as part of a man-hunt­ing oper­a­tion going after its for­eign fight­ers, financiers, and mil­i­tary lead­ers? Giv­en that the even more bru­tal Islam­ic State (IS) grew out of that tar­get­ed ter­ror group, that IS was fueled in many ways, say experts, both by U.S. actions and inac­tion, that its leader’s rise was bol­stered by U.S. oper­a­tions, that ​“U.S. train­ing helped mold” anoth­er of its chiefs, and that a U.S. prison served as its ​“boot camp,” and giv­en that the Islam­ic State now holds a sig­nif­i­cant swath of Iraq, was JSOC’s cam­paign against its pre­de­ces­sor a net pos­i­tive or a neg­a­tive? Were spe­cial ops efforts in Iraq (and there­fore in CENTCOM’s area of oper­a­tions) — JSOC’s post‑9/​11 show­case coun­tert­er­ror cam­paign — a suc­cess or a failure?

Nay­lor notes that JSOC’s fail­ure to com­plete­ly destroy al-Qae­da in Iraq allowed IS to grow and even­tu­al­ly sweep ​“across north­ern Iraq in 2014, seiz­ing town after town from which JSOC and oth­er U.S. forces had evict­ed al-Qae­da in Iraq at great cost sev­er­al years ear­li­er.” This, in turn, led to the rush­ing of spe­cial ops advis­ers back into the coun­try to aid the fight against the Islam­ic State, as well as to that pro­gram to train anti-Islam­ic State Syr­i­an fight­ers that foundered and then implod­ed. By this spring, JSOC oper­a­tors were not only back in Iraq and also on the ground in Syr­ia, but they were soon con­duct­ing drone cam­paigns in both of those tot­ter­ing nations.

This spe­cial ops mer­ry-go-round in Iraq is just the lat­est in a long series of fias­cos, large and small, to bedev­il America’s elite troops. Over the years, in that coun­try, in Afghanistan, and else­where, spe­cial oper­a­tors have reg­u­lar­lybeen involved in all man­ner of mishaps, embroiled in var­i­ous scan­dals, andimpli­cat­ed in numer­ous atroc­i­ties. Recent­ly, for instance, mem­bers of the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces have come under scruti­ny for an air strike on a Médecins Sans Fron­tières hos­pi­tal in Afghanistan that killed at least 22 patients and staff, for an alliance with ​“unsa­vory part­ners” in the Cen­tral African Repub­lic, for the inef­fec­tive and abu­sive Afghan police they trained and super­vised, and for a shady deal to pro­vide SEALs with untrace­able silencers that turned out to be junk, accord­ing to prosecutors.

Win­ners and losers

JSOC was born of fail­ure, a phoenix ris­ing from the ash­es of Oper­a­tion Eagle Claw, the humil­i­at­ing attempt to res­cue 53 Amer­i­can hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1980 that end­ed, instead, in the deaths of eight U.S. per­son­nel. Today, the elite force trades on an aura of suc­cess in the shad­ows. Its mis­sions are the stuff of mod­ern myths.

In his advance praise for Naylor’s book, one cable news ana­lyst called JSOC’s oper­a­tors ​“the finest war­riors who ever went into com­bat.” Even accept­ing this — with apolo­gies to the Mon­gols, the Varangian Guard, Persia’s Immor­tals, and the Ten Thou­sand of Xenophon’s Anaba­sis—ques­tions remain: Have these ​“war­riors” actu­al­ly been suc­cess­ful beyond bud­get bat­tles and the box office? Is excep­tion­al tac­ti­cal prowess enough? Are bat­tle­field tri­umphs and the abil­i­ty to bat­ter ter­ror net­works through relent­less raid­ing the same as vic­to­ry? Such ques­tions bring to mind an exchange that Army colonel Har­ry Sum­mers, who served in Viet­nam, had with a North Viet­namese coun­ter­part in 1975. ​“You know, you nev­er defeat­ed us on the bat­tle­field,” Sum­mers told him. After paus­ing to pon­der the com­ment, Colonel Tu replied, ​“That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

So what of those Green Berets who deployed to 135 coun­tries in the last decade? And what of the Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces sent to 147 coun­tries in 2015? And what about those Geo­graph­ic Com­bat­ant Com­man­ders across the globe who have host­ed all those spe­cial operators?

I put it to Viet­nam vet­er­an Andrew Bace­vich, author of Breach of Trust: How Amer­i­cans Failed Their Sol­diers and Their Coun­try. ​“As far back as Viet­nam,” he tells me, ​“the Unit­ed States mil­i­tary has tend­ed to con­fuse inputs with out­comes. Effort, as mea­sured by oper­a­tions con­duct­ed, bomb ton­nage dropped, or bod­ies count­ed, is tak­en as evi­dence of progress made. Today, tal­ly­ing up the num­ber of coun­tries in which Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces are present repeats this error. There is no doubt that U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces are hard at it in lots of dif­fer­ent places. It does not fol­low that they are there­by actu­al­ly accom­plish­ing any­thing meaningful.”