Not Just for SOF Anymore: Envisioning Irregular Warfare as a Joint Force Priority
Michael P. Noonan | 04.21.21
The recent buildup of Russian troops near Ukraine and Chinese naval exercises to the east and west of Taiwan may be seen as evidence that great power competition will require a return to focusing on the threats posed by the maneuver brigades, air wings, and naval fleets of competitors. For the Biden administration, which entered office stating that “diplomacy, development, and economic statecraft should be the leading instruments of American foreign policy,†and “the use of military force should be the last resort,†there is a clear temptation to reduce US commitments to messy political-military conflicts on what many see as the strategic periphery (i.e., Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia). President Biden’s announcement last week that the United States will remove all troops from Afghanistan by September 2021 is a prominent, but certainly not the only, indicator of this trajectory. For some this means, perhaps, that there should be a division of labor between conventional forces and special operations forces (SOF) that might assign these messy contingencies to the latter forces, but that would be a mistake.
As the Biden administration develops its national security strategy, it should not conflate great power competition with major theater war or conventional operations. The last twenty years of conflict have pushed both state and nonstate actors to challenge the United States in ways that it has historically been uncomfortable countering. This is particularly the case in the gray zone, where actors oftentimes blend and blur various tools of power in order to achieve objectives below the threshold of war. Responding to this international environment will mean that thinking of policy elements in discrete bins of force, diplomacy, and development will hamper US responses to threats and opportunities. The United States will need to merge all instruments of power, to include various components of its military power, to counter challenges from its rivals.
https://mwi.usma.edu/not-just-for-sof-anymore-envisioning-irregular-warfare-as-a-joint-force-priority/
