Why Are US Special Operations Forces Deployed in Over 100 Countries?

So asks Nick Turse. It wasn’t easy to find out where they were, as Turse explains:

And for more than a month, I waited for answers. I called. I left messages. I emailed. I waited some more. I started to get the feeling that Special Operations Command didn’t want me to know what its Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos—the men who operate in the hottest of hotspots and most remote locales around the world—were doing.

Then, at the last moment, just before my filing deadline, Special Operations Command got back to me with an answer so incongruous, confusing and contradictory that I was glad I had given up on SOCOM and tried to figure things out for myself.

After beginning with a blank map, “it didn’t take long before every continent but Antarctica was bristling with markers indicating special operations forces’ missions, deployments and interactions with foreign military forces in 2012–13. With that, the true size and scope of the US military’s secret military began to come into focus. It was, to say the least, vast.”

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3:23 pm on January 8, 2014