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According to the Washington Post, since the September 11, 2001 attacks, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown ten-fold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA managed.
"We're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe, but can't be seen," a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.
The SEALs are just part of the US military's Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America's secret army.
When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, even existed.
This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released "Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State," by the Washington Post, chronicles JSOC's spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before.
Two presidents and three secretaries of defence routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.
The president has also given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list - and then to kill, rather than capture, them.
Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by US law.
The JSOC list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar, but shorter roster of names.
Created in 1980 but reinvented in recent years, JSOC has grown from 1,800 troops prior to 9/11 to as many as 25,000, a number that fluctuates according to its mission.
It has its own intelligence division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own dedicated satellites.
It also has its own cyber warriors, who, on Sept. 11, 2008, shut down every jihadist Web site they knew.
Obscurity has been one of the unit's hallmarks.
When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or US embassies abroad, which they do often, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their other military comrades.
In combat, they wear no name or rank identifiers. They have hidden behind various nicknames: the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force 11, Task Force 121. JSOC leaders almost never speak in public. They have no unclassified web site.
"We're the dark matter. We're the force that orders the universe, but can't be seen,"
Just another coxcomb dreaming of power in his small hell.