Ken Robinson
The uncomfortable truth behind today’s “Special Forces identity crisis” is that it is not new. From Kennedy’s romanticized vision of unconventional warriors in the early 1960s, through the bitter lessons of Vietnam, the hollow post-war years, the birth of USSOCOM after Desert One, and twenty years of hyper-kinetic counterterrorism in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), U.S. Army Special Forces and the wider SOF enterprise have repeatedly drifted away from—and then fought to rediscover—their core purpose.
The latest round of this debate has been sharpened by COL (Ret.) Ed Croot’s JSOU study, “There Is an Identity Crisis in Special Forces: Who Are the Green Berets Supposed to Be?” and by COL (Ret.) Mark Grdovic’s subsequent commentary on doctrine and force employment.
Croot’s data-driven work demonstrates an erosion of shared narrative and internal coherence—what he calls an “existential drift”—as the Regiment has shifted from long-duration, politically attuned partner work toward short-term, transactional combat operations.
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