Elite forces top casualty list as reliance grows
U.S. pivots from ‘major combat operations,’ exposing best to harm
By nearly every measure, Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens was exceptional. The 36-year-old, who was killed by enemy fire during a raid in Yemen last Sunday, was a team leader in the Navy’s most elite commando force, SEAL Team 6, and had earned numerous awards for heroism under fire during a dozen deployments.
He was, one former SEAL Team 6 official said, “a blooming star.”
But on the moonless night when gunfire erupted as he approached a suspected terrorist compound, hitting him in the chest, he joined a group in which he was suddenly more typical. Twothirds of the troops killed in action in the last 12 months served in Special Operations units. Like Owens, they were the cream of the military’s crop — older and more experienced than the majority of troops, better trained and more decorated.
Over the last year, Special Operations troops have died in greater numbers than have conventional troops — a first. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they made up only a tiny sliver of the dead. The fact that they now fill nearly the whole casualty list shows how the Pentagon, hesitant to put conventional troops on the ground, has come to depend almost entirely on small groups of elite warriors.
“We’ve moved out of the major combat operations business,” said Linda Robinson, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp. In recent years, she said, the military has effectively outsourced rank-and-file infantry duties to local forces in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, leaving only a cadre of highly skilled Americans to train troops and take out high-value targets.
“This counterterrorism model is much more efficient,” Robinson said, noting it avoids the entanglements of an occupation.
But the flip side, she said, is that the U.S. troops left in harm’s way are some of the most experienced and valuable.
The number of U.S. troops killed in combat has plunged in the last five years, as President Barack Obama brought home more than 200,000 troops. In 2010, more than 500 service members were killed in action. Since the beginning of 2016, 18 have died. But 12 were elite trainers and commandos. Special operations troops make up about 5 percent of the military.
“These are the most impressive guys you’ll ever meet in your life,” said Jim Moriarty, a trial lawyer in Houston who served three tours with the Marines in Vietnam. “They are extremely competent.”
His son, Staff Sgt. James Moriarty Jr., 27, was killed in November with two other Green Berets in Jordan, where they were training Syrian rebel fighters.
Moriarty spoke to members of his son’s team and found them showing the wear of deployment. Many were divorced; others talked about getting out of the Army.
“I worry all this reliance on them is really using them up,” he said.