Late 20th and Early 21st Century
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, special forces have come to higher prominence, as governments have found objectives can sometimes be better achieved by a small team of anonymous specialists than a larger and much more politically controversial conventional deployment. In both Kosovo and Afghanistan, special forces were used to co-ordinate activities between local guerrilla fighters and air power. Typically, guerrilla fighters would engage enemy soldiers and tanks causing them to move, where they could be seen and attacked from the air.
Special forces have been used in both wartime and peacetime military operations such as the 1971 Indo-Pak War, Vietnam War, Portuguese Colonial War, Falklands War, The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Jaffna University Helidrop the first and second Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, the first and second Chechen Wars, the Iranian Embassy siege (London), the Air France Flight 8969 ( Marseille), Operation Defensive Shield, Operation Khukri, the Moscow theater hostage crisis, Operation Orchard, the 2006 Lebanon War, the Japanese Embassy hostage crisis (Lima), in Sri Lanka against the LTTE, and the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan involved special forces from several coalition nations, who played a major role in removing the Taliban from power in 2001–2002. Special forces have continued to play a role in combating the Taliban in subsequent operations.
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Famous quotes containing the words late 20th, late, early and/or century:
“A “super person” is one who expects to manage a career, home, and family with complete ease, expecting to maintain a perfect job, a perfect marriage, a perfect house, and perfect control of the children.”
—Joyce Portner (late 20th century)
“It is so very late that we
May call it early by and by. Good night.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)