But failure can be a powerful teacher. Eagle Claw was. What emerged within a few years was a well-trained, disciplined force of special operators groomed for counterterrorism, hostage rescue and other demanding missions. The force today is perhaps 10 times as big as it was in 1980, when its numbers, Mr. Ishimoto said, were between 6,000 and 8,000. As for successes, one need look no further than the 2011 SEALs raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was found and killed.

With Americans weary of war without end since Sept. 11, 2001, President Obama withdrew most conventional soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, he turned the Joint Special Operations Command into a dray horse. Its members are just about everywhere: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, you name it. Their impact can be deadly. But their footprint is lighter, and less costly, than that of a fully decked-out Army operation.

This commando force plainly appeals to Mr. Trump, who has shown scant faith in “soft power,” the use of diplomacy and humanitarian example to win friends and influence nations. His budget proposals have included many billions more for the Defense Department and billions less for the State Department and the Agency for International Development. In his first half-year in office, military special operators were sent on about five times as many lethal missions in what for the United States are non-battlefield countries — Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia — as there had been during Mr. Obama’s final six months.

Relying on them so heavily has a price. Though they make up roughly 5 percent of the total armed forces, they have accounted for at least half of the nation’s combat deaths since 2015. The risks were evident mere days into the Trump presidency when a member of the SEALs was killed on a flawed night mission in Yemen that also left more than a dozen civilians dead.

It’s easy to romanticize commandos. Just ask any Hollywood director. But they are not supermen. Even Israeli forces have lost their post-Entebbe glow, with blemished missions in Lebanon and Gaza that led to their own men and innocent civilians being killed.

Some military experts worry that even though the American teams also have chutzpah and are damn good, they are being asked to do too much too often. “These guys truly are amazing warriors,” Russell D. Howard, a retired brigadier general who was a special forces commander, told The Cipher Brief, a website focused on security issues. “But they’re more than that. They’re smart, flexible, adaptable and unafraid.” The problem, General Howard said, is that “the guys are still deployed all the time.”

“These guys are a national treasure,” he said. “In my day, it cost an average of $1 million to train a special forces soldier. Now it probably costs closer to $1.5 million, and you don’t waste that asset. You use them judiciously when you really need them.”