20-Year Prospect

20-Year Prospect

Sometimes the President of the United States needs a blunt instrument, like a horde of B-52 bombers...and sometimes the Commander-in-Chief needs a scalpel. You are the President's scalpel, and the U.S. will wield you like the weapon you are until the budget cuts come for you. Don't worry, though: There's a lot of fluff in the budget—education, the EPA, healthcare for the poor and the elderly—that'll get killed before your career does.

Your job is virtually untouchable because our concept of war has changed dramatically. Massive armies and long slogs over miles and miles of territory are things of the past. Today, war is all about being small and maneuverable and efficient, like our enemies...and Delta Force is pretty much the definition of small and maneuverable and efficient.

You're also really, really dangerous. In Afghanistan in 2008, you and other units that make up Joint Special Operations Command hit 550 targets and killed about 1,000 people. Those numbers are awesome, and they'd be even awesomer if they didn't constitute a fiftypercent success rate...by which we mean, only fifty percent of the people you killed were supposed to get axed. Oops.

So, yeah, as long as freedom needs defending and bad guys need punishing, your job will be there. You might want to work on the whole accidentally-murdering-civilians thing, though. That just makes for bad PR.