“Protection and preservation of SOF is of utmost importance. Our people are the foundation of special operations and we strive to ensure our force and their families have a support system necessary to ensure their long-term prosperity and health. We seek to ensure the physical and mental resilience of the individuals who make up our force. Continual combat deployments, combined with the demanding training regimen needed to keep the force sharp, have caused stress on the force and with their families.”

Votel echoed Lumpkin’s concerns.

“Alongside our conventional force partners, the 69,000 quiet professionals of SOCOM are committed to values-based excellence and service to our nation. They relentlessly pursue mission success and, today, roughly 7,500 of them are deployed to more than 80 countries worldwide supporting geographic combatant commander requirements and named operations,” he testified. “These requirements span the range of our core activities.

“From working with indigenous forces and local governments to improve local security to high-risk counterterrorism operations, SOF are in vital roles performing essential tasks. They provide critical linkages to our security partners and must be prepared to handle a wide range of contingencies, despite a small footprint in their areas of responsibility. These missions are often complicated, demanding and high risk. Because of the unique skill set SOF possess, we are seeing increasing demand for these units across the [COCOMs].

And while the most advanced – and portable – weapons, communications, and personal armor available are important, the key to MARSOC’s mission is the individual Raider and extensive training in language, culture, negotiation, and training host-nation forces as well as being able to bring precision lethality to bear when and where needed with little advance notice or preparation.

“Non-state actors like al Qaeda and ISIL and other violent extremist organizations, menacing state actors like North Korea, and growingly coercive actors like Russia are just a few examples of the entities affecting the strategic environment [in] which we operate. I remain profoundly concerned by the impact of another round of sequestration and how it not only impacts SOCOM but, more importantly, how it will affect the four services, upon whom we are absolutely dependent for mission support.”

MARSOC has no budget for research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) nor independent acquisition, relying on SOCOM, the big Corps, the Navy, and the Army for efforts such as replacing the heavy MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles designed to meet an urgent anti-IED requirement in Iraq and Afghanistan with lighter armored vehicles more easily deployed by ship and helicopter. And while the most advanced – and portable – weapons, communications, and personal armor available are important, the key to MARSOC’s mission is the individual Raider and extensive training in language, culture, negotiation, and training host-nation forces as well as being able to bring precision lethality to bear when and where needed with little advance notice or preparation.

A high point for MARSOC came in August 2014 with official authorization to use “Marine Raiders” to designate individual MARSOC special operators and below-headquarters commands. The name commemorates the four short-lived, but historically renowned, Marine Raider battalions and two Raider regiments formed to conduct amphibious raids and guerrilla operations behind enemy lines in the Pacific Theater between 1942 and 1944. Many military historians see the Raiders as America’s first special operations units.