Norweigian special forces participate in the NATObacked Cold Response 14 exercise. Norwegian special forces have seen hard fighting in Afghanistan and off the Horn of Africa in support of Ocean Shield.
Plan Colombia may have taken rather longer to blossom than the planners envisaged, but the sheer potency of combining advanced electronic intelligence collection techniques, high-tech smart weapons, air mobility, and clandestine tactics refined in other theaters has turned dense rainforests, previously viewed as safe havens, into death-traps. What had once been the defining protection for the insurgents has been transformed into a killing ground. Such activity in Latin America has been coordinated from a couple of major sites in the continental United States, one of which is SOCOM’s new Wargame Center at its headquarters on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., where in October 2013, Norwegian Forsvarets Spesialkommando troops undertook a hostage rescue exercise. MacDill hosts the International Special Operations Forces Coordination Center, which is staffed by a dozen representatives from 10 countries, a figure that was set to double. Among allies, the greatest burden, after 10 years of continuous commitments in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, has fallen on the three British Special Air Service regiments and their associated SOF components. The casualty figures of nine during the year were a significant improvement on 44 the previous year, and 46 in 2011. But such attrition was considered unsustainable, bearing in mind the limited resources of U.K. special operations forces, and the fear was that standards would be reduced to attain the necessary replacements. Perhaps not coincidentally, the SAS’s weeklong, famously arduous selection process came under intense scrutiny in
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July 2013, when three territorial reserve candidates died of heat exhaustion while on an endurance march across the Brecon Beacons. Trooper Edward Maher, aged 31, and Lance Cpl. Craig John Roberts, 24, died during the march, which involved more than 90 soldiers. Cpl. James Dunsby, aged 31, died in hospital 17 days later. The incident attracted the attention of the local coroner and the Health and Safety Executive, which required the Ministry of Defense to improve the safety of the grueling route over the notorious 2,900-foot Pen y Fan Mountain. Known as the “Fan Dance” and regarded as among the toughest in the world, those who passed were then assigned to tropical training, recently switched from Belize to Brunei. The British experience, of taking heavy casualties combined with a marked reluctance to dilute the famously exacting standards required by the Director of Special Forces, has created a dilemma: whether to compromise capabilities in order to maintain end-strength. Few other countries have encountered the same problem, where budgetary considerations and a disproportionately large SF component within the overall military structure make the future uncertain. Either standards will drop, or deployments will diminish, thereby reducing Britain’s perceived contribution to the allied order-of-battle. After more than a decade of unsustainable attrition, 2013 could be seen as a turning point, reflecting a reduction in front-line duties in the Middle East and a growing confidence in partnerships, especially in Africa, Latin America, and the Far East, where surrogates have gained the capacity and confidence to plan and direct relatively sophisticated counterinsurgency operations without a large scale presence of foreign advisers. Indeed, it may well be that in future years 2013, will be regarded as a milestone in the isolation of the scourges of international jihadism and jungle-based revolutionaries.
Norwegian Armed Forces photo by Torbjørn Kjosvold
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