TAMPA, Florida—Today’s special operators are rapidly becoming the model for the rest of the U.S. military, disrupting how the Defense Department does everything from buying gear to responding to global crises.
You might not notice that trend in Washington, D.C., where the Pentagon and the congressional armed services committees generally project predictable continuity. Perhaps that’s why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the new Joint Chiefs chairman, came to the Global SOF Foundation’s conference here to outline a new, special-operations-like vision for the U.S. military: smaller teams, quicker equipping, faster operations, more autonomy.
“Special operations forces have long operated like a tech startup,” Hegseth told a crowd of elite tactical operators on May 6. “You’re agile and nimble, lean and lethal. You leverage innovation…in ways that conventional formations just cannot.’”
Caine, who has spent years in special-operations assignments, said that his membership in the SOF “tribe” had prepared him to lead—and reform—the U.S. military with a startup mentality.
“You taught me how to integrate things. You taught me the importance of relationships. You taught me the importance of being an entrepreneur,” he told the audience, which reportedly included operators from more than 60 countries.
This mindset may help the U.S. military contend with a wider array of threats more quickly, from non-state actors to proxy forces. But some former members of the community said that over-reliance on special operations—without broader changes, more money, and new strategies—will prolong conflicts and undermine U.S. strength.
An American fascination
U.S. special operations forces comprise about 3 percent of the active-duty force, but are disproportionately represented in movies, TV shows, and video games. The idea of small teams of men and women carrying out secret missions behind enemy lines lends itself to cinematic adaptation in ways that less dramatic aspects of military activity—say, hauling supplies, maintaining fighter jets, and even conducting exercises—simply do not.
President Trump is hardly immune to this attraction. During his first term, he described SOF missions with a teenager’s enthusiasm for his favorite, violent movie. He reserved some of his highest public praise for “daring” and “dangerous” special-operations missions, such as the SEALs’ 2017 raid in Yemen; the 2019 killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an event he recounted in generous detail; and the SEALs’ 2020 hostage rescue in Nigeria. Meanwhile, Trump had harsh criticism for high-ranking leaders of the conventional forces, whose counsel he routinely resisted and whom he accused in 2020 of wanting “to do nothing but fight wars” to enrich defense contractors.
And while Trump is perhaps the loudest presidential booster of SOF capabilities, he’s hardly the first. “That’s been a phenomenon since at least the Obama administration,” said one former defense official who spent decades working with U.S. and other special operations forces.
For presidents, one of SOF’s most appealing features is that they can be deployed more flexibly and quickly, a fact that figures into how Trump has projected military power to reach his geopolitical objectives, fast, targeted action and a distaste for long-term foreign deployments (with the exception of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, re-shoring U.S. troops from foreign shores has been more difficult.) One month into his second term, the Trump administration designated several international criminal drug organizations as terrorist groups, opening up the possibility of military action against them. In January, the president publicly floated the idea of sending special operations forces into Mexico, despite the idea’s questionable legality and wisdom.
In February, Trump unceremoniously sacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown. Brown would ultimately be replaced by Caine, who was noted during Trump’s first term for arguing that more authority should be given to on-the-ground commanders during Operation Inherent Resolve—the actions against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. That resulted in more strikes against ISIS targets. Trump credited Caine as “instrumental” in the collapse of the Caliphate’s control over parts of Syria and Iraq. (A RAND report from February 2021 concluded that the intensification of airstrikes may have “slightly accelerated” the defeat of ISIS.)
Moving quickly
Whatever you may think of Trump’s motives or policies, one retired Army Special Forces colonel said, rapid deployment has become essential to countering modern-day threats. A move toward a more SOF-like model is not only necessary but overdue. The pace of conflict has eclipsed the ability of the United States to deploy large conventional forces quickly.
“Let’s say you want to deploy an armor division out of El Paso to Kuwait,” said the retired colonel. “The command takes 30 to 45 days where they’re walking around; they convert their gymnasiums into processing centers to make sure [the departing troops] all have their will and testaments, that their health records are updated, that they’ve all got their family support plans. Then they have to drive that, like, Army graveyard from El Paso to the Port of Beaumont, outside of Houston. And then they put them on [roll-on, roll-off] ships. That takes another month and that depends on the availability of ships. Then they arrive at a port of disembarkation where [the Army] builds out man camps, tent cities, fuel depots, brings in the ammo. Months later, they’re ready to go. Tell me, if you were China, would you feel deterred?”
A high-end adversary like Russia and China has a variety of means to make large deployments more difficult or dangerous, such as network-enabled attacks on civilian transportation infrastructure.
“They’re not going to let you permissively go from point A to point B in mass. But we haven’t changed anything” from when that system was invented, the retired colonel said.
Masses of U.S. forces also present easy targets in the era of ever-cheaper, more precise missiles, particularly when dealing with a well-supplied adversary like China, they said. That, in part, is why the Army is training to break up large formations into smaller, more enabled and autonomous groupings.
A second former defense official who has years of experience working with U.S. and allied special operators said, “The U.S. is catching up with the nature of the threats that we face right now. Like a brigade combat team is not going to really help you solve them…We’re not really fighting any conventional wars. And our adversaries don’t necessarily want to escalate to that point.”
Indeed, adversaries are turning to hybrid warfare tactics, highly empowered non-state actors, and proxy forces.
A “start-up” approach to buying
Special operations are also becoming more of a model for the way the Pentagon can acquire technology: buying things, trying them out, and then deploying them—all in a fraction of the time it takes the Army or Navy to create a program of record.
Like the services, U.S. Special Operations Command has purchasing authority under Title 10 of federal law. But it generally buys items in relatively small quantities. “With these smaller efforts, the statutory and regulatory requirements are considerably less, allowing greater flexibility and speed of execution,” former SOCOM acquisition executive James Geurts said in 2016.
They buy things off-the-shelf, “to hasten delivery and mitigate risk” Geurts wrote. As GAO reported in February 2023, other services are struggling to use the same authorities to purchase what are often called “mature” and “proven” technologies. Proven technologies also pass more easily through the hurdles of foreign military sales, as SOCOM plays a role in outfitting other, partner SOF forces as well.
SOF also makes much broader use of alternative contract vehicles like OTAs, thanks largely to the smaller number of units they purchase.
Sometimes SOCOM simply modifies existing gear, like transforming C-130 airlifters into close-air-support gunships.
But the real strength of SOF acquisition is that it relies on a small, close team of program office executives who work together much more closely than do the services’ offices, said Melissa Johnson, SOCOM’s acquisition executive.
In his SOF Week address, Hegseth said SOCOM’s approach is better suited to today’s era of rapidly evolving weaponry.
“You adopt advanced technologies early. You make them better and then you help them spread to the rest of the joint force. You are willing to experiment and fail while learning from each failure and each success. We need you to keep doing that,” he said. “You are acquisition reform.”
The Defense Department has already taken a step in that direction, mandating wider use of alternative contract mechanisms and buying things that already exist, rather than assigning companies to build them according to rigid and quickly obsoleted requirements.
The second former defense official cautioned that the SOCOM’s acquisition model can’t just be imposed on broader services, in part because SOCOM is reliant on those big services to buy things that SOCOM can later modify. SOCOM’s buying is “more agile, mainly because historically it hasn’t had to build things from scratch,” they said. “Should [the services]…make decisions faster, do a little bit less testing? Yeah, but it’s a bit apples-to-oranges to say that this SOF system is the gold standard for what the services need to do.”
Typecasting the SOF action hero
Demand for more special operations is rising, Gen. Brian Fenton, the current commander of SOCOM, testified in March 2024. At the recent conference here, Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, the head of Air Force Special Operations Command, said that trend has continued into this year. “Crisis response in general is up. If you look across, again, just what’s happening in the broader Middle East right now … We’ve got a lengthy commitment over there. So those type of things keep us pretty busy.” Despite this, special operations forces still face potential cuts.
The second former defense official said SOF has, in part, become a victim of its own success: because they can do a lot with a little, they are expected to do as much with less. Part of the problem is that neither the White House (across administrations) nor Congress appreciates the role that SOF can play outside of rapid kinetic action.
The first former official said using SOF for quick strikes makes for good press conferences but doesn’t help SOCOM develop into a force that can deter large-scale conflict or match Chinese or Russian hybrid-warfare activities. Like an actor who achieved success playing an action hero, SOF increasingly finds itself typecast as the door-kicker. But SOF is uniquely structured to perform another type or role: irregular warfare, which is increasingly relevant in the competition against China and Russia but in which there has historically been little interest.
“The community is bifurcated into two different things,” they said. “One of those is direct action, which is the easy button. This is what the Obama administration loved in Afghanistan, which was, ‘How many people did we kill today? Who are those people? How many more can we kill tomorrow?’ I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. That was basically the conflict.”
SOF forces are uniquely set up to conduct long-term irregular warfare. Consider the Russian use of irregular forces leading up to the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, or acts of sabotage and attempted assassination across Europe, China’s harassment of Taiwanese and Filipino vessels in the South China Sea, or the use of proxy forces in CENTCOM’s area.
“Irregular warfare is a long and slow capability, ” said the first former defense official.
The United States has used it well in Columbia against drug cartels but it doesn’t show up in the contest with China or Russia. While irregular warfare is a unique SOF capability, it’s also a tool that various administrations failed to prioritize.
“I don’t think that it’s gotten much traction because if you go to a President Biden or President Trump, or pick your president, and you say, ‘I can fix this problem. Just give me 10 years.’ They’ll say ‘I don’t have 10 years. What can you give me by Saturday?’”
People we spoke to disagreed about how to fix that problem. There was broad support for the idea of raising the assistant secretary of special operations/low-intensity conflict to something more like an undersecretary position, an idea that has been floated for years. But absent a broad, national strategy for irregular warfare that outlines key objectives and budgets, it’s not clear what that person would do with that extra authority.
Likewise, said the second former defense official, just giving SOCOM more money would not necessarily empower them to do more, not without a clear sense from lawmakers and the White House of what “more” would mean.
The ties that don’t break
The importance of SOF is also rising in another important dimension, as one of the last and most enduring elements of U.S. diplomacy.
From trade wars to traded insults in the Oval office, critics have called Trump’s belligerent attitude toward U.S. friends “ruinous,” “disruptive,” and “tragic” for America’s alliances.
Beneath the headlines, however, U.S. military-to-military relationships remain robust, at least judging by the variety of global attendees from the world who attended the Global SOF event, including the King of Jordan. A senior U.S. intelligence official told Defense One that partner militaries were actually requesting more opportunities to work with the United States, especially around information and intelligence sharing, despite the appearance of antagonism between the U.S. and other countries that permeates international news coverage.
One of the strengths of the U.S. special operations community is the deep ties that they form with partner forces around the globe, a strength that Caine called essential to U.S. military operations.
“We always fight with teammates and partners….with our allies and partners.” He described those international bonds as particularly important now and declared that strengthening them would be one of his top priorities as Joint Chiefs chairman.
That seems like a stark divergence from Trump’s efforts to extract concessions from longstanding friends.
So why are these SOF alliances growing stronger while others are fracturing? The first former defense official credited a binding feeling of professionalism and shared mission that stretches well beyond larger command structures.
“They endure beyond politics. I mean, we have lots of [U.S. and foreign] military officers who have been doing exercises together for 25 years”
The second former official said that SOF partnerships allow diplomatic engagements that other efforts don’t. “In certain parts of the world, military engagement is probably an effective substitute for other forms of economic, political, informational, types of relationship building, based really upon partner preference.”
The idea that affections and loyalties formed in the field transcend larger national notions of identity animates much modern literature and thought, from English writer Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Frank Herbert’s Dune to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. To see its power over the military mind, look to the resignation of Trump’s first defense secretary, retired four-star general Jim Mattis, who left the White House in December 2018 over what he perceived as Trump’s abandonment of U.S. allied Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq.
The stability of such bonds is likely to endure beyond the Trump White House, people said. But the recent pullback in U.S. diplomatic activity, such as the shuttering of USAID and the trimming of the State Department, will likely increase burdens on the special operations community, said the first former official.
“I don’t think that our ambassadors are less effective. Is our national message less clear? Possibly,” they said. The White House’s reduction of diplomacy “will drive a tendency to rely upon military capabilities to try to replace these things when we come into a crisis.”
The retired colonel said that the best use of SOF’s diplomatic muscle is to arm and equip partner militaries.
“The Ukrainians wanted M1 [Abrams] tanks,” the retired colonel said. “We will never, ever, ever use those tanks. [The Ukrainians] will. It’ll cost us more to demilitarize them than to give them to the Ukrainians at half price.”
Afghanistan 2.0
While special operators do offer faster ways to deploy forces, hit targets, and buy things, several people at SOF Week worried about an overreliance on “daring” strikes.
It’s not a new concern.
“The likelihood that the introduction of a handful of dozen of U.S. soldiers, regardless of how skillful they are—the likelihood of that making any meaningful difference in the course of events is just about nil,” Andrew Bacevich, a historian and retired Army colonel, said in 2015.
In 2017, then-SOCOM commander Gen. Raymond Thomas, told lawmakers, “We are not a panacea…We are not the ultimate solution to every problem, and you will not hear that coming from us.”
At that same hearing, Theresa Whelan, then acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, said the high tempo of SOF operations was at the expense of readiness and capability development. SOF was being forced to “eat our young,” Whelan said. “We’ve mortgaged the future in order to facilitate current operations.”
Back in Tampa, former officials said that an overreliance on SOF would lead to the return of a familiar historical pattern: U.S. engagement in conflicts that persist precisely because the United States refuses to address their causes with different, non-military tools.
“SOF is floated as a one-size-fits-all solution for a lot of problems,” said the second defense official, speaking about the long U.S. engagement in Afghanistan. An unwillingness to engage in those problems beyond hero missions led to “a lot of our biggest foreign-policy failures.”
Said the first defense official: ”With Afghanistan, we never lost a fight. We never lost an engagement. But we lost the war. And that, I think, is the challenge that we run into with special operations.”
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