Air Force Special Operations Command comprises some of the most stressed career fields in the entire Air Force. Some air commandos have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan as many as 20 times, said AFSOC Commander Lt. Gen. Eric Fiel, Wednesday at AFA’s Air & Space Conference. “We know we are going to be [in Afghanistan] a long time. We have some pretty courageous folks and they all want to keep going back, but each time they come back you see just a little piece of them still left over there,” said Fiel. “There is a lot of pressure on them and an enormous amount of pressure on their families as they continue doing this, but they are great Americans.”
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…