ABSTRACT
"It may well be that the era of US military expeditions, so much a feature of our history in the late nineteenth and entirety of the twentieth centuries, is drawing to a close", stated John D. Negroponte. Special Operations Forces (SOF) missions are usually clandestine, typically carried out in hostile or official off limits territory, and can involve raids, intelligence gathering, rescue, insurgency, etc for the purpose of achieving military, diplomatic, and/or economic objectives. In the near future, the temptation will be for military planners to view SOF as the solution for every kind of emerging problem. SOF expansion, due to the special training requirements of operators, is limited to 3–5 percent annually. So the dilemma facing the future of SOF overseas, at least in the near term, is how to deploy more operators to more areas of the globe with less support and without eroding operational capability. This is why some are cautioning that SOF is at an evolutionary dead end.
