Special Operations chief Adm. William McRaven has been on a mission this past year to humanize the soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines under his command, taking great pains to emphasize their training and advising roles and never failing to mention his operators tend to be older, college educated and have families.
“We. Follow. Rules,” he sharply told a think tank audience in Washington recently. “Most of those rules have been written in blood.”
He continued that theme today in Tampa.
In his strongest statement to date about the psychological health of his operators, McRaven said that under the crushing operational tempo of the past 12 years “the force is frying at a rate that I’m not comfortable with at all.” As a consequence, taking care of his troops and their families are his highest priority.
A report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments released last week reported that those assigned to Special Operations Forces (SOF) units often experience symptoms of PTSD at twice the rate of general purpose units.
“We intend to change the narrative, if you will, of special operations,” McRaven told the crowd at the SOFIC conference here. The plan is to connect his Theater Special Operations commands to one another by creating a global SOF network that can share intelligence across the global network