Reforge the Beret: Special Forces and the Education Cognitive Warfare Demands
by William F. Lyons Jr.
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06.12.2026 at 06:00am
A recent argument that the United States Army Special Forces have become a campaign afterthought is right about the diagnosis but provides an incomplete assessment of the cure. The decisive terrain of great-power competition is cognition, and the culturally immersed and distributed character of Special Forces—built on a “by, with, and through” —gives the regiment a latent comparative advantage in that contest. Realizing this advantage depends less on new equipment than on professional military education redesigned around four interlocking capacities: complexity analysis; epistemic humility; principled decision-making under uncertainty; and adaptive resilience. Together, these traits amount to the ability to lead in the complex—rather than the complicated—domain.
Introduction
In a widely read essay published in June 2026, a recently retired senior Green Beret argues that the United States Army Special Forces have slipped from being the U.S. military’s premier irregular force to “a campaign afterthought,” built for a world that no longer exists. He is right that the operating environment has outrun the force, and that presence is not strategy. But his prescription—consolidate a small remnant and, in his words, “bury the beret”—mistakes a changing mission for an irredeemable structural one.
The terrain he says Special Forces can no longer reach—the closed, surveilled human environments of authoritarian competitors—is precisely where the decisive contest of this era is being fought: in the cognitive domain. The attributes the regiment was built around are the attributes that cognitive warfare rewards. The binding constraint is not the mission but a defense posture still optimized for a complicated world rather than a complex one.
The argument here is therefore narrower and more hopeful than burying the beret: select harder, shrink where prudent, and above all reforge how Special Forces officers and NCOs are educated to think. Accordingly, overhauling professional military education (PME) is a critical aspect of changing our defense posture and capitalizing on the capabilities of our Special Forces.
From Irregular Warfare to the Contest for Cognition
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/06/12/reforge-the-beret-special-forces-and-the-education-cognitive-warfare-demands/
