> Unfortunately while our nation recognized the need to develop our black ops capabilities early on, we are a bit late to the party when it comes to cyber-warfare.

Out of curiosity, what makes you say this?

If there's one good example that our military underestimated the importance of cyber-security until recently, it is that the U.S. Army Cyber Command was just established in 2009. Before this happened, there was definitely work being done by the Army in this field, but it wasn't the large-scale, coordinated effort that such an important threat demands.

In the years leading up to the creation of the Cyber Command, there were many field grade officers who expressed the need for such a unit. These officers suggested that the military needed some sort of presence in cyberspace, mostly to ensure the safety of U.S. networks and partly to enable us to effectively respond to cyber-attacks around the world.

This article has a lot of good information about CYBERCOM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command

I hope you realize that NSA, perhaps the biggest and most capable information security organizations in the world has always been under the Pentagon. It's absurd to suggest the US attention to data security started with the establishment of "Cyber Command".

My personal view is that it's a dangerous experiment in ineptitude allow the Pentagon to "defend in cyberspace" US networks. Most of the people who are tossing around such terms don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about.

It's one thing to say we're going to let the Pentagon use its procurement bucks to have defense contractors weaponize exploits in case the day arrives. But it's highly debatable whether allowing the military to get involved in US domestic networks is even legal.

Their ability to defend even their own networks for less than 10x the cost of the private sector is still an open question, much less whether or not they can defend anything having a wide diversity of traffic such as today's business and consumer internet.

I didn't say that the creation of CYBERCOM marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in cyberspace. It was created just a few years ago, because our government's leadership felt that we needed to do far more than we have been. The NSA is very good at what they do, but unless they expand dramatically, other organizations are going to have to be formed.

That's fine. I'd just like to disagree with the idea that the US was late to this party. If anything the US has been one of a few countries leading the world into this "cyber arms" race, albeit mostly covertly until recent years.

Taboo? Do you have a reference for that? I was always under the impression that the initial resistance to SO was from traditional generals in the pentagon who came up through the infantry and armored ranks...

You are correct. There was a lot of resistance from generals who were well versed in conventional warfare. Many of them thought that guerrilla warfare was either cowardly or somehow below us.

Richard Marcenko, the founder of the now defunct SEAL Team 6 (got transformed into the Developmental Warfare Group) discusses the attitudes he encountered throughout his navy career in some of his earlier novels. (he does write fiction now, but some of his earlier works were based on his life.) I know that he's an extremely controversial figure and that his writing ability is questionable, but he was both a SEAL and an officer at a time when the military was just starting to realize how significant a role that guerrilla warfare would play in future conflicts.

A lot of it varies from service to service. The Marine Corps was the last to develop special ops teams, under the doctrine that all Marines were capable of special operations. The smallest integrated Marine units, the MEU's, are all certified as "special operations capable", and are indeed capable of covert, small-unit action. One of the missions they're often tasked with is TRAP, "Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel". It was a Marine TRAP team that rescued downed F-16 pilot Scott O'Grady during the Bosnian war, for instance.

Ironically, it was the Marines who actually had some of the earlier predecessors to black ops, in the form of the Raider Battalions in the Second World War. One of the Raider Battalions was commanded by FDR's son, which protected the Raiders from political interference, at least until FDR died.

It's not exactly publicized, but my dad told me that the first Raider Battalion, at least, was even organized as a Maoist guerrilla unit; Samuel B. Griffith, its second commander, had previously served in China and spent a great deal of time with Mao. Among other things, the unit was run democratically.t My dad was acquainted with Griffith for a time, and I don't know how much of this is public information, or even accurate, but it's what he told me.

The reason that the Marines are considered to have developed a spec ops teams last is largely due to the military having a different definition of special operations than the average person.

To an average person like me (and I was a Soldier) when I think of special forces, I consider pretty much anyone who went to one of the military's most elite schools. The SEALS, Force Recon, and the actual U.S. Army Special Forces all seem to have a similar level of ability. Each of these groups has taken the absolute best soldiers that could be found and trained them to an extreme degree.

When the government thinks of special forces, they think of organizations that fall under the Special Operations Command. When the U.S. wanted Force Recon to fall under SOCOM, the commandant said "no." This is part of the reason that the Marine Corps didn't officially have special forces until recently.

The problem with SOCOM, and why Force Recon didn't fit in, is that Force Recon was always meant to perform a specific mission within the context of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF), not be used as a black-ops team on a detached mission. Which is incidentally why the Marines still have them, even though the Marines have teams assigned to SOCOM now.

Given your knowledge of Marcinko's reputation I'm surprised you used him as your reference material. When Marcinko formed ST6 he selected the first members from an already existing specwar community. The same thing can be said for Beckwith and the creation of SFOD-D which predated ST6.

I was using him as a reference because he experienced first hand the discrimination that the special operations community faced from many high ranking officers and even politicians.

I wasn't trying to say that the SEALS were the first SF unit, I guess I wasn't very clear. Most of the SF type units were around in some form well before the Vietnam War. Even the SEALS were around in the 40's, they just weren't called SEALS yet.