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, early and/or century:
“Roosevelt could always keep ahead with his work, but I cannot do it, and I know it is a grievous fault, but it is too late to remedy it. The country must take me as it found me. Wasn’t it your mother who had a servant girl who said it was no use for her to try to hurry, that she was a “Sunday chil” and no “Sunday chil” could hurry? I don’t think I am a Sunday child, but I ought to have been; then I would have had an excuse for always being late.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)