What Does the Future of U.S. SOF Look Like Within Great Power Competition?
April 8, 2024 Guest Special Forces 0
SOF and Great Power Competition
By Christian P. Martin.
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) saw the U.S. military engaged in combat operations the likes of which had not been witnessed since the Vietnam War. American military personnel serving during the GWOT were deployed around the globe to seek out and destroy the terror networks (and complicit governments) that were responsible for the September 11 attacks. While conventional forces such as Army and Marine Corps infantry or armored units were a common sight on American news channels, special operations forces (SOF) were conducting surgical strikes with astounding regularity and effectiveness. However, the rise of China and Russia and their designation as near-peer competitors, would signal a return to Great Power Competition. This move will greatly shift the way in which special operations forces are utilized, from a direct-action focus to agents and custodians of American influence.
In the years following the attacks on September 11, specifically in 2003, there were “… approximately 20,000 SOF operators, representing almost half of the entire special operations force of 47,000, involved in ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq” (Horn, 2020, p. 6). Fast forward three years to 2006, and Joint Special Operations Command was conducting 300 missions per month
in Iraq alone (Horn, 2020, p. 6). In the first three months of 2011, Allied special operations forces conducted 1,600 missions and captured or killed approximately 3,000 insurgents (Horn, 2020, p. 7). U.S. Special Operations Command was the vanguard of the 20-year War on Terror; its personnel, skillsets and specifically their ability to carry out lethal and destructive direct-action strikes were always in high demand.
Yet, with an eye toward a challenging future, the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) made clear that the “…primacy of counterterrorism, which dominated US foreign policy for years after 9/11 is a thing of the past. Competition with authoritarian great powers—Russia and particularly China—is the order of the day” (Brands & Nichols, 2020, p. 1). The 2018 NDS set the massive gears of the American defense establishment in motion and charted a course toward a familiar, yet hazy, past; that of competition short of all-out, high-intensity warfare, reminiscent of the Cold War days with Soviet Russia.
https://sof.news/special-forces/sf-future-gpc/
