Christopher Moede
Abstract: This article argues that U.S. Special Operations Forces have experienced an atrophy in counteroffensive irregular warfare capacity amid the shift to strategic competition, leaving Western interests vulnerable to adversarial gray-zone strategies. It advances signature reduction—the deliberate management of physical and digital detectability—as a human-centered doctrine capable of restoring freedom of maneuver, renewing Special Operations Forces (SOF) heritage competencies, and providing a scalable counteroffensive IW framework below the threshold of armed conflict. The author contends that institutionalizing signature reduction within IW doctrine and training is essential to preserving human primacy in an era of asymmetric technological competition.
The Strategic Imperative for Irregular Warfare
The world has gone digital. When wearable Strava fitness trackers exposed the location of previously undisclosed U.S. special operations forces operating locations in Syria in 2018, policies were quickly put in place to ban the devices. Operations continued with little risk to the mission or force. A mere four years later, when Russian surveillance equipment observed a small number of mobile devices registered in the UK on Ukrainian networks at a military base near the Polish border, 30 Russian cruise missiles tore into the facility where British volunteer fighters had been, killing 35. The technology-fueled contrast between these operational vignettes starkly exposes the hidden costs of attribution in strategic competition – tech which poses exponential risk to both mission and force beyond that which has previously been visible in the past three decades of warfare. Irregular warfare finds itself most authentically in the dynamic heart of this contrast, not as an ancillary auxiliary but rather a central character.
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