Ajit Maan
While the Pentagon’s front line Special Warfare Units are facing cuts, our near peer adversaries are advancing.
More reduction for funding for the non-kinetic activities of Special Warfare Units is on the table, but we, the undersigned, are advocating not only expanding SOF’s capability to conduct influence operations but we are arguing for reconfiguring, expanding, and creating more agility as a cost-effective alternative that capitalizes on SOF’s unique influence capabilities for engagement that promotes and projects the US values essential to achieving National Defense Strategy objectives at the tactical level.
Our adversaries and allies have recognized and embraced Narrative Warfare, which is the foundation of irregular warfare, and psychological operations, influence operations.
China and Russia are combining hard and soft power at the strategic and tactical levels. While China is rapidly building up its military capability and capacity, it also engages in psychological operations through its United Front Work Department and its blatant Three Warfares of influence (public opinion, psychological, and legal). Russia has combined its strength as a conventional military power with effective use of irregular warfare and influence operations. Despite its setbacks in Ukraine, Russia is learning and adapting its Special Operations for activities that are more about influence than kinetic activities.
It is not only our adversaries who prioritize the quantifiable measures of effect of Special Warfare as the best value for money; NATO and FVEY partners are also reorganizing around a prioritized tech-enhanced Special Operations model to spread and maintain influence globally. US case studies and data supporting Influence Operations and Unconventional Warfare activities are historically one of the best uses of defense dollars in Great Power Competition. Focusing on, and funding, lethality is not the best bang for our military buck. As Colin Gray puts it, “special operations forces (SOF) offer the prospect of a favorably disproportionate return on military investment. Moreover, SOF provide the possibility of a range of precisely conducted military activities more extensive than that reliably feasible for regular warriors conducting regular operations.”
Our influence capacities require a broader and more integrated system than the current PsyOp or Civil Affairs doctrines enable. Our influencers need a far broader scope of mission and one that fits more effectively into a reconfigured SOF mission in which the Green Berets would continue to bridge hyper-conventional units and expanded Special Warfare Units.
The United States is so focused on competing with conventional military and hard power that we are now considering undermining our own capacities in the influence arena.
The Department of Defense’s de-prioritizing of Special Warfare of the non-kinetic variety rests on a dangerous conflation: conceiving of great power competition as primarily conventional as opposed to the unconventionality of terrorism. China, Iran, Russia – like Al-Qaeda, ISIS – and other extremist groups – have very clearly been competing unconventionally, but with far greater resources than non-state actors.
Our adversaries tell their stories in ways that are compelling to broad and diverse audiences. And yet the United States of America has the natural advantage when it comes to a compelling foundational narrative that has historically had appeal to audiences world over.
If we can manage to leverage our strengths instead of submitting to our hard power biases, we can lead again.
Unfortunately, it appears that it is easier for US SOF to gain authorization, permissions, and resources to put a bullet in an adversary’s head than it is to put an idea in the mind of a vulnerable population. This needs to change.
The lessons learned in WWI and WWII led to the birth of Special Warfare units and forces who turned enemy conventional weakness into an Allied asymmetric advantage. The Cold War conditions in Korea, and then Vietnam became the formal genesis of US Army Special Forces.
Without a Special Warfare force, fully formed for efforts that current engagements require, including top-down efforts which have proven capable of mission success, we cannot match our adversaries on the playing field they intend to dominate.
Major defense contractors and our military services are focused on lethality. But our military can best defend our country by strengthening partnerships and alliances. Special Warfare is not about proliferation, but about human contact. They need our support.
While, of course, we must maintain our capacity to deter and ultimately to dominate in conventional warfare, if the strategies of our adversaries (both state and non-state) are successful, there will be no need for kinetic confrontation.
Access to, and a voice within, indigenous populations was the foundation of SOF when it was formed in the 1950s and when “special warfare” was reinvigorated during the Kennedy administration. In active combat zones SOF, and the Green Berets in particular, continue to be unique exemplars of core competencies in indigenous engagement which is one of the most vital and underserved roles in the NSS and Great Power Competition. Top-down approaches have had demonstrable oversights in operational capability.
Every aspect of the National Security Strategy requires influence, a core competency of the traditional SOF mission, in any focus area. Influence strategy cannot rely on messaging alone, but requires an understanding of indigenous narratives, involving indigenous narrators, and a sustained choreography of actions that back up narratives that support the NSS with mission success.
SOF, reconfigured for influence agility in support of National Defense Strategy requirements, must always be the “Tip-of-the-spear.” An expanded SOF mission, to prioritize Civil Affairs and Psychological and Informational Operations, would collectively work toward marginalizing Great Power Competition adversaries in the most productive and cost-effective manner.
All warfare since the end of the last century has been an amalgamation or integration of irregular and conventional warfare. Our adversaries have already adopted this reality with the advent of “hybrid warfare” which places equal (or even greater) priority on irregular and influence-related warfare – the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are integrated irregular-conventional wars in which the irregular component of the conflict is decisive and the conventional portion a shaping operation. Unfortunately, the United States has yet to fully integrate irregular and conventional warfare (along DOTMLPF-P lines) to the extent or level of our adversaries; more so, it continues to treat conventional forces as largely decisive and irregular forces as shaping – if anything, it has become clear that, in many ways, conventional forces must become more SOF-like rather than the other way around.
It would take a generation to retrain a specific force capable of filling the operational void that cuts would create. And that is unnecessary as SOF, CA, PSYOP,’s and IO are already available but not effectively woven into a singular force nor are they deliberately woven into integrated campaigns which they must be.
We should not only retain our current levels of funding but expand and unite our influence force capacities.
A more comprehensive understanding of, appreciation for and commitment to, the utility of Special Warfare and SOF is a crucial part of integrated whole of society treatments of the dilemmas at the heart of compound security competition. SOF’s critical relevancy in today’s and tomorrow’s full-spectrum/continuum civil-military interventionism requires, at the very least, “holding the line” on SOF budgeting and force structure at present. But the very least is not enough. If we intend to dominate and lead, we need to fund the forces that can accomplish the task.
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