Famous US Special Forces operations

Special operations are elite, tactical military units employed in complex, high-risk strategic operations such as counterterrorism.  While they have always existed in some form, they were bolstered after declines in funding and priorities - particularly after the failed 1980 mission to rescue 53 American hostages held in Iran. Here are examples of some successful special operations missions.

DoD photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Bradley J. Sapp, U.S. Navy.
A Navy Landing Craft Utility approaches the well deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa while participating in Rim of the Pacific Exercise 2004 off the coast of Hawaii on July 6, 2004.

1. Somalia Rescue

DoD photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Bradley J. Sapp, U.S. Navy.
A Navy Landing Craft Utility approaches the well deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa while participating in Rim of the Pacific Exercise 2004 off the coast of Hawaii on July 6, 2004.

On Wednesday, January 25th, US Special Operations forces, including members of Seal Team 6, rescued two hostages who had been kidnapped
 and held for ransom by Somali pirates since October, 2011. The hostages, Poul Thisted, a Dane, and Jessica Buchanan, an American
 relief worker, were not harmed. Several pirates were killed in the raid; no American personnel were injured or killed.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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