Chinese state media has mounted a sustained critique of Washington’s growing reliance on special operations forces, arguing that an obsession with targeted raids and covert actions is producing strategic blowback. The commentary frames special operations as a political shortcut — a “magic bullet” for presidents who prefer spectacle and deniability to long, costly campaigns — and warns that this habit now risks turning the instrument against its user.
The piece traces the phenomenon as a matter of institutional path‑dependency that stretches back to the Cold War. Presidents from Kennedy onward institutionalized elite units as tools of foreign influence; painful operational failures and symbolic successes alike — from the Iran hostage rescue attempt and the Black Hawk Down fiasco to the bin Laden raid — reinforced a preference for small, high‑profile missions over broader, politically messy engagement.
That institutional momentum has been turbocharged by two decades of counter‑terrorism operations that have honed “find, fix, finish” capabilities. The result is a force that is faster, stealthier and more capable than it was in 2001, and a political class that treats special operations as a low‑visible‑cost instrument of policy. The Chinese commentary argues this dynamic encourages ever more aggressive and unilateral action because leaders can reap publicity and domestic political credit without the overt burdens of large‑scale military deployments.
The commentary singles out recent episodes to illustrate its point, claiming an intensification of U.S. special operations at sea and an escalatory turn in Latin America. It frames allegations of interdictions off Venezuela and a January 2026 operation that purportedly detained President Nicolás Maduro as symptomatic of a broader trend: the repackaging of force as “cross‑border law enforcement” and the stretching of legal rationales to justify extraterritorial actions. The piece portrays these moves as emblematic of a White House willing to subordinate international law and diplomatic costs to immediate strategic or commercial gains.
Beyond reputational damage, the commentary warns of concrete strategic risks. Routine recourse to unilateral raids can erode the normative architecture that constrains interstate behavior, inflame local populations, complicate alliances and spur reciprocal tactics by rivals. The argument is that the very advantages special operations offer — speed, deniability, and tactical precision — mask longer‑term consequences: coordination problems, intelligence failures, and the political liabilities that follow unintended outcomes.
The political incentives driving the trend are also central to the critique. Special operations produce media‑friendly narratives of success and avoid the visible costs of mass mobilization, making them attractive to leaders running on “no‑end‑wars” platforms. Chinese commentary highlights how hawkish voices inside administrations celebrate special forces as a way to project power without provoking the domestic backlash that conventional deployments invite.
If the critique is correct, the strategic lesson is not that special operations should disappear, but that they cannot substitute for sustained diplomacy, regional engagement and multilateral burden‑sharing. Overuse of a tool designed for discrete objectives risks degrading the political and legal cushions that allow it to be effective. The piece concludes with a warning: misuse of elite forces can cut the wielder, producing tactical victories that undermine strategic interests and global stability.