Posted: 9/18/2026 11:41:52 PM EDT
This is a look at Special Operations training from a NCO or CO perspective. Appears to be a brutally honest look at successes and failures in Special Operations training.  Unconventional Failure: How Army Bureaucracy Killed Special Forces It is stunning to me the number of people who haven't read Charlie A. Beckwith's important book Delta Force: A Memoir by the Founder of the U.S. Military's Most Secretive Special-Operations Unit. COL Beckwith spent a very long time building the concept and organization that became Delta Force. I think Zack does a great job discussing it. I also really liked the discussion on Field Marshal Viscount Slim's Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945 Zack talks about the necessity of mastering foundational skills. What is less discussed in detail in the video is what are foundational skills? From instructors like Mosby and Paul Howe the short list is Fitness, Medical and Marksmanship. Tactics, land nav, and combatives are other areas that should not be overlooked. Zack has some other great discussions on the history of Unconventional Warfare, contributing his valuable perspective of an SF combat vet. I have to admit that before the last years of the Afghanistan war I had probably fallen for some of the propaganda regarding SF's expertise in UW. Zack's compilation of videos suggest that expertise in UW is not out of reach, but in the Army it is very much stifled by Bureaucracy and what I would call Second Generation warfare mindset. |
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The part about not learning to shoot with nightvision for 3.5 years is interesting. Back in 1991 there was this "we own the night" notion. I've spoke to a USMC rifle instructor who admits he never ran any Marines through nightvision training. Another item was no training to respond to an ambush from thin skinned vehicles. That's a massive oversight, in that soldiers responded to an ambush in a thin skinned vehicle the way they were trained to respond from an armored vehicle. Maybe the most eye opening was lack of instructor training. Q-course only had 1,000 rounds fired and they are suddenly supposed to teach marksmanship? The image and reality are often different things. |
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