Joint Special Operations Command

In the pre 9-11 era, outside of a very specific sort of group of professionals and practitioners, you know, surveillance authorities weren't really something that took up a lot of ink in most newspapers.

You know, the average citizen had no idea what JSOC was or, you know, what Special Activities Center or Special Activities Group was or the hostage rescue team.

Like there's all these organizations now or subunits of larger organizations that are part of the national conversation that just nobody knew about beforehand.

Right.

And I don't use that term because it just sounds nice.

Exquisite capability is outlined in the Department of War capabilities in terms of a capability is an exquisite capability when it is in its infancy of technology and development, very high-end tech, very expensive, and we're using it for something that's very specific in the hands of, likely, Joint Special Operations Command or the special operations under the Joint Force.

So this particular submersible, at the cost of...

Two and a half million commercial use if you're using it for research, fishing, industry, etc.

I mean, that's one of the, you know, not talking about CD, but talking about a story that General Brennan, who was on the show and CD told me when we were having dinner one time, they were talking about General Tony Thomas, who ended up, ended his career as the SOCOM commander.

You know, he was a JSOC commander.

He had been over, he had been in the unit for a long time.

He was like in a, in a early MRAP or something.

Rescue men, TACPs, which are your basic JTACs that are embedded with army units, all the way through Spectre gunships.

They have Ospreys that support JSOC and also all kinds of other special operations activities.

PC-12s, which are the U-28s, which do a lot of soft overwatch, kind of armed overwatch role.

And then there's two other communities, NSAAV, which is non-centered aviation, so soft logistics, moving guys around the world.

Love with your experience, maybe to comment on one or both of those.

Well,

it's interesting because the whole root of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, was this operation called Desert One, which is the failed hostage rescue of the Iranian, the American hostages from Iran back in the 70s, I think, during the tailing, trailing year of Carter's administration.

Basically, they tried to rescue these hostages.

So let me illustrate it by, I think I was three months, two and a half, three months into this administration, and I sat down.

I traveled to JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command, where the then commander took... basically half the day to sit down with me in a secure facility in a classified room.

And he had on these video screens a little bit like, you know, something out of a Tom Clancy movie, every one of our special operations task forces arrayed across the Middle East.

So these are our guys in theater giving me a live briefing with their boss sitting next to me.

But the point is, is that The reason I wanted to say that was to say all that, it's like the bin Laden raid was the apex of a lot of the transformation that happened in the US military.

JSOC itself was a creation because of the failure of Operation Desert One in Iran in 79, in 1980.

And you couldn't have got there without everything that preceded it, right? I mean, thousands of other similar operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so, you know, despite the fact that we, the United States, got a lot of things wrong in these wars, we also got a lot of things right.

And that was in 2005.

Of course, the insurgents had no idea.

And then JSOC became this Ferrari in the garage that wasn't used, like being used all the time.

And then...

And in Chantilly, Virginia, just four miles from the runway of Dulles Airport, the military and CIA personnel who staff the National Reconnaissance Office are beginning an exercise in which a plane crashes into their building.

Members of the Joint Special Operations Command, the U.S. military's top counterterrorism unit, are in Hungary preparing for Jackal Cave, a highly classified joint readiness exercise.

Fighter pilots deployed to monitor the Russian Air Force's training exercise in the Arctic are readying themselves for a day of maneuvers in Alaska and northern Canada.

and at NORAD's Combat Operations Center at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, military commanders are preparing for one of the busiest days of war games and exercises in the history of the United States.