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By Robert Farley,The National Interest

Since World War II, the U.S. military has experimented with special-operations forces, small groups of warriors with the equipment and training to undertake extremely difficult missions. In effect, special forces exist to leverage human capital in unusual tactical situations. Soldiers selected for high physical and mental capabilities, then intensively trained, can theoretically achieve objectives that normal soldiers cannot.

The successes of special operators are well known; they include, most notably, the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But special operations have always faced criticism from more conventionally oriented parts of the military. The basic tradeoff involves the loss of human capital that regular line units suffer when their best soldiers and officers join special-forces formations. Training resources dedicated to special operators may also, in some cases, shortchange conventional forces.

(This first appeared several years ago.)

There are also organizational problems; while some commanders have proven overly conservative regarding the use of special operators (keeping them out of the fight in anticipation of some unknown job on the horizon), others have expended special forces in conventional operations, where the high human capital of the units has limited effect. And politicians, with a limited sense of military utility, tend to find special operations attractive without fully evaluating their costs.

In his new book Oppose Any Foe, Mark Moyar turns a critical eye on the history of U.S. special forces, taking seriously the costs that developing such units imposes on the rest of the military, and taking account the strategic limitations of special operations. Moyar argues, among other things, that the glamor and undeniable heroism of special operators has helped deflect scrutiny of some of their more egregious failures, and of the special-operations enterprise as a whole.