fter 18 years of low intensity warfare and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense, and indeed the country, are pivoting to the reemergence of Great Power Competition as guided by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. This shift necessitates a rethinking and reconsideration of how Special Operations Forces (SOF) are structured, developed, and used. These changes, while necessary, do not constitute an overthrow of the existing force structure. Rather, they build on the successes and hard-won lessons learned and apply them to the new strategic reality.
Strategic Realignment
In this new era of power dynamics, conflict will vary from liminal contact to swift escalation, evidenced by Chinese expansionism via the Belt and Road Initiative and the physical construction of territory in the South China Sea and Russian destabilization operations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Both Beijing and Moscow are already exploring and fielding the means by which their specialized military forces may seize upon gaps in the strategic security architecture.
In April of this year, Russian commandos jumped from 33,000 feet over the Arctic Circle as part of a three-day exercise in Russia's Franz Josef Land archipelago. The combined Special Forces and paramilitary elements established a base, conducted reconnaissance patrols, and raided a “saboteur” base—a collective term the Russians use for terrorists or other small groups of adversaries.
Even prior to this exercise, Moscow effectively applied specialized and clandestine services to great effect in the Libyan, Crimean, and Syrian conflict zones, maintaining plausible deniability. While the videos of the Arctic operation were certainly fascinating to watch, they presage a shift of which the United States must be aware: the return of Great Power Competition and the use of special operations forces amidst that strategic context.
Policymakers must recognize that great power competition features a new wave of fostered political turmoil, emerging arms races, and new domains of conflict as the new source of strategic unrest. If the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated for strategic thinkers nothing else, it is that adversaries are actively engaging in such new domains of competition as information warfare and escalation—short of conflict. While SOF cannot be expected to cover the full breadth of these emerging domains, the strategic realignment will provide policymakers capabilities necessary to confront emerging challenges.
Existing research has yielded conclusions on the role special operations forces will play within future paradigms of conflict, highlighting irregular warfare as the key environ in which specialized forces will play a role. This characterization is too broad and insufficiently contextualizes countering rival powers. Thus, institutionalizing an ‘irregular warfare’ domain could yield a similar rudderless catch-all strategy like the counter-terror umbrella (expounded later)—meaning massive investment, vague oversight, and little return on investiture.
GPC-focused Strategy for SOF
A realignment of Special Operations Forces based on five key strategy components is worth considering:
1. Rapid mobilization on a timeline not of our choosing.
2. Returning to core skillsets and mission competencies.
3. Emphasizing the preservation of the force.
4. Increasing integration with regional and strategic partners.
5. Preparing for new domains of conflict.
These five areas categorically refocus the enterprise against near peer threats through emphasizing skills and execution by the human component, vice continued reliance on technology, and incessantly expanding the collective footprint. This realignment envisions a force postured to identify and pre-empt rapid emerging threats versus constant rotations chasing poorly defined target networks as previously performed in the counterterrorist (CT) paradigm.
1. Rapid mobilization on a timeline not of our choosing.
The new strategic reality upends existing battlefield assumptions. Today, the United States enjoys uncontested air dominance enabling constant close air support, medical evacuation operations, and continuous logistics veins touching every distal node of operations. This cannot be assumed in a high- or even low-intensity conflict with a peer- or near-peer adversary. In most cases, the United States will not control the time, location, or pace of a conflict and its initial phase of operations.
Further, the enterprise is mechanically married to the constant return to known locales (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan) where the support architecture is firmly established for years. Put simply, after 18 years of defining the battlespace, the adversary will now control the speed of activity, example: the Russian seizure of Crimea, or the seemingly inevitable escalation of conflict between China and Taiwan.
Russia’s use of the “little green men” and evolving special forces to destabilize and project power is a key pressure point against which the rapid mobilization of U.S. SOF may need to respond. As denoted earlier, the dynamics of power competition in Europe on the part of Russia are liminal, but as of yet Moscow is undeterred from continued subversion of the international order. China’s expanding power base continues to dominate the South China Sea, unmolested and growing by the month. In this arena, the swift deployment of precision and lethality by a SOF component is another pressure point for curbing aggression and safeguarding against potential conflict.
2. Returning to core skillsets and mission competencies.
Counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict lead to the adoption of a fairly uniform skillset across specialized units. In essence, direct action took priority over foreign internal defense, local force advisory, or even indigenous force development, despite their historical genesis. It is as though every GWOT problem were a nail and every Special Mission Unit became a hammer. These “basic” or “traditional” skill and mission sets need renewal and revitalization to respond to the full spectrum of Great Power Competition. The screw driver, crowbar, and more must now augment the hammer.
Across operational locales, the focus on hunting terrorists is waning, demonstrating an ideological shift in how special operations forces are employed. The operational level guidance for terrorist hunting is shifting to reflect the CT mission’s slow but steady decline. In Africa, units conducting operations against extremist groups in the continent were told to “plan missions to stay out of combat or do not go”. Other capable entities are taking up the CT fight, including Security Force Assistance units, which only substantiates the argument for SOF to concentrate on the great power fight. This paradigm shift echoes the guidance outlined in the ‘127 Echo’ program, or the authorization under Section 127(e) of the U.S. Code for SOF to equip and enable surrogate forces to conduct counter terrorism operations in place of U.S. personnel.
Where the spectrum of SOF units once concentrated training and expertise into a CT/direct action amalgamation, a shift to technical and core competencies is necessary to ensure unrivaled speed and precision when employing the enterprise maneuver elements against power rivals like Russia, China, and militarized near peer states like Iran and North Korea. The direct-action mission is well-suited to an environment where the U.S. enjoys uncontested supremacy such as in Afghanistan, but less so against a capable enemy force. Thus, the attributes of SOF in terms of precision strike, global access, targeting enemy centers of gravity, and rapid reaction are those basic skillsets that must become the focus- less counter-terrorism, more payoff/yield driven mission constructs.
3. Emphasizing the preservation of the force.
United States Special Operations Command adheres to a select philosophy defined as ‘SOF Truths’:
• Humans are more important than hardware.
• Quality is better than quantity.
• Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
• Competent SOF cannot be created after emergencies occur.
• Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
In a strategic environment where the operational demands expanded, dependence on technology as supplementation increased, alongside calls for more funding being answered with abandon, and the enterprise began to drift away from its self-imposed truths. Taken together, the result is an erosion of the most valuable portion of SOF: the people.
As the demand for special operations increased, so too did the toll on operators and their families. To this point, General Raymond Thomas (former commander, U.S. Special Operations Command) testified to congress in 2018 that units were “deployed to their sustainable limit”. Divorce rates are higher in marriages associated with a high operational tempo, while suicide rates among special operations veterans tripled from 2017 to 2018. The U.S. Special Operations Command adopted an initiative to address the stressors on operators and their dependents, dubbed the ‘Preservation of The Force and Family”, but this may only serve as a band-aid to the issue of scope creep.
Comments from Command Chief Gregory Smith, the U.S. Special Operations Command Senior Enlisted Advisor, noted a 1:2 dwell time ratio (meaning, for every month of downrange time operators receive two months stateside) as another tool for force preservation. What isn’t mentioned is that those extra months spent at home are fully absorbed in a demanding spin-up cycle as teams prepare for the next rotation. Additionally, the repeated deployments to the same theatres is resulting in an erosion of quality that is inevitable. After all, repetition breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds contempt.
Figures provided by SOCOM note that special operators are present in 148 states across the globe (2017), the highest numbers recorded to date. Deployment of special operations forces around the world is an “easy button” for policymakers to address complicated issues, which are difficult to quantify and provide clear strategy for. As “The Afghanistan Papers” report outlines in sobering detail, a lack of strategy and the repetitive nature of military application to an unclear environment saw an area of operations degrade with little return on investment. So too did the scope creep take its toll on the resource alleged to be more important than hardware: the humans.
Preserving the force means renewing investment in the whole special operator, not just the tools, technologies, and training, but also the families and the mental health of the members.
4. Increasing integration with regional and strategic partners.
The Global War on Terror brought the best SOF personnel and teams to the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres. Now, the fight may turn to our allied partners’ backyards. SOF must deeply integrate with partner forces on the frontlines of potential conflicts as well as the secondary and tertiary theatres where these conflicts may take place.
The USMC’s continuous deployment of personnel to Australia, which has emphasized “improving interoperability and security cooperation activities,” is a model of further strengthening alliances and partnerships. These will also enhance regional disaster relief response capabilities, and augment forces that are optimally postured to quickly respond to various crises throughout the region. The presence of U.S. Marines and Joint Force partnerships in Australia is aimed at pressing back on Chinese Communist expansionism—evidenced by the implementation of the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations warfighting concept. This type of force projection is not feasible without SOF enabling the forward staging of conventional forces.
In the European theater, opportunities for SOF to pursue integration and develop interoperability with partner forces are just as lucrative and dynamic, although the environ is a considerable change from the climes of the Indo-Pacific. As the Russian Arctic Circle exercise demonstrates, the U.S. will need its specialized warfighting elements prepared to face aggression and challenges wherever and whenever they may rise.
Not only do these events demonstrate U.S. resolve and support for partners and allies, but they also offer possibilities for integration with the conventional forces, providing recruiting opportunities, which will further improve the health of the enterprise. U.S. SOCOM is incapable of addressing the challenge of great power competition alone—it must fuse with international and joint force partners and lead the fight in emerging arenas.
5. Preparing for new domains of conflict.
Until recently, SOF stood alone; direct action was an end in and of itself. While this may work for a low-intensity conflict, it is insufficient for the complex battlefield of Great Power Competition. As defined in the Rapid Response component of this realignment, the SOF enterprise needs to posture itself to preempt adversarial destabilization operations, in essence hiding in the shadows waiting for the enemy to arrive; “appear where you are not expected”, as written by Sun Tzu. This pre-staging should include exploring new domains of conflict (areas in which the U.S. finds itself at risk) versus simply populating geographic spots on a map.
Areas of vulnerability for which the SOF enterprise should develop doctrine and establish operational norms include information warfare and counter-information operations, both of which necessitate continued fusion with the intelligence community. The strategy by adversaries is to reduce and undermine the public confidence in the spread of information and the decision making by elected leaders; an effective counter-strategy and defensive doctrine for countering this threat is an opportunity for the SOF enterprise to continue to safeguard U.S. interests.
Cyberwarfare is another domain for which the SOF enterprise must prepare for, in at least a responsive capacity. SOF elements must be prepared to fight “unplugged” in the event an adversary uses cyber weapons against the United States—a far cry from the unchallenged use of cyber in the current CT paradigm. Moscow and Tehran rely on the use of targeted cyber-attacks to achieve operational outcomes or augment overt military action, which makes cyber a rival dependency that U.S. SOF should be prepared to exploit and not be hindered by.
Tomorrow’s Fight Is Already Here
The great power competition landscape is a return to the near-peer potential warfare of the Cold War. Adversaries are finding new and innovative means of challenging the international order. As such, the SOF enterprise cannot assume preeminence based on its supremacy in the previous fight; it requires rapid innovation, but smartly allocated as a scarce resource (by its very nature).
The SOF enterprise has mastered the finer points of the last war, though the lack of strategy and an unclear end-state undermined the tactical dominance achieved by the Special Operations community. Thus, the enterprise needs to turn its attention away from CT, and towards the next generation’s peer and near-peer rivals across known and potential domains of competition with a focus on speed, partner and joint cooperation, and anticipation versus reaction.
a global affairs media network
Vectoring Special Operations for Great Power Competition
June 4, 2020
A
fter 18 years of low intensity warfare and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense, and indeed the country, are pivoting to the reemergence of Great Power Competition as guided by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. This shift necessitates a rethinking and reconsideration of how Special Operations Forces (SOF) are structured, developed, and used. These changes, while necessary, do not constitute an overthrow of the existing force structure. Rather, they build on the successes and hard-won lessons learned and apply them to the new strategic reality.
Strategic Realignment
In this new era of power dynamics, conflict will vary from liminal contact to swift escalation, evidenced by Chinese expansionism via the Belt and Road Initiative and the physical construction of territory in the South China Sea and Russian destabilization operations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Both Beijing and Moscow are already exploring and fielding the means by which their specialized military forces may seize upon gaps in the strategic security architecture.
In April of this year, Russian commandos jumped from 33,000 feet over the Arctic Circle as part of a three-day exercise in Russia's Franz Josef Land archipelago. The combined Special Forces and paramilitary elements established a base, conducted reconnaissance patrols, and raided a “saboteur” base—a collective term the Russians use for terrorists or other small groups of adversaries.
Even prior to this exercise, Moscow effectively applied specialized and clandestine services to great effect in the Libyan, Crimean, and Syrian conflict zones, maintaining plausible deniability. While the videos of the Arctic operation were certainly fascinating to watch, they presage a shift of which the United States must be aware: the return of Great Power Competition and the use of special operations forces amidst that strategic context.
Policymakers must recognize that great power competition features a new wave of fostered political turmoil, emerging arms races, and new domains of conflict as the new source of strategic unrest. If the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated for strategic thinkers nothing else, it is that adversaries are actively engaging in such new domains of competition as information warfare and escalation—short of conflict. While SOF cannot be expected to cover the full breadth of these emerging domains, the strategic realignment will provide policymakers capabilities necessary to confront emerging challenges.
Existing research has yielded conclusions on the role special operations forces will play within future paradigms of conflict, highlighting irregular warfare as the key environ in which specialized forces will play a role. This characterization is too broad and insufficiently contextualizes countering rival powers. Thus, institutionalizing an ‘irregular warfare’ domain could yield a similar rudderless catch-all strategy like the counter-terror umbrella (expounded later)—meaning massive investment, vague oversight, and little return on investiture.
GPC-focused Strategy for SOF
A realignment of Special Operations Forces based on five key strategy components is worth considering:
1. Rapid mobilization on a timeline not of our choosing.
2. Returning to core skillsets and mission competencies.
3. Emphasizing the preservation of the force.
4. Increasing integration with regional and strategic partners.
5. Preparing for new domains of conflict.
These five areas categorically refocus the enterprise against near peer threats through emphasizing skills and execution by the human component, vice continued reliance on technology, and incessantly expanding the collective footprint. This realignment envisions a force postured to identify and pre-empt rapid emerging threats versus constant rotations chasing poorly defined target networks as previously performed in the counterterrorist (CT) paradigm.
1. Rapid mobilization on a timeline not of our choosing.
The new strategic reality upends existing battlefield assumptions. Today, the United States enjoys uncontested air dominance enabling constant close air support, medical evacuation operations, and continuous logistics veins touching every distal node of operations. This cannot be assumed in a high- or even low-intensity conflict with a peer- or near-peer adversary. In most cases, the United States will not control the time, location, or pace of a conflict and its initial phase of operations.
Further, the enterprise is mechanically married to the constant return to known locales (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan) where the support architecture is firmly established for years. Put simply, after 18 years of defining the battlespace, the adversary will now control the speed of activity, example: the Russian seizure of Crimea, or the seemingly inevitable escalation of conflict between China and Taiwan.
Russia’s use of the “little green men” and evolving special forces to destabilize and project power is a key pressure point against which the rapid mobilization of U.S. SOF may need to respond. As denoted earlier, the dynamics of power competition in Europe on the part of Russia are liminal, but as of yet Moscow is undeterred from continued subversion of the international order. China’s expanding power base continues to dominate the South China Sea, unmolested and growing by the month. In this arena, the swift deployment of precision and lethality by a SOF component is another pressure point for curbing aggression and safeguarding against potential conflict.
2. Returning to core skillsets and mission competencies.
Counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict lead to the adoption of a fairly uniform skillset across specialized units. In essence, direct action took priority over foreign internal defense, local force advisory, or even indigenous force development, despite their historical genesis. It is as though every GWOT problem were a nail and every Special Mission Unit became a hammer. These “basic” or “traditional” skill and mission sets need renewal and revitalization to respond to the full spectrum of Great Power Competition. The screw driver, crowbar, and more must now augment the hammer.
Across operational locales, the focus on hunting terrorists is waning, demonstrating an ideological shift in how special operations forces are employed. The operational level guidance for terrorist hunting is shifting to reflect the CT mission’s slow but steady decline. In Africa, units conducting operations against extremist groups in the continent were told to “plan missions to stay out of combat or do not go”. Other capable entities are taking up the CT fight, including Security Force Assistance units, which only substantiates the argument for SOF to concentrate on the great power fight. This paradigm shift echoes the guidance outlined in the ‘127 Echo’ program, or the authorization under Section 127(e) of the U.S. Code for SOF to equip and enable surrogate forces to conduct counter terrorism operations in place of U.S. personnel.
Where the spectrum of SOF units once concentrated training and expertise into a CT/direct action amalgamation, a shift to technical and core competencies is necessary to ensure unrivaled speed and precision when employing the enterprise maneuver elements against power rivals like Russia, China, and militarized near peer states like Iran and North Korea. The direct-action mission is well-suited to an environment where the U.S. enjoys uncontested supremacy such as in Afghanistan, but less so against a capable enemy force. Thus, the attributes of SOF in terms of precision strike, global access, targeting enemy centers of gravity, and rapid reaction are those basic skillsets that must become the focus- less counter-terrorism, more payoff/yield driven mission constructs.
3. Emphasizing the preservation of the force.
United States Special Operations Command adheres to a select philosophy defined as ‘SOF Truths’:
• Humans are more important than hardware.
• Quality is better than quantity.
• Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
• Competent SOF cannot be created after emergencies occur.
• Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
In a strategic environment where the operational demands expanded, dependence on technology as supplementation increased, alongside calls for more funding being answered with abandon, and the enterprise began to drift away from its self-imposed truths. Taken together, the result is an erosion of the most valuable portion of SOF: the people.
As the demand for special operations increased, so too did the toll on operators and their families. To this point, General Raymond Thomas (former commander, U.S. Special Operations Command) testified to congress in 2018 that units were “deployed to their sustainable limit”. Divorce rates are higher in marriages associated with a high operational tempo, while suicide rates among special operations veterans tripled from 2017 to 2018. The U.S. Special Operations Command adopted an initiative to address the stressors on operators and their dependents, dubbed the ‘Preservation of The Force and Family”, but this may only serve as a band-aid to the issue of scope creep.
Comments from Command Chief Gregory Smith, the U.S. Special Operations Command Senior Enlisted Advisor, noted a 1:2 dwell time ratio (meaning, for every month of downrange time operators receive two months stateside) as another tool for force preservation. What isn’t mentioned is that those extra months spent at home are fully absorbed in a demanding spin-up cycle as teams prepare for the next rotation. Additionally, the repeated deployments to the same theatres is resulting in an erosion of quality that is inevitable. After all, repetition breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds contempt.
Figures provided by SOCOM note that special operators are present in 148 states across the globe (2017), the highest numbers recorded to date. Deployment of special operations forces around the world is an “easy button” for policymakers to address complicated issues, which are difficult to quantify and provide clear strategy for. As “The Afghanistan Papers” report outlines in sobering detail, a lack of strategy and the repetitive nature of military application to an unclear environment saw an area of operations degrade with little return on investment. So too did the scope creep take its toll on the resource alleged to be more important than hardware: the humans.
Preserving the force means renewing investment in the whole special operator, not just the tools, technologies, and training, but also the families and the mental health of the members.
4. Increasing integration with regional and strategic partners.
The Global War on Terror brought the best SOF personnel and teams to the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres. Now, the fight may turn to our allied partners’ backyards. SOF must deeply integrate with partner forces on the frontlines of potential conflicts as well as the secondary and tertiary theatres where these conflicts may take place.
The USMC’s continuous deployment of personnel to Australia, which has emphasized “improving interoperability and security cooperation activities,” is a model of further strengthening alliances and partnerships. These will also enhance regional disaster relief response capabilities, and augment forces that are optimally postured to quickly respond to various crises throughout the region. The presence of U.S. Marines and Joint Force partnerships in Australia is aimed at pressing back on Chinese Communist expansionism—evidenced by the implementation of the Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations warfighting concept. This type of force projection is not feasible without SOF enabling the forward staging of conventional forces.
In the European theater, opportunities for SOF to pursue integration and develop interoperability with partner forces are just as lucrative and dynamic, although the environ is a considerable change from the climes of the Indo-Pacific. As the Russian Arctic Circle exercise demonstrates, the U.S. will need its specialized warfighting elements prepared to face aggression and challenges wherever and whenever they may rise.
Not only do these events demonstrate U.S. resolve and support for partners and allies, but they also offer possibilities for integration with the conventional forces, providing recruiting opportunities, which will further improve the health of the enterprise. U.S. SOCOM is incapable of addressing the challenge of great power competition alone—it must fuse with international and joint force partners and lead the fight in emerging arenas.
5. Preparing for new domains of conflict.
Until recently, SOF stood alone; direct action was an end in and of itself. While this may work for a low-intensity conflict, it is insufficient for the complex battlefield of Great Power Competition. As defined in the Rapid Response component of this realignment, the SOF enterprise needs to posture itself to preempt adversarial destabilization operations, in essence hiding in the shadows waiting for the enemy to arrive; “appear where you are not expected”, as written by Sun Tzu. This pre-staging should include exploring new domains of conflict (areas in which the U.S. finds itself at risk) versus simply populating geographic spots on a map.
Areas of vulnerability for which the SOF enterprise should develop doctrine and establish operational norms include information warfare and counter-information operations, both of which necessitate continued fusion with the intelligence community. The strategy by adversaries is to reduce and undermine the public confidence in the spread of information and the decision making by elected leaders; an effective counter-strategy and defensive doctrine for countering this threat is an opportunity for the SOF enterprise to continue to safeguard U.S. interests.
Cyberwarfare is another domain for which the SOF enterprise must prepare for, in at least a responsive capacity. SOF elements must be prepared to fight “unplugged” in the event an adversary uses cyber weapons against the United States—a far cry from the unchallenged use of cyber in the current CT paradigm. Moscow and Tehran rely on the use of targeted cyber-attacks to achieve operational outcomes or augment overt military action, which makes cyber a rival dependency that U.S. SOF should be prepared to exploit and not be hindered by.
Tomorrow’s Fight Is Already Here
The great power competition landscape is a return to the near-peer potential warfare of the Cold War. Adversaries are finding new and innovative means of challenging the international order. As such, the SOF enterprise cannot assume preeminence based on its supremacy in the previous fight; it requires rapid innovation, but smartly allocated as a scarce resource (by its very nature).
The SOF enterprise has mastered the finer points of the last war, though the lack of strategy and an unclear end-state undermined the tactical dominance achieved by the Special Operations community. Thus, the enterprise needs to turn its attention away from CT, and towards the next generation’s peer and near-peer rivals across known and potential domains of competition with a focus on speed, partner and joint cooperation, and anticipation versus reaction.
