THE END OF THE “JUST-IN-TIME” COALITION: GLOBAL SOF READINESS
Oscar Garzon , Rachel Bowers , Gerald Bowman July 2, 2026
To fight and win future conflicts, defense leaders must abandon the assumption that interoperability will naturally coalesce
The United States-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS are often touted as examples of successful multinational integration. Yet closer examination reveals that these coalitions, despite some strengths, struggled. A RAND Corporation study noted that the counter-ISIS campaign placed a massive, grueling burden on U.S. special operations forces (SOF) to build partner capacity among disjointed local forces. While the United States benefited from secure basing and uncontested control over multiple domains, keeping the coalition together required constant effort. Recent political-military consultations highlighted the importance of diplomatic persistence amidst the immense friction of aligning diverse partner forces, such as the Iraqi CTS and the Syrian Democratic Forces.
The United States is now changing its direction. The 2026 National Defense Strategy demands the immediate, integrated employment of allied forces against peer adversaries. To fight and win future conflicts, defense leaders must abandon the assumption that interoperability will naturally coalesce; instead, they must adopt a predictive, data-driven framework that measures allied readiness across its human, procedural, and technical dimensions before a crisis ever erupts.
Recent discussions among defense scholars and insights from a past U.S. Army War College Carlisle Scholars Program research project highlight a fundamental truth: interoperability is not simply a matter of plugging two radios together. It is a complex architecture built across three distinct dimensions: human, procedural, and technical. Historically, tracking this multi-dimensional readiness across the Global SOF Network has been a decentralized, subjective effort. Staff officers frequently rely on static spreadsheets and anecdotal trip reports to catalog partner capabilities. But static spreadsheets are built to solve past problems. They cannot dynamically model the barriers to interoperability, nor can they predict how a partner nation’s political caveats will manifest during an emerging crisis.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/global-sof-readiness/
