The future of Special Operations Forces may look less like Zero Dark Thirty and more like Lawrence of Arabia or Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – with just a dash of 007. It’s a future that builds on the last ten years of raids and advisor missions, then adds solo operators in foreign lands, proxy wars with nuclear-armed rogue states, and stealth aircraft infiltrating commando teams to sabotage high-tech defenses.
That’s the vision from the influential Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments which rolled out a study on the future of SOF, “Beyond the Ramparts,” this morning. CSBA is arguably the Pentagon’s favorite thinktank, and its briefing in Congress’s Rayburn Office Building was headlined by House Armed Services Vice-Chairman Mac Thornberry, who’s pushed for new legal authorities for SOF, and Garry Reid, deputy to Michael Sheehan, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and low Intensity Conflict. The meat of the presentation, though, came in co-authors Jim Thomas’ and Chris Dougherty’s distillation of their 144-page report.
What’s counterintuitive about Special Operations nowadays is how much its biggest backers try to deglamorize it and even make it a little boring. (Hint: It’s not). Admittedly, in real life, as opposed to movies, a lot of special ops is long slogs through the dust to distant villages, whether to gather intelligence on a “high value target” or to train local militia. It’s not all jumping out of helicopters and kicking down doors. (Unless you’re an Army Ranger: Those are generally younger, less experienced commandos with less language and culture training who spend almost all their time on “kinetic” missions, which they think is awesome).
So Special Operations Command chief Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that got Bin Laden and is himself a Navy SEAL, likes to talk of SOF rebalancing, reducing the last decades’ emphasis on strike missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead reemphasizing its traditional training and advising role around the world, although SOF has always done a lot of both. McRaven’s top priorities are strengthening the regional SOF headquarters known as “Theater Special Operations Commands” – which some insiders see as a power grab at the expense of conventional-force commanders – and building relationships with friendly special operators from Colombia to Poland to Australia.
McRaven’s personal favorite pundit, Linda Robinson, adds a recommendation of more personnel management authority for SOCOM. Mac Thornberry and HASC’s top Democrat, Adam Smith, are examining new, streamlined legal authorities for worldwide special ops beyond the patchwork of narrowly focused powers created after 9/11. And all the services, both special and conventional, are looking hard at “counter-WMD,” the high-stakes task of securing weapons of mass destruction in failing states, from Syrian chemicals to, potentially, Pakistani or North Korean nukes.