The President's Army

That's what some call SOCOM, the Special Operations Command. The thirty  members killed by the Taliban over the weekend belonged to that group. From news reports, it is now evident that SOCOM has been conducting a heck of a lot of night raids in Afghanistan; one article speaks of "thousands of nighttime operations conducted annually across the nation." Nick Turse has an extended article on the growth of SOCOM over the past twenty-five years. And grow it has.

Its budget has grown from $2.3 billion pre 9/11 to $9.8 billion for FY2012. It has not only grown in size (from around 37,000 in the late '90s to over 60,000 today), in countries in which it has operations (75 today from 60 when GW left office), but also in influence and power (it sets its own budget apart from DOD). It is made up not only of the groups we've heard about (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) but it also includes "specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, civil affairs personnel, para-rescuemen, and even battlefield air-traffic controllers and special operations weathermen." 

While the leaders of SOCOM assert that most of the work it does is train foreign troops at the request of foreign governments, it has also been known to perform such tasks as "assassinations, counterterrorist raids, long-range reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, and weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation operations.

One section, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), reports to the president and acts as his hit men and jailer of those held in secret prisons around the world.