The team houses were not conspicuous, but everyone knew where they were. Before operators arrived in Sana’a, for example, specialist kit would often be flown in by C-130 and picked up by the embassy, giving Yemeni customs workers a fairly reliable indicator that something was going to happen. The high tempo of Western special operations forces’ activity over the past two decades has led to repetitive behaviors and the formation of a set of persistent patterns. Failure to recognize the changes in the operating environment may carry a heavy price. They have fallen into predictable patterns, become overly reliant on technological solutions, and grown accustomed to short operations enabled by overwhelming support. As the world returns to an era of great power competition, policymakers need to realize the extent to which special operations forces have been optimized for a narrow mission set. That apparent flexibility is misleading, however. Special operations forces have long been valued for their flexibility, and this was a characteristic that seemed to be demonstrated throughout the US-led post-9/11 wars as the same teams rotated between theaters and deployed at short notice to respond to sudden policy challenges. It depended upon local partners for access, a high level of enablement by the joint force to bring operators to the objective as quickly and directly as possible, seamless satellite communications, and airpower.

The methodology was high tempo, built around intelligence-led raiding with follow-up operations that exploited the gathered information before the adversary’s command-and-control system could assess and react. The methodologies that brought about this outcome were subsequently applied against the Islamic State as special operations forces spearheaded the campaign to defeat the group, working by, with, and through Iraqi and Syrian forces to find, fix, and finish the operational echelons of the terrorist organization.

They helped whittle the organization down from an international menace to an internally fractured and locally fixed shadow of its former self. Special operations forces played a critical role in the secret war against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In the evening they would be met by someone from their embassy and taken to a haven of vice known as the Russian Club to meet their counterparts and have a beer where no locals were admitted. They would be picked up at the airport and whisked away to a team house. They would say they were IT technicians, which everyone would accept and no one would believe. They would be courteous but direct of speech and deliberate in their movements. They generally wore unbranded baseball caps, hiking trousers, shirts, wrap-around sunglasses, an expensive watch, and one of three brands of shoe. Every so often, however, another type of traveler would board the plane: pairs of British or American men, invariably lean, muscular, and above average height, with scruffy beards but surprisingly regimented fingernails. Before Sana’a fell to the Houthis in September 2014, the passengers on flights to the Yemeni capital largely comprised Yemeni businesspeople, members of the Yemeni diaspora, diplomats, oil and aid workers, language students, and the occasional journalist.

Old habits die hard meaning