Because of my professional background, I get asked a lot about what it’s like to work within the special operations forces (SOF) community. I served in a number of different SOF units over the years, and between deployments and CONUS training missions, I worked with most of the major ones. These days, I work with a lot of current and former members of the SOF community here at The Havok Journal as well as in my “day job.”
When it comes to the military, I’m on the support side of the house. It wasn’t always that way, but when it comes to my time in SOF, all of my jobs were in an enabler capacity.
I’m not ashamed of that. On the contrary, I’m proud of the work I did in various SOF units both at home and overseas and never aspired to do anything else. I was fortunate to realize early in my career that my comparative advantage lies behind a desk, not behind a rifle. And I was very, very good at what I did.
So when it comes to SOF I don’t know what it takes to get selected as a “shooter,” or an “operator,” or any of the other terms tossed around by people who really don’t know what they mean to describe the types of men I supported. Fortunately, there are plenty of great articles out there that do that. But I do know what it takes to be successful in a supporting role in a SOF unit—it only takes these four things:
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