CSBA’s study, “Beyond the Ramparts,” reiterated most of these important, sober recommendations, but it added some intriguing wrinkles of its own. It agrees Special Operators need to emphasize training and advising friendly forces to fight al-Qaeda spin-offs, narco-terrorists, and the like. But it adds they must also “regain their readiness for major wars” against sophisticated nation-states such as China or, to a lesser degree, Iran, whose multi-layered “anti-access/area denial” networks of sensors and long-range missiles will keep conventional forces at bay – at least until cyber-attacks and SOF infiltrators can sabotage the A2/AD system. This is where those stealth transports come in, as well as “identity-masking technologies” to deceive biometric scanners that compare an individual’s facial features to a database of suspects.
What’s more, CSBA predicts that as A2/AD defenses proliferate, as well as nuclear weapons, regional powers will stalemate the U.S. and one another in the conventional arena. That stalemate, they said, will displace head-on conflict into a new era of proxy warfare. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds force, the authors noted, are arguably doing this already with their support for the Mahdi Army in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In an endearing display of nerdity, lead author Jim Thomas’s choice of historical analogy was not how nuclear-armed superpowers resorted to proxy conflicts during the Cold War but how Great Britain and France spent much of their effort fighting in their far-flung colonies, not in Europe, during the Seven Years’ War – which most Americans know as the French and Indian War anyway. His second analogy was the 19th century “Great Game” between the British and Russian Empires in the regions now known as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the setting of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
In remote regions beyond either Russian or British ability to project large conventional forces, open and covert agents dueled for influence over local potentates. That conflict required highly independent operators with the linguistic and cultural skills to immerse themselves among a foreign people for years. Translated from the Great Game into modern terms, said Thomas, that requires SOF to be able operate in “very small teams, smaller than an Operational Detachment-Alpha,” the 12-man unit, aka an A-Team, that is the traditional building block of Special Operations.
Potentially, Thomas said, you could go “down to single operators of the T.E. Lawrence/Lawrence of Arabia variety, where one man or one woman parked in one location can persistently engage and have a strategic impact,” mobilizing or assistance local forces to assist America’s strategic aims, much as Lawrence aided the Arab Revolt against Britain’s enemy, Ottoman Turkey.
Such operations require a new breed of special operator. “It’s not someone with a different haircut,” Thomas said. “It’s coming up with essentially a new career plan for them, where the goal may not be a group command in either the SEAL or the Special Forces community… It could be spending most of their military career devoted to a single country….going back again and again.”
“Until recently, this would have been considered a career killer,” Thomas noted: The force will need new incentives and promotion criteria to make it work.
Finally, he said, Special Operations will need to recruit differently, including from first-generation immigrants who know the language and culture of their home country. Today, he said, SOF are “overwhelmingly Caucasian and almost exclusively male.” They don’t blend in a lot of places. To prepare for a new era, Special Operations needs to take full advantage of America’s diversity.