or the United States military, the end of an era is now stamped into history as the full withdrawal from Afghanistan has concluded. While the collective defense, intelligence, policy, and civilian communities emerge from the conclusion of the United States longest war, a haunting tally paints a stark picture—$978 billion between 2001 and 2020 (according to a Brown University study), more than 2,300 U.S. deaths and over 20,000 injuries due to combat in the graveyard of empires.
In the terminal years of the conflict, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) became the near sole participants engaged in offensive operations against declared hostile forces, and as such, took on the preponderance of casualties. According to a USSOCOM press release in April, following President Biden’s assertion of the total withdrawal, there have been 349 casualties and another 1,991 combat-related injuries from the U.S. Special Operations contingent, who have been engaged in the conflict from its earliest moments with many SOF units sustaining a non-stop presence since the onset. Casualties are always a necessary component of war, but the bitter lesson after 20 years is that blood and money must be spent in arenas of equitable strategic value in today’s national security paradigm. Under the broader war on terror banner, the forever war in Afghanistan has certainly taken its pound of flesh and lost strategic value long before this final gateway.
Those financial and casualty tallies are the surface level costs of the war. But another metric serves as an equally sobering price tag, one that is far more difficult to quantify but directly impacts the SOF enterprise. The culture and home lives special operators have paid an incredibly high price during the global war on terror. These specially selected and well-trained soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are hand-picked to carry a burden not fully understood by those who have not experienced categorically similar demands. As such, the natural inference is that these heightened warriors are made of insoluble grit, impervious to the trappings of the human experience.
This final installment—the fifth from the series—expounds on the role of the SOF enterprise in the modern power competition paradigm. Yet, this installment is not crafted with a narrative arch on strategy, a suggestive arraignment of warfighting capabilities against adversaries, or an attempt at quantifying emerging domains. Rather it addresses how the forever wars of recent decades have contributed to an erosion of culture in the SOF domain, the impact which increasing demands had on the enterprise, and a way ahead from the policy perspective.
>> Read Part One, Two, Three, and Four from this series.
An Era of Scope Creep
The appeal of special operations/low-intensity conflict (SO/LIC) in the war on terror was its specialization in those delicate and volatile operational circumstances—small footprint, hyper-efficient, and uniquely suited to politically sensitive environments in a way that the broader conventional forces are not (and frankly, are not intended to be). When enemy combatants rapidly mastered assimilation into civilian architecture, the ability to conduct precision engagements became the modus operandi for an increasingly sensitive warfighting environment. With the rise of the Islamic State and its cancerous spread across the Middle East, SOF was once again called upon to lead the fight and stem the growth of this global threat. These are but two unclassified examples of how the role and utilization of special operators grew exponentially in recent decades.
Because of the inherently volunteer nature of the enterprise, as demand grew, so too did the collective rate of special operations teams’ rotational deployments to cover new locales to address the threat of violent extremism. To accommodate the growing knee-jerk demand for low-intensity expertise, SOCOM grew by 75% from 2001 to 2017, and has continued to swell in recent years as the Afghanistan and counter-Islamic State conflicts became entirely SO/LIC-driven. During a testimony to the congressional armed services committees, former SOCOM chief General Raymond Thomas told lawmakers that U.S. SOF forces were present in around 150 countries, which is more than 70% of the earth’s sovereignties. In recent years, most SOF units were deployed to their sustainable limit, while others beneath that readiness benchmark were still heavily engaged in the fight to counter violent extremism abroad.
When every problem started to look like a nail, SOCOM became an all-too-convenient hammer.
The concept of dwell time is a significant talking point in the discussion on the preservation of the force, yet the public pronouncement and the realities at the line-units are often two-different things. From my own experience, during the bulk of my career, I spent an average of 270 days per year away from home, with roughly 110 of those days being the rotational annual deployments. The remainder of away days were spent on temporary duty assignments, training in critical skills related to the inevitable next rotation. This is but one example within an enterprise where the story of bandwidth overload exacerbates the scope creep of SOF employment.
The Price of Endless Demand
The assertion that mission creep and increasing demands on the force results in a culture deterioration is not simply quantified, but despite the complexity of factors, congress determined that a review was necessary in order to ascertain the conditions of the force after years of scandal. Such blemishes on the public face of the SOCOM community include:
- the murder of an Army Special Forces soldier by Navy and Marine SOF operators in Mali from 2017.
- The highly politicized acquittal of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher for his role in the death of an ISIS detainee.
- Army Special Forces Major Matthew Golsteyn and his role in the death of a Taliban-affiliated detainee.
- Rampant drug abuse and related criminal activity within circles of the SOF community.
- Equipment and training mishaps with U.S. Air Force Special Tactics operators during a training jump and mountaineering event which led to two deaths.
- Incidents of sexual assault and misconduct by a special operations team while deployed to Iraq (the broader issue of sexual assaults and mental health in the military notwithstanding).
None of these events, or a myriad of similar occurrences less well publicized, are outlined here with the intent to demonize the enterprise, or a callous summation of these tragic events for the sake of content. The conditions that led to each event are unique to each and complex in nature but speak to one recurring theme: unethical behavior has eroded professionalism, deteriorated credibility, and threatened the ironclad persona of the SOCOM enterprise writ large. Much like the issue of racism and police brutality in today’s social climate, most law enforcement personnel are good people with an incredibly difficult job, but those cases of misconduct are highly (and rightfully) publicized, which undermine the whole enterprise despite the incredible and selfless services of the ones trying to do right.
This issue is not unique to the U.S. special operations enterprise. Allied partners are undergoing similar investigative processes to uncover some harrowing instances of culture deterioration. In Britain, a three-and-a-half year long probe into a reported massacre of Afghans was upended by the suspicious loss of incriminating surveillance footage; the Special Air Service (SAS) unit reportedly responsible for the event was identified by Royal Military Police as a “rogue unit”. Meanwhile, the British Army’s distinguished Black Watch unit faced its own investigations for unethical conduct in Iraq, including torture and sexual abuse. In Australia, the future will be a difficult one, where members of the SAS and Commando Regiments self-reported units committing war crimes, resulting in the damning Brereton report, which outlines “shocking and disturbing” conduct by Australia’s military elite in Afghanistan.
The findings of SOCOM’s culture review summarized the following: “the Review Team did not assess that USSOCOM has a systemic ethics problem. The Review Team did assess that in some instances, USSOCOM’s culture focus on SOF employment and mission accomplishment is to the detriment of leadership, discipline, and accountability”. Correlation does not equal causation, but consider that earlier this year, the Ronald Reagan Institute’s latest National Defense Survey found a sharp decline in American’s faith in the military as an institution—a 14 point drop over the past three years (the survey was originally intended for release in 2020 but was delayed due to COVID).
The Wars Abroad at the Frontlines of Home
There is no empirical method for quantifying the effects of the forever wars on the home front. But the difficulty of so much time and distance imposed on operators and their families is clearly a facet that bears consideration.
After speaking with current members of the community and their families on the condition of anonymity, the issue of scope creep resides not at the tactical level, where operators and their families are perpetually driven towards adaptation in the face of mounting difficulties. Rather, the home front perception is that the operators are used as convenient tools intended to achieve vague policy outcomes with little or no viable worth. The “[spouses] are risking their lives for the simple motivation of making sure teammates make it home, and not to liberate the oppressed or prevent another 9/11”. When those casualties mount up year after year, that inevitably erodes the insoluble armor of the superhuman identity.
Regular separation from loved ones, an interminable war with no end state, and the loss of friends and teammates on a recurring basis, are ingredients for a recipe that is demonstrably perhaps too much even for our very best to endure year in and year out. Again, this is no critique of the members of the special operations tribes, but rather a harsh evaluation of the policies applied by leaders whose hawkish stubbornness has threatened the culture of the military’s sharpest tool.
Because the Afghanistan theater now fades into the rearview, the enterprise faces the challenge of maintaining an invigorated ethos against a roster of adversaries who are patient and cautious against stimulating in open conflict with the West. The likelihood of U.S. special operations components engaging in direct confrontation with Russian Spetznaz, China’s PLA Special Mission Units, or a similar near-peer element is low at best. The inherent nature of American departure from counterterrorism to strategic competition means that the recruiting draw of terrorist hunting and Hollywood aggrandization of American SOF missions portends another source of friction and risk for the home front. Those constant rotational deployments became the norm, and families adjusted to endure. Now, the lack of constant demand and the persistent crucible in the Graveyard of Empires means that the enterprise must be ready for the long wait, which hearkens back to the culture of the late 20th century. Training, training, and more training, waiting for the red line to ring and crisis response becoming the modus operandi.
A Way Ahead for SOCOM
Over the course of the war on terror, the recruiting draw for the broader military candidate pool and a generation of young Americans motivated by September 11th was simple: getting to do the high-speed/low drag ‘cool guy’ missions, and a sense of achievement and belonging, from surviving the crucible of a selection program for any of the given tribes. On the condition of anonymity, a senior ranking member of a SOCOM unit told me that the issue of culture erosion is two-fold: “First, a failure to develop leaders-leadership, which is often misconstrued with battlefield prowess. Second, the conflation of ‘valor’ with character (prevalent across all of the SOF elements). This enabled the bad candidates to get in, and remain in, because the demands never waned, only grew.”
At tactical level SOF units, a diverse collection of combat decorations is certain to be found (deservedly so); but battlefield prowess does not always equate to character or leadership. Where this mindset most affected the enterprise is in the manifestation of those rotten apples borne of a lack of character. The selection processes found the fastest, strongest, most suitable volunteers capable of taking violence to the enemy in a swift and efficient manner, but the inability to develop fundamental leaders and the occasional failure identify unsuitable character failed the teams after years of cyclic application once those few bad apples made it into the barrel. Even with the preponderance of good candidates surviving the cut, those rotten apples were already established in the communities which could then corrupt the new blood.
Preventing another turn of these bad apples begins with the selection process. Physical acumen is important, but it is not the most important issue. In short, assess the person, not the time in which they complete the 40-mile ruck-march. In the coming years, the candidate pools will be comprised of a generation without a war, whereas the previous 20 years always had Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror as a reliable proving ground. In a near-future without such conflict, leadership and character will make the difference in whether or not SOCOM is prepared to face and adapt for changing threats to U.S. and allied security.
While my recent interviews with SOCOM personnel clearly indicate that the enterprise knows that it must address the character issue and vector itself accordingly under the banner of strategic competition (because SOF must address great and non-state powers alike), this must be a policy issue discussed and institutionalized from the top-down, not only the bottom-up. Until policymakers align the diplomatic and defense priorities to evolve with the challenge of tomorrow, this will be an uphill battle for SOCOM, who will go on fighting the good fight all the same.
Today, now that the Afghanistan chapter has ended, the SOF panoply must refocus on those greater threats to the world order. The soul of the United States’ Special Operations Forces is at best chipped from its excessive and relentless use, and at worst, manifesting signs of rust and decay when it may soon arrive at a pivotal injunction in the new era of liminal conflict and peer competition. If it is to remain the pinnacle of combat prominence and effectively present in the new paradigm of competition, it must take better care of its most important asset: its people.
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Corrosion of the Spear: When Culture and Mission Collide
Image via Pixabay.
September 16, 2021
In the final installment of a five-part series, Mike Rogers Center Senior Fellow Ethan Brown discusses how the forever wars of recent decades have eroded culture in the SOF domain, the impact which increasing demands had on the enterprise, and a way ahead from the policy perspective.
F
or the United States military, the end of an era is now stamped into history as the full withdrawal from Afghanistan has concluded. While the collective defense, intelligence, policy, and civilian communities emerge from the conclusion of the United States longest war, a haunting tally paints a stark picture—$978 billion between 2001 and 2020 (according to a Brown University study), more than 2,300 U.S. deaths and over 20,000 injuries due to combat in the graveyard of empires.
In the terminal years of the conflict, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) became the near sole participants engaged in offensive operations against declared hostile forces, and as such, took on the preponderance of casualties. According to a USSOCOM press release in April, following President Biden’s assertion of the total withdrawal, there have been 349 casualties and another 1,991 combat-related injuries from the U.S. Special Operations contingent, who have been engaged in the conflict from its earliest moments with many SOF units sustaining a non-stop presence since the onset. Casualties are always a necessary component of war, but the bitter lesson after 20 years is that blood and money must be spent in arenas of equitable strategic value in today’s national security paradigm. Under the broader war on terror banner, the forever war in Afghanistan has certainly taken its pound of flesh and lost strategic value long before this final gateway.
Those financial and casualty tallies are the surface level costs of the war. But another metric serves as an equally sobering price tag, one that is far more difficult to quantify but directly impacts the SOF enterprise. The culture and home lives special operators have paid an incredibly high price during the global war on terror. These specially selected and well-trained soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are hand-picked to carry a burden not fully understood by those who have not experienced categorically similar demands. As such, the natural inference is that these heightened warriors are made of insoluble grit, impervious to the trappings of the human experience.
This final installment—the fifth from the series—expounds on the role of the SOF enterprise in the modern power competition paradigm. Yet, this installment is not crafted with a narrative arch on strategy, a suggestive arraignment of warfighting capabilities against adversaries, or an attempt at quantifying emerging domains. Rather it addresses how the forever wars of recent decades have contributed to an erosion of culture in the SOF domain, the impact which increasing demands had on the enterprise, and a way ahead from the policy perspective.
>> Read Part One, Two, Three, and Four from this series.
An Era of Scope Creep
The appeal of special operations/low-intensity conflict (SO/LIC) in the war on terror was its specialization in those delicate and volatile operational circumstances—small footprint, hyper-efficient, and uniquely suited to politically sensitive environments in a way that the broader conventional forces are not (and frankly, are not intended to be). When enemy combatants rapidly mastered assimilation into civilian architecture, the ability to conduct precision engagements became the modus operandi for an increasingly sensitive warfighting environment. With the rise of the Islamic State and its cancerous spread across the Middle East, SOF was once again called upon to lead the fight and stem the growth of this global threat. These are but two unclassified examples of how the role and utilization of special operators grew exponentially in recent decades.
Because of the inherently volunteer nature of the enterprise, as demand grew, so too did the collective rate of special operations teams’ rotational deployments to cover new locales to address the threat of violent extremism. To accommodate the growing knee-jerk demand for low-intensity expertise, SOCOM grew by 75% from 2001 to 2017, and has continued to swell in recent years as the Afghanistan and counter-Islamic State conflicts became entirely SO/LIC-driven. During a testimony to the congressional armed services committees, former SOCOM chief General Raymond Thomas told lawmakers that U.S. SOF forces were present in around 150 countries, which is more than 70% of the earth’s sovereignties. In recent years, most SOF units were deployed to their sustainable limit, while others beneath that readiness benchmark were still heavily engaged in the fight to counter violent extremism abroad.
When every problem started to look like a nail, SOCOM became an all-too-convenient hammer.
The concept of dwell time is a significant talking point in the discussion on the preservation of the force, yet the public pronouncement and the realities at the line-units are often two-different things. From my own experience, during the bulk of my career, I spent an average of 270 days per year away from home, with roughly 110 of those days being the rotational annual deployments. The remainder of away days were spent on temporary duty assignments, training in critical skills related to the inevitable next rotation. This is but one example within an enterprise where the story of bandwidth overload exacerbates the scope creep of SOF employment.
The Price of Endless Demand
The assertion that mission creep and increasing demands on the force results in a culture deterioration is not simply quantified, but despite the complexity of factors, congress determined that a review was necessary in order to ascertain the conditions of the force after years of scandal. Such blemishes on the public face of the SOCOM community include:
- the murder of an Army Special Forces soldier by Navy and Marine SOF operators in Mali from 2017.
- The highly politicized acquittal of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher for his role in the death of an ISIS detainee.
- Army Special Forces Major Matthew Golsteyn and his role in the death of a Taliban-affiliated detainee.
- Rampant drug abuse and related criminal activity within circles of the SOF community.
- Equipment and training mishaps with U.S. Air Force Special Tactics operators during a training jump and mountaineering event which led to two deaths.
- Incidents of sexual assault and misconduct by a special operations team while deployed to Iraq (the broader issue of sexual assaults and mental health in the military notwithstanding).
None of these events, or a myriad of similar occurrences less well publicized, are outlined here with the intent to demonize the enterprise, or a callous summation of these tragic events for the sake of content. The conditions that led to each event are unique to each and complex in nature but speak to one recurring theme: unethical behavior has eroded professionalism, deteriorated credibility, and threatened the ironclad persona of the SOCOM enterprise writ large. Much like the issue of racism and police brutality in today’s social climate, most law enforcement personnel are good people with an incredibly difficult job, but those cases of misconduct are highly (and rightfully) publicized, which undermine the whole enterprise despite the incredible and selfless services of the ones trying to do right.
This issue is not unique to the U.S. special operations enterprise. Allied partners are undergoing similar investigative processes to uncover some harrowing instances of culture deterioration. In Britain, a three-and-a-half year long probe into a reported massacre of Afghans was upended by the suspicious loss of incriminating surveillance footage; the Special Air Service (SAS) unit reportedly responsible for the event was identified by Royal Military Police as a “rogue unit”. Meanwhile, the British Army’s distinguished Black Watch unit faced its own investigations for unethical conduct in Iraq, including torture and sexual abuse. In Australia, the future will be a difficult one, where members of the SAS and Commando Regiments self-reported units committing war crimes, resulting in the damning Brereton report, which outlines “shocking and disturbing” conduct by Australia’s military elite in Afghanistan.
The findings of SOCOM’s culture review summarized the following: “the Review Team did not assess that USSOCOM has a systemic ethics problem. The Review Team did assess that in some instances, USSOCOM’s culture focus on SOF employment and mission accomplishment is to the detriment of leadership, discipline, and accountability”. Correlation does not equal causation, but consider that earlier this year, the Ronald Reagan Institute’s latest National Defense Survey found a sharp decline in American’s faith in the military as an institution—a 14 point drop over the past three years (the survey was originally intended for release in 2020 but was delayed due to COVID).
The Wars Abroad at the Frontlines of Home
There is no empirical method for quantifying the effects of the forever wars on the home front. But the difficulty of so much time and distance imposed on operators and their families is clearly a facet that bears consideration.
After speaking with current members of the community and their families on the condition of anonymity, the issue of scope creep resides not at the tactical level, where operators and their families are perpetually driven towards adaptation in the face of mounting difficulties. Rather, the home front perception is that the operators are used as convenient tools intended to achieve vague policy outcomes with little or no viable worth. The “[spouses] are risking their lives for the simple motivation of making sure teammates make it home, and not to liberate the oppressed or prevent another 9/11”. When those casualties mount up year after year, that inevitably erodes the insoluble armor of the superhuman identity.
Regular separation from loved ones, an interminable war with no end state, and the loss of friends and teammates on a recurring basis, are ingredients for a recipe that is demonstrably perhaps too much even for our very best to endure year in and year out. Again, this is no critique of the members of the special operations tribes, but rather a harsh evaluation of the policies applied by leaders whose hawkish stubbornness has threatened the culture of the military’s sharpest tool.
Because the Afghanistan theater now fades into the rearview, the enterprise faces the challenge of maintaining an invigorated ethos against a roster of adversaries who are patient and cautious against stimulating in open conflict with the West. The likelihood of U.S. special operations components engaging in direct confrontation with Russian Spetznaz, China’s PLA Special Mission Units, or a similar near-peer element is low at best. The inherent nature of American departure from counterterrorism to strategic competition means that the recruiting draw of terrorist hunting and Hollywood aggrandization of American SOF missions portends another source of friction and risk for the home front. Those constant rotational deployments became the norm, and families adjusted to endure. Now, the lack of constant demand and the persistent crucible in the Graveyard of Empires means that the enterprise must be ready for the long wait, which hearkens back to the culture of the late 20th century. Training, training, and more training, waiting for the red line to ring and crisis response becoming the modus operandi.
A Way Ahead for SOCOM
Over the course of the war on terror, the recruiting draw for the broader military candidate pool and a generation of young Americans motivated by September 11th was simple: getting to do the high-speed/low drag ‘cool guy’ missions, and a sense of achievement and belonging, from surviving the crucible of a selection program for any of the given tribes. On the condition of anonymity, a senior ranking member of a SOCOM unit told me that the issue of culture erosion is two-fold: “First, a failure to develop leaders-leadership, which is often misconstrued with battlefield prowess. Second, the conflation of ‘valor’ with character (prevalent across all of the SOF elements). This enabled the bad candidates to get in, and remain in, because the demands never waned, only grew.”
At tactical level SOF units, a diverse collection of combat decorations is certain to be found (deservedly so); but battlefield prowess does not always equate to character or leadership. Where this mindset most affected the enterprise is in the manifestation of those rotten apples borne of a lack of character. The selection processes found the fastest, strongest, most suitable volunteers capable of taking violence to the enemy in a swift and efficient manner, but the inability to develop fundamental leaders and the occasional failure identify unsuitable character failed the teams after years of cyclic application once those few bad apples made it into the barrel. Even with the preponderance of good candidates surviving the cut, those rotten apples were already established in the communities which could then corrupt the new blood.
Preventing another turn of these bad apples begins with the selection process. Physical acumen is important, but it is not the most important issue. In short, assess the person, not the time in which they complete the 40-mile ruck-march. In the coming years, the candidate pools will be comprised of a generation without a war, whereas the previous 20 years always had Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on terror as a reliable proving ground. In a near-future without such conflict, leadership and character will make the difference in whether or not SOCOM is prepared to face and adapt for changing threats to U.S. and allied security.
While my recent interviews with SOCOM personnel clearly indicate that the enterprise knows that it must address the character issue and vector itself accordingly under the banner of strategic competition (because SOF must address great and non-state powers alike), this must be a policy issue discussed and institutionalized from the top-down, not only the bottom-up. Until policymakers align the diplomatic and defense priorities to evolve with the challenge of tomorrow, this will be an uphill battle for SOCOM, who will go on fighting the good fight all the same.
Today, now that the Afghanistan chapter has ended, the SOF panoply must refocus on those greater threats to the world order. The soul of the United States’ Special Operations Forces is at best chipped from its excessive and relentless use, and at worst, manifesting signs of rust and decay when it may soon arrive at a pivotal injunction in the new era of liminal conflict and peer competition. If it is to remain the pinnacle of combat prominence and effectively present in the new paradigm of competition, it must take better care of its most important asset: its people.
