The Pentagon is reviewing the special operations community after a series of high-profile...

Part of the Mental thing is that you have to have free thinkers for the most part. They have to be able to, to use the old statement, "improvise, adapt and overcome". Someone that sticks to the regs as written without any wiggle room, is going to get people dead, while not accomplishing the mission objective. Some of that "free" thinking is going to upset the folks sitting in the head shed. I, personally, would rather see Mission accomplished and troops out ambulatory, than the other way around.

SGT (Join to see) - respectfully, I don’t think they’re reviewing the ‘free thinkers’.

More aptly, they’re taking a look at instances like, “Just this year, Army Special Forces soldiers have been charged with attempting to smuggle cocaine back from Colombia, the murder of an estranged wife, the sexual assault of a family friend, and the rape of two young girls.”

Or when, “Two Navy SEALs and two Marine Raiders face murder charges in the death of a Green Beret last year in Mali.”

Those actions weren’t perpetrated by free thinkers just driving on with their missions. I’ve got no problem with Operators doing operator stuff when deployed. But the above doesn’t qualify. The above is so far out of bounds and has no place in our military. It’s unfortunately happening at a more frequent rate (or at least being publicly acknowledged more). And it needs to be figured out.

SGT (Join to see) - I agree with the Sgt. This is not a free thinker issue. I was a Transportation Commander. I read the regs and used the grey areas to do stuff to support the wing or the troops, but I never did things I knew were wrong or illegal just because I could stretch the regulations.

LTC Brown, what makes you qualified to label “people drawn to this type of work” as “rule breakers...”?? Ethics training? Seriously? Everyone benefits from exceptional leadership-hardly a stop-the-presses revelation! But this type of a sweeping, uninformed generalization of Special operators as being “rule breakers” is symptomatic of the larger issue. Your comments also show an exceptional misunderstanding of the SOF community, its mission and challenges at the very least.