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I was in 7th Group for 9 years in the 1980s to early 90s. Our stock in trade was FID. AAMOF, no one did it better than we did.
Don't think of it as a mission, but as a manifestation of UW along the continuum of warfare (difficult to illustrate here):
On the low end of the continuum, you have peacetime competition. We send ODAs to foreign countries to show the flag, make nation-to-nation contact, improve their training, and to build relationships of trust. This is FID and it continues through the continuum through low intensity all the way through mid-intensity conflict.
At the other end is high intensity conflict. For SF, this gets into guerrilla warfare. What's the difference between FID and GW? Usually, in FID we are invited in by the host government, in GW we go in and subvert the government.
This is a huge over-simplification but it makes the point. The skills for FID carry over for GW - the difference is you're univited. I enjoyed the challenge of the mission. It was never "safe" and there were always bad-guys. We operated in Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, El Salavdor, and others. We lost guys and had WIAs in these low intensity conflict missions as well and the mid-intensity. We never thought that we were wasting our time. We captured drug kingpins and interdicted weapons. We trained up the Honduran army while the Nicaraguans were massing on the border just kilometers away. We ran into "G's" and kept El Sal Nicaragua from spilling into other Central American countries.
I think we did pretty well. We took what the previous SF generations gave us, learned hard-won lessons and passed them onto the next generation. These were used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those guys there will learn more and pass them on to the next.
BS mission? Nah.
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