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From the Military Times 9/2021: The future of special operations may look a lot different than the GWOT aesthetic we’ve come to know
The article is old at this point, but I've seen recent discussion about it in various Twitter/YouTube areas and while that discussion was definitely one-sided, it was very much culture war.
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This following section got attention interpreted as saying that SOCOM was going to prioritize diversity hiring over meritocratic hiring
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Emphasis added below, has been interpreted in the context of SOCOM as meaning people dying.
The article does a bad job of contextualizing it, but SOCOM historically was not just direct-action combatants. US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) got their start as the eponymous "military advisors" working with and training various US friendly guerilla groups or US friendly governments dealing with US unfriendly guerillas/rebellions across Asia and South America. During GWOT (global war on terror), something like extracting/apprehending intelligence targets became much more common1 and the need for highly trained door kickers to do that work grew. In a post-GWOT environment, there could be an argument for going back to roots, deemphasizing combat experience and emphasizing ability to integrate with local forces but this is not that.
It's notable that the main thrust of the article is that what has been considered one of the more meritocratic parts of the military will need to go the DEI route and seems to try to caveat that any potential reductions in effectiveness are acceptable costs. This in the background of a looming recruitment crisis.
1: linking only as a point of reference on operational tempo, rest of that story is a whole different iceberg. The related increase in operational tempo at the bottom of the pyramid and pulling in other MOSs to meet demands is where the "basically infantry" meme comes from.
Maybe this is good (actually, hear me out).
There is definitely a place for the 6'5", 300lb psychopath with a 140IQ who can skydive into a warzone, storm a compound, and save the proverbial princess/kill Osama Bin Laden.
That is some version of "most scariest war fighter imaginable".
But there might be another version of "scariest warfighter imaginable" that looks more like a stinky overweight hacker who can build anything out of scraps and could take the bus into conflict zone and demo a bridge using materials he can find at the grocery store. Or who can build improvised drones out of things at the toystore.
I think there is a place for elite hackers in the military, too. Having known what some of the military's hackers look like, they aren't anywhere close right now. It seems like Tier1 guys get a lot of leeway in the way they want to work, so long as they provide the results that are asked of them.
I think the CIA is sortof kindof trying to fill this role right now, but unfortunately the problem is that the stinky annoying autistic genius hackers I'm talking about would never, ever, ever pass the interview.
None of this should come at the expense of the 6'5" pipe hitters. We should have both.
Most of the actual competent techies aren't stinky, aren't overweight (that's a low class thing) and had you paid attention in chemistry you'd know you can't blow up a bridge without explosives that aren't sold in a grocery store. At least not in this century, before 1950 you could probably buy dynamite in rural stores all over the US.
Also, why are you talking about hackers in context of army special forces ? Hackers belong to NSA, CIA and maybe some airforce intel and EW units, not 'special forces' which typically means doorkickers (i.e. assault troops), enemy territory recon forces and such.
You actually could but it would be very difficult/dangerous (you would need several grocery stores worth of acetone and peroxide)
TATP is not going to be practical for taking down a bridge. Skip that and just make nitroglycerin, you'll only probably kill yourself doing it.
IIRC it's nontrivial to buy large amounts of nitrate these days without a documented need, precisely because nitric acid's required to make nearly all the good explosives (not just nitroglycerin; nitric acid + easily-available stuff would also suffice for RDX and TNT). That's part of why crazy shit like TATP gets used; the terrorists know it's ludicrously unsafe, they just can't get dynamite (the other part is that counter-terrorists have scanners for nitrogen - I think it's either NMR or X-ray - and again TATP's one of few options that won't show up).
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Most peroxide in stores is hopelessly dilute. Plus, even if you got the good stuff we used in lab in university you'd kill yourself before accomplishing anything.
A home freezer suffices for getting arbitrarily-dilute peroxide to 20% or so (the first eutectic's at around 45%, but I don't think most home freezers get cold enough).
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