The UK has been the USA’s active partner in this campaign: since 2015 up to fourteen Royal Air Force (RAF) fast jets and six Reaper Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) have been striking at Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria and an admitted 86 British Army personnel have trained anti-Daesh forces in Syria. Under Obama, US strategy in the global war on terror shifted conspicuously away from the hallmark of the George W Bush administration, ‘regime change’ in terrorist-friendly countries, to a global counter-terrorist campaign utilising JSOC assets combined with drones, manned aircraft and local proxies to hit jihadi networks in Yemen, Syria, parts of Africa and, of course, Pakistan, the most famous strike being the killing of Osama bin Laden himself in April 2011. This originated with US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld’s Al Qaeda Network Execute Order of 2004, which authorised JSOC strikes against high value targets (HVTs) in twenty named countries, and escalated following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The past two decades have seen UKSF cooperate with US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in building what one UKSF officer of the author’s acquaintance has called ‘the greatest counterterrorist organisation in history’, executing a global campaign of capture or kill strikes against al Qaeda and Daesh. United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF) is a tri-service command in the British armed forces which right now appears on the point of a major shift in direction.
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