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Things to consider....
First, SF was probably at its height during Vietnam. 2 reasons.
One was President Kennedy's support. The other was the relative lack of other Special Operations assets, so SF did missions that today would be executed by other organizations.
Remember, at one time we had:
1st Gp
3d Gp
5th Gp (which was huge)
6th Gp
7th Gp
8th Gp
10th Gp
46th Co.
plus 11th Gp, 12th Gp, 19th Gp and 20th Gp.
I am not suggesting these organizations were ever close to full-strength. Although I would be curious to see what the MTOE strength totals would be for those and what the actual totals were given that 5th Gp was far larger than a Group usually is.
In the early 70s, a huge amount of that simply went away. SF NCOs were assigned to ROTC assignments.
We had:
5th Gp
7th Gp
10th Gp
Det K.
and the 4 NG/RC Groups.
SF came very close to ceasing to exist then. Very close.
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