The Perils of Overreliance on Special Operations Forces

Join Moderator Stephen Grenier, Program Director of the MA in Global Security Studies program, as he welcomes New York Times bestselling author and award-winning national security journalist Sean Naylor for a discussion on how U.S. special operations forces have evolved from a few niche military units into the Pentagon's primary warfighting tool. Naylor will explore how the repeated use of elite troops, and the growing infatuation of special operations forces, led to an epidemic of unethical behavior, a softening of military standards of conduct and capabilities, and the rise of VetBro culture - the combination of noxious masculinity, pseudo-patriotism, and militarism that has swept across the American social and political landscape.

Naylor served as a national security correspondent for Yahoo News and as the intelligence and counterterrorism correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine. As a contributing reporter for the New York Times, he participated in an in-depth investigation of SEAL Team 6 that won the 2015 George Polk award for military reporting. He was also a contributing writer for Newsweek magazine. Naylor is the author of Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command and Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda. He is a co-founder, editor and a lead reporter for The High Side, an online publication of investigative national security reporting.

As a reporter for Army Times (1990 to 2013), Naylor covered special operations forces, combat operations, exercises, training, readiness, force modernization, and the Army's senior leadership. He spent time as an embedded reporter in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Event will be held in the Link, covering rooms 426, 428, and 430 at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center. The Link is located on the fourth floor.

Refreshments will be served.

Host or Publisher JHU MA in Global Security Studies