As the U.S. military draws down from Afghanistan and prepares to aggressively scale back its dual war-sized footprint, its total force will be whittled down considerably. Despite this, the core capabilities and greatest strengths of the U.S.’s Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) military and intelligence components must be preserved. Top brass and executive leadership must ready troops, management, and the general public for the repositioning of these very special assets that were responsible for massive successes in the wars of the last decade. These resources played vital roles in those engagements and now face a transition back to more traditional non-combat activities. They must do so without risking the loss of hard-won operational and institutional knowledge.
Military engagements during President Obama’s second term are likely to have a markedly different character than his first term, though not necessarily any less turbulent. The reach of the U.S.’s air, naval, and ground forces is largely unrivalled, and the military’s intelligence and reconnaissance assets are supreme. Nonetheless, the proficiency of conventional U.S. ground forces to stabilize systems of governance, defeat insurgencies, fight unconventional ground wars, and safeguard security in complex environments is limited.
Traditional military troops are not best suited to the tasks of instilling democratic values in underdeveloped societies, facilitating close training of allied militaries, conducting persuasive psychological operations, or imposing order in societies fragmented by internal conflicts. These increasingly necessary skills are all the more reason why it is vital that robust efforts be made to preserve the special skills that Special Operations Forces (SOF) have specifically trained to operate with in these complex environments.
Understanding the Assets
The most specialized and oft-considered ‘elite’ elements of different service branches fall under the oversight of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a component command within SOCOM. SOCOM is a part of the Department of Defense that is charged with overseeing various Special Operations Commands. While each branch of the military has an independent Special Operations Command that is capable of running its own missions, it is SOCOM that takes over command when different branches collaborate, and JSOC that ensures seamless interoperability among its choice components.
JSOC’s components are widely considered to be the exemplars of the U.S.’s specialty military capability. SOF skill sets can be utilized throughout all stages of the operational continuum, ranging from peacetime through full-fledged war. These are entities with very specialized and dedicated skill sets that have been comprehensively trained to perform unconventional missions. These exceptional capabilities may include direct offensive action, counterinsurgency support through population engagement, sabotage and demolition, hostage rescue, surveillance in hostile environments, and foreign internal defense initiatives (or training friendly foreign forces), among other initiatives.
SOF’s most infamous combat utility is their surgical precision and ability to achieve objectives throughout non-permissive or denied environments. They do so by utilizing their superior speed, stealth, and force in an unparalleled, low profile manner. These operators are highly trained in both general combat and small unit tactics that can be used for a range of missions, but each service’s entity fosters their own very unique skill sets and specialties.
Boots on the Ground
While top-tier assets have gained notoriety in popular culture for their direct action pursuits and targeted use of force, they also possess sophisticated non-kinetic capabilities and refined precision skills gained from unrelenting training. These diverse skills are used across a wide variety of missions, many of which will never even be publicly acknowledged. For every mission that leaks into the press, there are dozens if not scores of endeavors that these silent professionals perform with no open recognition or commendation for their incredible accomplishments.
These JSOC assets–who are trained to not only function but excel in non-permissive, hostile, and austere environments–operate with the mentality that humans are more important than hardware. This approach imparts skill sets in these individuals that go beyond technical prowess and instead veers into the territory of human intelligence (HUMINT). While comprehensive technology-driven counterterrorism and reconnaissance missions should continue, information gathered in support of specific targeting missions should be integrated into a more holistic assessment of the environmental conditions. Understanding how and why certain pieces of information matter is both difficult and time consuming, but can be augmented by the sorts of HUMINT atmospherics that only individuals on the ground can observe.
The active U.S. military in its entirety makes up less than 0.5 percent of the American population. JSOC service members are reported to constitute less than 1 percent of that slim margin of U.S. society. Calculated with extremely generous margins, that means that less than 0.00005 percent of the American population is responsible for some of the most influential missions and operations of our lifetimes. These numbers do little justice to the returns the nation’s security derives from the investments of these dedicated individuals, who volunteer time and time again for punishing responsibilities.
Looking Forward
The prohibitive costs of the last decade’s interventions, intensive time requirements, and improbable public support for similar missions in the future will likely result in a strong aversion of future administrations to undertake similar large scale ground force missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan, although opportunities abound any time a news channel is turned on. A more fixed course of action that may become the preferred alternative would involve the narrow targeting of explicit adversaries, such as the activities recently conducted against the Haqqani network near the AfPak border and other terrorist organizations. These more low-intensity operations may also allow the U.S. military to work more collaboratively with governments whose territory is inhabited by malicious actors, rather than undertaking full-scale or unilateral intervention.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan SOF assets played pivotal roles in which they dismantled or eliminated opposition and insurgent networks before setting about to rebuild the capacity of host nation forces to impose the rule of law. This expertise has proved invaluable in Iraq and Afghanistan as local capacity building and village stability operations have been cornerstones of U.S. exit strategies for both theaters. With the rapidly evolving sociopolitical events across the MENA region and ongoing civil strife throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region and beyond, the needs for these specialized SOF capabilities will be plentiful in the coming years – particularly with America’s trending preference to offer intelligence, capacity building training, and logistical support rather than troops on the ground.
Much like the intelligence community has been summoned to refocus efforts from targeting and capture/kill missions to more classical intelligence application, the military’s leadership is seeing a public call to scale back both expenditures and investments. Though the U.S. is battle weary and fiscally challenged, there should be no cut to the support of these exceptional forces. Let the summons to pare down our wider military engagements and defense budget not be at the cost of losing the operational prowess that has been hard won through the sweat and blood of our Special Operations Forces.
Whitney Grespin has worked in contingency contracting and international development on four continents. She currently specializes in security sector reform and capacity building.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2013 print edition.
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Protecting Sound Investments: Preserving U.S. Special Operations Forces Assets in the Next Administration
February 6, 2013
As the U.S. military draws down from Afghanistan and prepares to aggressively scale back its dual war-sized footprint, its total force will be whittled down considerably. Despite this, the core capabilities and greatest strengths of the U.S.’s Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) military and intelligence components must be preserved. Top brass and executive leadership must ready troops, management, and the general public for the repositioning of these very special assets that were responsible for massive successes in the wars of the last decade. These resources played vital roles in those engagements and now face a transition back to more traditional non-combat activities. They must do so without risking the loss of hard-won operational and institutional knowledge.
Military engagements during President Obama’s second term are likely to have a markedly different character than his first term, though not necessarily any less turbulent. The reach of the U.S.’s air, naval, and ground forces is largely unrivalled, and the military’s intelligence and reconnaissance assets are supreme. Nonetheless, the proficiency of conventional U.S. ground forces to stabilize systems of governance, defeat insurgencies, fight unconventional ground wars, and safeguard security in complex environments is limited.
Traditional military troops are not best suited to the tasks of instilling democratic values in underdeveloped societies, facilitating close training of allied militaries, conducting persuasive psychological operations, or imposing order in societies fragmented by internal conflicts. These increasingly necessary skills are all the more reason why it is vital that robust efforts be made to preserve the special skills that Special Operations Forces (SOF) have specifically trained to operate with in these complex environments.
Understanding the Assets
The most specialized and oft-considered ‘elite’ elements of different service branches fall under the oversight of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a component command within SOCOM. SOCOM is a part of the Department of Defense that is charged with overseeing various Special Operations Commands. While each branch of the military has an independent Special Operations Command that is capable of running its own missions, it is SOCOM that takes over command when different branches collaborate, and JSOC that ensures seamless interoperability among its choice components.
JSOC’s components are widely considered to be the exemplars of the U.S.’s specialty military capability. SOF skill sets can be utilized throughout all stages of the operational continuum, ranging from peacetime through full-fledged war. These are entities with very specialized and dedicated skill sets that have been comprehensively trained to perform unconventional missions. These exceptional capabilities may include direct offensive action, counterinsurgency support through population engagement, sabotage and demolition, hostage rescue, surveillance in hostile environments, and foreign internal defense initiatives (or training friendly foreign forces), among other initiatives.
SOF’s most infamous combat utility is their surgical precision and ability to achieve objectives throughout non-permissive or denied environments. They do so by utilizing their superior speed, stealth, and force in an unparalleled, low profile manner. These operators are highly trained in both general combat and small unit tactics that can be used for a range of missions, but each service’s entity fosters their own very unique skill sets and specialties.
Boots on the Ground
While top-tier assets have gained notoriety in popular culture for their direct action pursuits and targeted use of force, they also possess sophisticated non-kinetic capabilities and refined precision skills gained from unrelenting training. These diverse skills are used across a wide variety of missions, many of which will never even be publicly acknowledged. For every mission that leaks into the press, there are dozens if not scores of endeavors that these silent professionals perform with no open recognition or commendation for their incredible accomplishments.
These JSOC assets–who are trained to not only function but excel in non-permissive, hostile, and austere environments–operate with the mentality that humans are more important than hardware. This approach imparts skill sets in these individuals that go beyond technical prowess and instead veers into the territory of human intelligence (HUMINT). While comprehensive technology-driven counterterrorism and reconnaissance missions should continue, information gathered in support of specific targeting missions should be integrated into a more holistic assessment of the environmental conditions. Understanding how and why certain pieces of information matter is both difficult and time consuming, but can be augmented by the sorts of HUMINT atmospherics that only individuals on the ground can observe.
The active U.S. military in its entirety makes up less than 0.5 percent of the American population. JSOC service members are reported to constitute less than 1 percent of that slim margin of U.S. society. Calculated with extremely generous margins, that means that less than 0.00005 percent of the American population is responsible for some of the most influential missions and operations of our lifetimes. These numbers do little justice to the returns the nation’s security derives from the investments of these dedicated individuals, who volunteer time and time again for punishing responsibilities.
Looking Forward
The prohibitive costs of the last decade’s interventions, intensive time requirements, and improbable public support for similar missions in the future will likely result in a strong aversion of future administrations to undertake similar large scale ground force missions such as Iraq and Afghanistan, although opportunities abound any time a news channel is turned on. A more fixed course of action that may become the preferred alternative would involve the narrow targeting of explicit adversaries, such as the activities recently conducted against the Haqqani network near the AfPak border and other terrorist organizations. These more low-intensity operations may also allow the U.S. military to work more collaboratively with governments whose territory is inhabited by malicious actors, rather than undertaking full-scale or unilateral intervention.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan SOF assets played pivotal roles in which they dismantled or eliminated opposition and insurgent networks before setting about to rebuild the capacity of host nation forces to impose the rule of law. This expertise has proved invaluable in Iraq and Afghanistan as local capacity building and village stability operations have been cornerstones of U.S. exit strategies for both theaters. With the rapidly evolving sociopolitical events across the MENA region and ongoing civil strife throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region and beyond, the needs for these specialized SOF capabilities will be plentiful in the coming years – particularly with America’s trending preference to offer intelligence, capacity building training, and logistical support rather than troops on the ground.
Much like the intelligence community has been summoned to refocus efforts from targeting and capture/kill missions to more classical intelligence application, the military’s leadership is seeing a public call to scale back both expenditures and investments. Though the U.S. is battle weary and fiscally challenged, there should be no cut to the support of these exceptional forces. Let the summons to pare down our wider military engagements and defense budget not be at the cost of losing the operational prowess that has been hard won through the sweat and blood of our Special Operations Forces.
Whitney Grespin has worked in contingency contracting and international development on four continents. She currently specializes in security sector reform and capacity building.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2013 print edition.
