Spec Ops Magazine

German SEK, Spezialeinsatzkommando, units emerged in the 1970s as Germany developed specialized police teams for high-risk situations. The timing wasn't incidental, it was a direct response to catastrophe. The 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, where Palestinian militants seized Israeli athletes and a botched rescue attempt by ordinary police ended in disaster, exposed in the most public way imaginable that West German law enforcement had no real capability for this kind of scenario. The same tragedy that produced GSG 9 at the federal level also pushed individual German states to build their own dedicated tactical units.

Unlike GSG 9, which operates under the Bundespolizei as a single national force, SEK units are organized separately by each of Germany's 16 states, each with its own command structure, training standards, and operational history, giving the country a genuinely decentralized tactical response network rather than one centralized unit handling everything. That structure reflects Germany's broader federal system of policing, where individual states retain real authority over their own law enforcement rather than deferring entirely to Berlin.

Over the decades since, SEK units have built serious reputations handling hostage rescue, high-risk arrests, barricaded suspects, and counterterrorism operations at the state level, often working in close coordination with GSG 9 on the largest or most sensitive incidents. Born out of one of the darkest days in modern German history, these units represent the lasting institutional response to a failure nobody wanted to repeat.

Lance Corporal George Hooley, 28, of the Parachute Regiment, died in Ukraine on December 9, 2025, becoming the first confirmed British service member killed on the ground there since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. A coroner's inquest, held largely in private at his family's request, concluded this week that he died from multiple injuries sustained in an explosion while observing Ukrainian forces testing a new defensive capability away from the front line.

Hooley, from Wallingford, Oxfordshire, enlisted in June 2016 after training at the Infantry Training Centre Catterick. He was injured on December 6 and received prompt emergency treatment at the scene, underwent surgery, and was moved through at least one hospital before dying three days later in Kyiv. The coroner said he'd been given only limited evidence about the exact circumstances and ruled the death not suspicious, though the precise cause of the explosion remains undisclosed.

His presence in Ukraine wasn't publicly known until his death. His company commander called him a model of professionalism who didn't just do his job, he excelled at it, remembered for a deep kindness and genuine time for everyone. He was due to be promoted to Corporal that January and had already taken on the role's responsibilities during his deployment. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he served his country with honour and distinction, including as part of the small number of British personnel in Ukraine.

Russia's Foreign Ministry used his death to press Britain publicly over the scope of its presence in the country, a reminder of how politically fraught even a training accident becomes in a war this closely watched. Never forgotten.

Chinese special operations forces have recreated Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound as a full-scale training facility. Satellite imagery analyzed by Newsweek shows construction began between mid-October and early November 2014, with the main building fully complete by October 2015, sitting in Yulin county near Korla, in the deserts of China's far-western Xinjiang region, roughly 860 miles northeast of the original site in Pakistan.

The replica is visible on every major commercial map service, Google, Apple, Bing, and even China's own Baidu, and open-source analysts believe it's used to train Chinese special operators specifically in American tier one tactics, helicopter insertion and close-quarters battle against the exact kind of multi-story, urban compound layout the U.S. assaulted in 2011. A senior Pentagon official told Defense Department News in 2023 that China has leaned heavily on making its training more realistic precisely because the PLA hasn't fought a real war since 1979, and a proven American template is an obvious one to study.

There's a real irony in the whole thing. Before Operation Neptune Spear ever happened, American forces built their own life-size replica of the same compound, at Harvey Point in North Carolina, to rehearse the raid that killed bin Laden. More than a decade later, China built the same structure for the opposite reason, not to practice taking it down, but to practice doing what DEVGRU did that night. A strange, very public monument to one of the most consequential nights in modern special operations history, replicated now by the country most often cited as America's next peer competitor.

Major Jessica Yahn, U.S. Special Operations veteran, who deployed to Afghanistan on 40 combat missions as a Cultural Support Team member attached to our Army SMU and the 75th Ranger Regiment, a role we've featured on this page before. She later assessed for SOF herself.

Yahn grew up in a military family, her father a U-2 pilot, and she joined the Army Signal Corps rather than following him into the Air Force, working communications at a base in Iraq before deciding to chase something more dangerous. She trained for the grueling rucks and weapons handling the role demanded, and found herself on some of the war's most sensitive missions, the CST program built specifically to reach Afghan women and children in a culture where male operators simply couldn't.

On one of her earliest missions, she stepped off a helicopter into a dark field near the objective her team was about to assault that night and fell on the uneven ground, heart pounding, only her second mission with a team she'd barely begun to earn her place on. Forty missions followed. She was promoted, continued her career, and has since left active duty, settling in Tampa, where she now serves as executive producer of a documentary series on women who served in combat alongside the men they fought beside.

Her response to renewed political debate over women in combat roles has been steady rather than defensive, arguing that as long as a standard exists and is agreed upon by the institution, anyone who meets it, man or woman, has earned their place without question. A woman who went into some of the most dangerous corners of the Afghan war forty separate times, and who still answers the hardest questions about it the same way she answered the mission itself. Respect.

A Navy SMU operator's weapons during the GWOT, custom painted in AOR1 desert camouflage.

Top: HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon
Middle: M79 40mm gr***de launcher, famously known in the community as the "Pirate Gun"
Bottom: HK416

The M79 dates back to Vietnam, where troops nicknamed it the "Thumper" and "Blooper" for its distinctive report, and it was largely phased out of general service by the underbarrel M203. But the Command kept a sawn-off, pistol-length variant alive, stock and barrel cut down, fitted with a reflex sight, giving it a silhouette close enough to an old flintjock pistol that operators started calling it the Pirate Gun. Despite the age of the platform, it's stuck around for a real reason, superior range and accuracy compared to the M203, reaching out to roughly 350 meters versus the M203's 150.

The weapon became public knowledge largely through Matt Bissonnette's No Easy Day, the same insider account we've featured on this page before, which first brought widespread attention to this particular piece of kit. Paired with an MP7 for close-quarters work and an HK416 as the primary carbine, all finished in matching AOR1, this trio captures something distinctly GWOT-era about Naval Special Warfare's small arms philosophy, a Vietnam-era launcher modernized and kept in rotation specifically because nothing newer did the job quite as well.

Monica Grenfell, a former civil servant who spent three years at the SAS headquarters in Credenhill between 2015 and 2018, has gone public with evidence given to the independent Afghanistan Inquiry, which is examining allegations of unlawful killings by UK special forces during night raids between 2010 and 2013.

Grenfell, now 75 and a former journalist, worked at the base in kitchen and storekeeping roles. In testimony and a subsequent Times interview, she described some members of the regiment as "feral," said there was a sense that "no one could touch them," and that it felt like "there are no rules here." She told the inquiry she was informed casually by a relatively new soldier that her former boss had been accused of war crimes, and separately alleged soldiers had described dropping detainees in Afghanistan from forklift trucks "for fun." She also recounted an officer joking about the deaths of three SAS reservists during a Brecon Beacons selection march, drawing laughter from others in the room.

The inquiry itself, chaired by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave and running at a reported cost of £58 million, stems from a 2022 BBC Panorama investigation and has already heard evidence from senior military personnel who say they believed extrajudicial killings took place.

The reaction has split sharply. Critics have questioned what relevance a storekeeper's observations of barracks behavior actually have to allegations of battlefield conduct, pointing out the SAS operates under a different standard of secrecy and danger than any ordinary workplace. Supporters of the inquiry argue Britain has every right, and obligation, to investigate credible allegations of unlawful killing wherever the evidence leads, regardless of who raises it. The Ministry of Defence has previously stated the Royal Military Police found no evidence of criminal behavior, while at least one unnamed SAS soldier has separately told press that illegal killings did occur under specific intelligence conditions.

This remains a live, contested matter before an active inquiry, not a settled one. We'll continue to follow it as it develops.

Master Sergeant Ivica Jerak, born in Debeljak, Croatia, known to his American brothers as "Pizza" and the "Croatian Sensation." A seven-year-old shooting hoops on a bare-bones basketball court in a small Croatian village grew up to become a 17-year veteran of U.S. Army Special Operations, earning 47 decorations and honors, including the Bronze Star for valor, two more Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, and the Joint Service Commendation Medal for valor.

He enlisted in January 1988 as a Combat Medic, completed the Special Forces Qualification Course, and served with 10th Special Forces Group, picking up the Ranger Course, Pathfinder Course, Military Freefall, and Special Forces Assessment and Selection along the way, the full résumé of a soldier who kept pushing himself toward the hardest standard available. He was serving as an Assistant Special Operations Team Sergeant with U.S. Army Special Operations Command, reportedly with our Army SMU, when he was killed on August 25, 2005, near Husaybah, Iraq, when an anti-tank mine struck his Pandur vehicle. Two fellow operators, Trevor Diesing and Obediah Kolath, who succumbed to his wounds two days later, and Ranger Corporal Timothy Shea died alongside him.

He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, survived by his wife Hye and his mother Milka. Back in Debeljak, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers later renovated the same elementary school he'd attended as a boy, rebuilding the basketball court where it all started, a lasting tribute from the country he adopted to the village that first shaped him. His friend and fellow Master Sergeant Charles Sekelsky said it plainly at a memorial service years later, that he was an honorable soldier who sacrificed his life for freedom. A Croatian kid who became an American hero. Never forgotten.

U.S. Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, better known as the "Marlboro Marine." On November 9, 2004, during the Second Battle of Fallujah, Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco caught 20-year-old Miller leaning against a wall during a lull in the fighting, a cigarette dangling from his lips, face streaked with grime and blood. The photo ran on the front pages of more than 150 newspapers, Dan Rather singled it out on CBS Evening News, and almost overnight the previously unidentified Marine became a symbol of the entire war.

Miller stayed in the fight rather than go home early once the fame hit, finishing his deployment in one of the bloodiest battles of the entire conflict, nearly 100 Americans killed and 450 wounded in the effort to clear Fallujah. He's spoken since about what was actually running through his mind in that photo, the seven months of combat behind him, including the first enemy fighter he killed, whose body lay rotting in the street for days afterward. Details most people who shared the image never knew.

He came home and was medically discharged in 2005 after being diagnosed with PTSD, struggling for years with nightmares, insomnia, self-isolation, and suicidal thoughts, the quiet second war so many of the men on this page have fought after the first one ended. Sinco, the photographer who made him famous, became something closer to a lifeline than a journalist, driving him to treatment, flying to Kentucky when he went missing, staying on the phone for hours at a time. A single photograph turned a 20-year-old Marine into the face of a war, and the years since have shown exactly what that war actually cost him once the camera moved on.

Two Army Rangers in Mogadishu, 1993. Part of Task Force Ranger, the joint force sent that summer to capture lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, alongside Delta operators and the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR. Rangers made up the outer security and blocking positions on nearly every raid that summer, the muscle holding the perimeter while Delta went in for the target, a role that looked unglamorous right up until October 3rd, when it became the deadliest fight American forces had seen since Vietnam.

Commander Seth "Stoner" Stone, Navy SEAL, one of the most highly decorated operators to come out of the Iraq War. A 1999 Naval Academy graduate, Stone deployed to Iraq three times and earned two Silver Stars across those tours.

In 2006, he served as a platoon commander in Ramadi as part of Task Unit Bruiser under Jocko Willink, alongside Chris Kyle, Marc Lee, Michael Monsoor, Jonny Kim, Kevin Lacz, and Ryan Job, all names we've featured on this page before. His platoon played a key role in one of the toughest sustained urban combat operations in SEAL history, helping turn Ramadi from the most violent city in Iraq into a stabilized one after more than six months of brutal fighting. He returned two years later to lead a SEAL task unit through a major battle in Baghdad's Sadr City.

Stone went on to earn a master's degree in public policy from Princeton in 2010, deployed again to Afghanistan, then spent time at the Naval Special Warfare Center helping train the next generation of SEALs before his final posting with Special Operations Command Pacific.

He died on September 30, 2017, in a skydiving accident at 41, when his parachute failed to deploy. His Task Unit Bruiser commander, Jocko Willink's co-author Leif Babin, still marks the date publicly every year, writing simply that they miss him, but know they'll see him again one day. Never forgotten.