Today: Why the spread of major crime within the U.S. Special Forces? Seth Harp on a dark legacy of America’s war on terror.

+ Is Europe getting ready to defend itself? What we’re tracking for this week’s member’s despatch. & New music from Cut Copy …

Just a shot away

On investigation, that case revealed a broader pattern of criminality having spread within certain branches of the Special Forces. Since then, there’s been a stream of reports of American special-operations personnel engaging in crime—sometimes with lethal consequences. The home of some of the United States’ most elite units, Fort Bragg saw 105 of its soldiers die between 2020 and 2021—only four in combat; many of the remaining were overdose deaths, some of them unsolved murders.

In fact, in 2023, the Army opened a drug-trafficking investigation into at least 13 Special Forces troops stationed at Fort Bragg. And between 2020 and 2024, there were at least 24 murders involving its soldiers. Something, it seems, isn’t as it should.

What’s going on?

Seth Harp is an investigative reporter, an Iraq War veteran, and the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. Harp says a culture of impunity has taken shape within America’s Special Forces. These units rose to prominence in the U.S. military because of the war on terror—and were also given privileges and protection because of it: They were sometimes handed wads of cash to pay informants, for example, but no one really cared to check how they spent it, and some began smuggling it back home. Meanwhile, traumatized by their experiences of fighting, some Special Forces members turned to narcotics for self-medication. Before long, some began smuggling heroin and cocaine on military planes.

For a while, it seemed as though U.S. authorities wouldn’t tolerate the pattern endlessly. A few years ago, the Army improved security near Fort Bragg. And the federal government created a special prosecutor with jurisdiction over troops involved in serious felonies. But now, Harp says, with the Trump administration’s Department of Defense making clear that it’s not interested in concerning itself with these matters, they’re only apt to get worse …

• “We can’t know exactly how much money has been stolen, but several billion dollars went missing just in Iraq. Whole pallets of cash vanished. The Federal Reserve’s largest-ever U.S.-dollar payout in cash went to Iraq on a plane in 2007. Then it just disappeared. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen in criminal cases involving U.S. military personnel. And that’s just cases where prosecutors brought charges, which is going to be a small minority of cases overall.”
• “Illegal drug use is … pervasive, especially at the more elite echelons of the Special Forces, more especially in the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC. I’m not talking about casually smoking some marijuana, either, but seriously using the hard stuff—cocaine, heroin. We can’t know for sure, but some of my sources have called it a 50-50 split between those who are clean and those who aren’t. I think that’s a plausible estimate. At any rate, a significant ratio of soldiers in elite units drinks heavily, takes drugs and steroids, and then goes back to work the next day. That’s become extensively normalized. As more than one of my sources has put it, for those who do this, it’s a kind of rock-star lifestyle.”
• “I don’t know exactly how many people they killed, because they didn’t count, but when you look at the number who died in Iraq during these years, it’s chilling. At the peak of it, Special Forces were running 10 raids a night, sometimes killing 10 or 15 people at a time. If you’ve been through that in Iraq, when you get home to Fayetteville, North Carolina, you might find yourself cleaning out the bar with your friends. You might find yourself popping some pills. You might find yourself taking harder drugs, too. Somehow, you have to deal with what you’ve seen and been through.”

make a difference—in style.

Three days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that NATO’s European members would buy huge stocks of critical—and expensive—weaponry like missile-defense systems, along with ammunition, to send to Ukraine’s armed forces.

At the NATO summit in late June, member countries agreed to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, after decades of pressure from Washington for them to pay more of the costs of security on the Continent—and in the face of Russia’s increasing aggression across it. Germany even changed its Constitution so it could spend more on defense.

But this picture is more complicated. Spain, the sixth-largest country in NATO, got an exception to the budget increase. All member countries will have 10 years to meet the new target. And it’s not really 5 percent of GDP on defense—it’s 3.5 percent on defense and another 1.5 percent on security-related outlays, which they defined to include infrastructure like roads and bridges.

And their expenditures won’t be coordinated but broken up into 29 member-country budgets and militaries. They won’t pool resources for greater purchasing power, so some spending could—and almost certainly will—be redundant. European countries will probably continue to favor domestic arms producers, raising questions about the interoperability of the countries’ equipment.

What are Europeans actually getting for their new defense spending, then?

• Center-right and far-right parties had the biggest gains in Japan’s elections to its upper legislative chamber over the weekend, as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party won only 22 percent of the vote, its worst showing ever.
• Russian forces have launched another massive drone attack on Ukraine, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Moscow’s bombing of a Kyiv metro station an “assault on humanity.”
• Israel has begun an offensive on the town of Deir al-Baah in central Gaza, as foreign ministers from 25 countries condemned Israeli forces for shooting and killing hundreds of Palestinians seeking food in recent weeks.
• Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro—charged with attempting a coup to overturn his election loss in 2022—to wear an ankle monitor, stay mostly in his home, and stop communicating with foreign officials, as the Court accuses him of collaborating with the United States to pressure Brazil to free him.
• China’s Premier Li Qiang has announced that Beijing had started building the world’s biggest hydropower dam in Tibet—with officials in Bangladesh and India saying they fear the potential environmental effects on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which flows downstream into their countries.

See you Thursday …

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