what exactly makes special forces “special” compared to normal military?
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It depends. People who might be designated as “special operations forces” in the United States military might not meet the British definition of “special forces,” for example. The US Navy has its own weird definition of “special operations” which seems to include everyone whose job is to go for a swim. Divers and rescue swimmers, for example.
They have a much higher training budget. Any particularly high-speed guy in a conventional light infantry unit like the 82nd Airborne can meet the standards of a SOF unit that acts like conventional troops like the 75th Ranger Regiment. The difference is that they have the training budget to keep practicing special stuff and make sure that their skills stay sharp always. In a conventional unit, there will be times when you don’t have anything to do and they don’t always have the budget to practice all of the cool stuff. In these cases, Sergeant Major will find something for you to do, to keep your janitorial skills sharp.
There are also a few special missions that they are trained for that aren’t necessarily what the conventional troops do. With the Rangers, the big thing unique to themis airfield seizure. If you want to parachute a few hundred guys to take over an airfield and hold it until the Air Force can land more troops to take over, that’s the job of a Ranger battalion, not a battalion from a conventional airborne unit. Their higher standards of training mean that they can also do basically everything that a conventional light infantry unit does, just doing it better (although they might not have as much practice at holding or defending positions because this is a waste of their abilities). Other special missions include reconnaissance (conventional reconnaissance typically doesn’t go farther than the range of friendly artillery), hunting specific people, unconventional warfare and foreign international defense (guerrilla warfare and training foreign troops to deal with guerrillas), and some other stuff. Most of these missions besides the ones that Rangers focus on are ones that are done with significantly smaller units. Even Rangers don’t deploy in the same numbers as conventional infantry despite having roughly the same structure. In a conventional unit, there are platoons of roughly 30 guys, four platoons to a company, and four companies of infantry (plus a company of support troops) to a battalion. Conventional units never deploy smaller than battalion size, but Ranger units often do. In the Green Berets, the basic unit (equivalent to a platoon in the organizational structure, but led by a captain who would be leading a company in the conventional force) is the A-Team (officially called an Operational Detachment Alpha) which consists of twelve guys: a captain, warrant officer (#2 guy), the team sergeant, intelligence sergeant, and two specialists each in communications, engineering, medical, and weapons. A few ODAs and an ODB (which acts as a headquarters to coordinate the ODAs) make up a company. Obviously while the individual guys might be more capable than a light infantry company, having a lot fewer guys makes it so they have stuff that they can’t do.
These special missions mean that they also get special equipment for those missions and the training to use them. The SEALs are famously all qualified as divers and specialize in stuff that involves water (a SEAL Team is a unit of 150-200 or so guys divided up into smaller units to do this stuff). While they’re all qualified to do standard military parachuting, some of them across the various SOF have special qualifications to do high-altitude parachuting. For a conventional unit, it would be pointless to train an entire battalion in high-altitude parachuting because inserting that many people takes away the surprise, and it would be too expensive to train a few hundred guys for something that they’d never do. However, you can find a lot of reasons to insert an ODA of 12 guys via HALO or HAHO parachuting.
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