I heard Larry Korb on a talk show last night re: Defense budget cuts.

Special Ops, at $11 billion, is a tiny fraction of DoD's overall $750B+ baseline budget.

Special ops was effective in early Afghanistan.

Special Ops was effective in addressing Bin Laden.

It did not take a land invasion force to do these things, nor nationbuilding, etc...

Dr. Korb is a very smart fellow.

In that vein, military historians may begin to re-evaluate the entirety of the GWOT and Libya through that lense.

What if we simply targeted, fixed and killed Saddam, Qhaddafi, etc..., and left the rest to internal resolutions.

If we didn't like what followed, do it again.

Isn't that the same "foreign policy" we used throughout most of the Cold War period in these less-than-first-world countries?

Isn't this a tremendous victory for "Small Wars?"

Between emerging revisionist analyses, coming back to spec ops and limited targeting/interventions, what does this say about a future force structure, strategies, tactics, staffing/budgeting?