Irregular Warfare Podcast - Strategic Disruption by Special Operations Forces

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Episode 102 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast examines how special operations forces can disrupt the strategic designs of Washington’s adversaries. Our guests begin with an in-depth discussion on civil-military relations, examining the relationship between SOL/IC and SOCOM. They then discuss the unique capabilities that special operations forces bring to the table, both during peacetime competition and large scale combat operations. Finally, they address the complexities of interagency cooperation, and how irregular warfare units can leverage their skills to deter adversaries, impose outsized costs, and create relative positions of advantage.

The lines between peacetime competition and war are definitely blurring, largely at the insistence of our adversaries. We're seeing a greater willingness to use limited force and violence short of war. And I think SOF is arguably well positioned in that many of its capabilities for actual large-scale combat operations require significant investments up front in peacetime. And that complementarity of those missions actually means that SOF is a relatively useful hedge force for the department to buy down risk in both campaigning and in conflict simultaneously. I think the long-standing relationship that Special Operations has had with Ukraine,

going back really since shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, but actively since really the little green men showed up there in 2014. And that period afterwards has allowed us to work with the Ukrainians on a number of different asymmetric capabilities that we see them applying on a regular basis. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. on irregular paces. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and my co-host today is Nathan Kaczynski. Today's episode examines how special operations forces can disrupt the strategic designs of Washington's adversaries. Our guests begin with an in-depth discussion on civil-military relations, examining the relationship between SOLIC and SOCOM. They then discuss the unique capabilities that Special Operations Forces bring to the table,

both during peacetime competition and large-scale combat operations. Finally, they address the complexities of interagency cooperation and how irregular warfare units can leverage their skills to deter adversaries, impose outside costs, and create relative positions of advantage. Christopher P. Mayer is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations in Low Intensity Conflict. Previously, he has served in numerous positions in government, to include leading the DoD's Defeat ISIS Task Force and serving on the National Security Council staff as the Director

for Counterterrorism. Mr. Mayer holds advanced degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Eric Robinson is an Acting Associate Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Program at RAND. Mr. Robinson's research focuses on special operations, irregular warfare, and gray zone challenges, and he holds advanced degrees from the College of William & Mary. degrees from the College of William and Mary. In 2023, he co-authored a report entitled Strategic Disruption by Special Operations Forces, which serves as the anchor for today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with ASD Chris Mayer

and Mr. Eric Robinson. Eric, Chris, thanks for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Thanks, Ben. Nathan, really appreciate the chance to come join. You guys are doing great work with this podcast. I'm excited to be here with Chris as well. and really appreciate the chance to come join. You guys are doing great work with this podcast. I'm excited to be here with Chris as well. Yeah, thanks to all of you and especially glad to be here with Eric, who's done lots of work with us and really enjoy what I've been able to listen to on the Regular Warfare podcast. So look forward to adding my voice to that. Excellent. So Eric, we found this report to be fascinating, particularly because you identified five ways that U.S. and Allied Special operations forces can frustrate our adversaries' strategic goals, and it's great

to get that level of specificity. But before we dig into those specifics, could you tell us why you decided to write this report? Like, what motivated you? Thanks. That's a really great question. Kind of speaks to the fact that this report was really something that we put a lot of time and energy and effort into. It's a long running challenge that I have personally intellectually tried to figure out how we can help solve really what the department's approach is in more proactive forms of campaigning vis-a-vis Russia and China. So post 2018 NDS, obviously, the department really shifted its focus towards the threats and challenges from nation state competitors. And a lot of that focus naturally for the Department of Defense focused on deterring and if needed, actually fighting a major war. But what was less

emphasized since that point is on what do we need to do short of war to actually secure our interests and deny our adversaries the ability to really achieve all of their objectives without fighting. A lot of terms have been thrown around in this space, both in the 2018 National Defense Strategy and also in the 2022 National Defense Strategy and also in the 2022 National Defense Strategy, that call for the department to impose costs, to create vulnerabilities, target vulnerabilities, and present dilemmas to our adversaries. But not a lot of conceptual work has gone into how to actually frame how operations that do cost imposition aren't just likely to create significant escalation in response. position aren't just likely to create significant escalation in response. So really, the goal of this research was to take this premise that the Department of Defense has a role to play in special operations forces specifically in more proactive, direct forms of cost and position and understand looking at historical cases, how the actual conceptual logic of how those campaigns have

achieved friendly strategic objectives and not just escalation in response. So before we dig into the meat of the Rand report, we need a quick lesson in civil-military relations, especially because this report recommends a lot of interagency cooperation. Chris, could you explain the role of SOLIC? What's its value and how does it fit into the larger national security enterprise? It's an important question because it may seem strange to folks that aren't in the Pentagon, and it is because it's strange. So SOLIC is inherently unique and mirrors, in many respects, some of what U.S. Special Operations Command has. So within SOLIC, we have a policy side that is long and well-established. And for that, as the assistant secretary, I report up

through the undersecretary for policy, said another way, the secretary's chief policy advisor. And like SOCOM, we also have a service-like role. So I am based on authorities that Congress has strengthened in recent years, actually in the chain of command between the commander of special operations and the secretary of defense for his service-like role. So not the traditional title 10 role. So what that means is I have two jobs and I have two ways I report up through the secretary of defense. What that means in practical terms is I interface with the parts of the Pentagon that do policy and operations. And I interface with the parts of the Pentagon that do policy and operations, and I interface with the parts of the Pentagon that do more traditional programs and resourcing.

And this potentially, and in many practices, gives SOLIC a lot of ability to influence on both what we're doing, the policy and ops side, but how we're doing it, making sure we're resourced and invested in the right places. That's unique from how the military departments, the policy and ops side, but how we're doing it, making sure we're resourced and invested in the right places. That's unique from how the military departments, the Army, Navy, and Air Force operate. They're not on the policy and ops side, and also unique from how the combatant commands work, which of course don't have that service-like role that SOCOM uniquely does. Chris, could you also characterize the relationship specifically between SOLIC and SOCOM? Yeah, so I think at the most basic level, we engage with SOCOM from SOLIC from those two different perspectives, the policy and ops side, if you will, and also the more traditional service side.

So by law, as being in the chain of command there, I have the authority, direction, and control of the service-related aspects of SOCOM. But ultimately, how this plays out, I think, is a very tight partnership. From my perspective, having been in different roles here in the department, not always in SOLIC, but having had previous roles in SOLIC, I would say, again, as objectively as possible, this is the tightest relationship I've ever seen, not just because I'm responsible for some of that, but because we're on a different journey than we were over probably the last 20 years and really trying to articulate the soft value proposition to a number of parts of not only the Department of Defense, but the interagency that haven't had a whole lot of experience with soft, or if they have, it's been in the previous 20 years on counterterrorism or crisis response. So

there's a lot of perceptions and beliefs that this is about SOF as the CT force or SOF as a crisis response force, where I think we would say, based on how we're investing, the capabilities we're building, and how we're working increasingly with the interagency. It's about that strategic competition piece. It's about looking through a number of other lenses. Some of those may be the same ones we've used in the CT or crisis response arenas, but we're using them in a different way. And some of these are entirely new in how we're actually executing them and also investing in them as we build capabilities. So it is something that I think we spend every day nurturing that relationship with SOCOM,

but also making sure horizontally that I'm tight and our team is tight with the other combatant commands because ultimately, as you all know, most of our SOF is applied through the combatant commands, not as an individual offset from SOCOM, but also other parts of the interagency so that we're working with the State Department, with the intelligence community, with National Security Council staff, and some less traditional

partners like Treasury, Commerce, others, especially as we're taking on increasing missions that require the authorities' capability and know-how of those agencies. So I think that's a great segue to dig into Eric's report. Eric, you claim that special operations forces are uniquely tailored to frustrate our adversaries' goals through this concept of strategic disruption. Could you explain what strategic disruption actually means and how and why soft forces are particularly well-suited to do this? Sure, absolutely. So we approached this report and the broader research really in an inductive way, looking at past examples where

special operations forces have, or similar forces have attempted to pursue strategic aims by disrupting some critical aspect of an adversary's approach in campaigning. And we didn't necessarily go in with an understanding of the conceptual logic that would really tie all of these together. But in identifying roughly 50 or so historical cases where SOF or similar forces have attempted to do disruptive acts previously, really a core logic came out of looking across all of these cases, which is that SOF execute a series of tactical or operational actions, usually as part of some larger campaign. And the goal of this campaign is to disrupt some critical aspect of how an adversary or rival is seeking to achieve its own objectives. In that actual action, the goal is to deny them the ability or degrade them the ability to achieve their own interests through what they have assessed to be the best way that they could possibly go about doing it.

Basically push the adversary off of their preferred approach. In so doing, such campaigns are actually then able to buy time, space, create opportunities, incentivize missteps by an adversary, or just generally create openings for friendly elements of national power, not just SOF, but diplomatic, informational, conventional military forces, and broader economic tools to then come in and consolidate gains or achieve other broader friendly strategic objectives. For special operations specifically, SOF's value proposition here is largely in its unique set of capabilities, its ability to get access to politically sensitive or denied areas of the world,

and really in SOF's well-proven ability to establish friendly partner relationships all over the world. And through those sort of core tenets of what SOF can bring to the table, SOF is, in essence, uniquely capable of actually executing many of these disruption campaigns throughout the world. And I can offer up a couple examples. So one easy one, and then happy to talk more examples throughout the rest of this conversation as well. In the mid-90s in Bosnia, U.S. SOF, as well as some allied SOF,

were intimately involved in the efforts in Bosnia under the.S. SOF, as well as some allied SOF, were intimately involved in the efforts in Bosnia under the Joint Commission Observer Mission, JCO. And the goal of this mission was to help enforce the Dayton Accords, in essence. Really, the role of SOF was to get down and dirty in the weeds of a lot of the local civic society and patronage networks that exist within Bosnia, understand who the key actors were. And then when potential provocations were occurring post-Dayton Accords that could lead to a reintroduction of ethnic violence, SOF was able to actually disrupt the underlying networks that could have fomented and made that violence even worse. Another example is SOF's role in support to the paramilitary campaign

in Tibet in the 1950s, which was not strategic in and of itself in the sense that it really sought to provide a form of resistance that forced the CCP to consolidate local control in Tibet. But the ultimate strategic effect was during the broader US-China rapprochement that was led by the Nixon administration, was we were able to use the withdrawal of that effort as a bargaining tool in order to incentivize the CCP to move away from its close relationship with the Soviets. The common thread of all of these campaigns is that the initial action disrupts the adversary from its preferred approach and creates openings and opportunities that broader long-term goals can be achieved as a result. That's a fascinating example of how the actions themselves might not seem significant, but it gives you leverage and it's able to tie different

instruments of statecraft together. So I'd be interested to hear both of your thoughts on this, gentlemen, but the report makes a distinction between peacetime and wartime actions. Basically, Eric, your report says that special operations should have different mission sets and peacetime competition versus large-scale combat operations. Could you talk through some of those distinctions? Sure. So I actually would argue that the value proposition that SOF brings to the joint force in terms of its capabilities is often going to be common across many of the peacetime competition and large-scale combat operation mission sets. We identify five specific capabilities for resisting, supporting an ally or partner, influencing,

understanding, and targeting. The real difference between SOF's role in peacetime competition versus large-scale combat is really the why SOF employs its forces and the actual campaign design of its ultimate goal of utilizing SOF in those missions. The strategic objective for large-scale combat operations is clear. It's the military defeat of an adversary, and that often amounts to denying them some core military objective that they are pursuing in combat. SOF's role really then is to leverage those capabilities to support that broader joint force denial campaign, often through asymmetric or indirect means that are denying an adversary, that are extending an adversary, that are better enabling the joint force to reach into hard to reach areas. But for campaigning, soft's role in those missions, and really it's nuanced because the strategic objectives of the United States short of war are also nuanced.

And what we found in this research is that soft's role is primarily about executing those initial disruption campaigns by having the existing relationships worldwide to enable policymakers to have options down the line, such that friendly elements of national power can consolidate their goals. The lines between peacetime competition and war are definitely blurring, largely at the insistence of our adversaries. We're seeing a greater willingness to use limited force and violence short of war. And I think SOF is arguably well positioned in that many of its capabilities actual barge-kill combat operations require significant investments up front in peacetime. And that complementarity of those missions actually means that SOF is a relatively useful hedge force for the department to buy down risk in both campaigning and in conflict simultaneously. to add to that point from Eric. So I should say very much appreciate this report and the work that Eric and others have done. And truth in lending, we didn't pay him to do this. So I'm

not saying this from the perspective of self-interest beyond the idea that this is really a ripe area that is both going on outside formal government channels and in government channels, in particularly the two parts of this, what is the proper role of the Department of Defense using more regular asymmetric capabilities prior to large-scale combat operations? And then secondly, within the department, where does SOF fit into this? And more importantly, perhaps, where does the rest of the joint force fit into this in a peacetime, non-large-scale combat operation environment? And I think these types of reports and additional thought from the outside is really going to drive a lot of the internal debate and discussion and learning. that a lot of the change that's probably going to come on these issues is going to come from the outside. And it needs to come principally from those that don't wear a soft hat as former. So we need other people out there talking about these things that are looking at it through a broad

national security lens, not predisposed to think that soft is going to be the preeminent force in this, although we might end up being that, but have already weighed for themselves the other options that are out there. Because I think we're very conscious here in the department that asymmetric, irregular, gray zone, hybrid, you pick your term, are not exclusively the purview of SOF. My theory of the case has been like on counterterrorism, SOF is going to be the leaders in thinking through this, working through the TTPs, figuring out how to work with the interagency, how to leverage allies and partners in a way. But we need the rest of the joint force and we need the rest of the US government to really be effective in this space,

especially as we start to think about this across multi-domains. If you think of cyber space, that's not the sort of areas where the SOF enterprise is going to inherently be the leader. So Chris, the RAND report says that soft can execute tactical and operational level actions to frustrate our adversaries preferred strategies across the diplomatic, informational, military and economic spectrum. This seems like a lofty goal because coordinating action between different tools of state power is extremely difficult. And this is a difficult question, but could you discuss how Solic and SOF work with other governmental organizations to achieve these effects across

the dime spectrum? Yeah, it's really important, I think, as we look at really the effects we're trying to achieve here. And Eric said it earlier, it's less about what tools we're using, I think, and more about what we're trying to achieve and use the term campaigning design. I think this is not something that is readily understood in all parts of the U.S. government policymaking arena. Maybe parts of the department understand that, but the idea that you would embark on a deliberate campaign over long periods of time for effects that in and of themselves may not be decisive. And I think we have made early missteps, just criticizing myself and our team by thinking of this initially as an irregular warfare campaign, and that's somehow going to translate to these other departments and agencies. They don't know what irregular means, and they certainly get

spooked by the term of warfare. And I think we might use a softer term of campaigning or campaigning towards integrated deterrence. But I think where this starts in the department here needs to be understanding in most instances, whether it's the department writ large or soft as a component of it, is not going to be in the lead here. And this is where we need to sometimes check our own ambition, which is one of the things that makes SOF so valuable in many instances, but can also work to its detriment of, I see the problem, I'm going to fix the problem. We may need to bring along much more consciously other aspects that could be more decisive in the diplomatic realm,

in the economic realm, in the increasingly, we talk about it, intelligence diplomacy realm of being able to go in and talk to a part of a government that understands that there's sensitivities, whether it's escalation sensitivities, whether it's PRC encroachment or Russian encroachment sensitivities, and be able to maybe be decisive there. But understanding at the end of the day, this is going to be largely a game of patience, a lot of small actions over a period of time, well calibrated to stay below that level of armed conflict, or maybe said better, level of escalation. We're going to have to have a set of fellow travelers in other departments and agencies, much as we did on counterterrorism, that understand how they fit into this puzzle. This isn't a DOD puzzle that we've sketched out the outlines and they're just

plugging in, like has at times been the case with GIATFs and other things. I think we're going to actually have to have partners understand it's their effect at the State Department, in the Treasury Department, in the intelligence community that is going to be most decisive. And as I think Eric said in his report says, looking for those opportunities where we can identify those, be in support, maybe even create the conditions that allows the other aspects of our instruments of power to apply there. And I think we shouldn't lose sight, and I'll keep saying this all the time, beyond just the interagency, our key partners and allies have their own interagencies. And sometimes the message

is the same, but the messenger is more credible, more effective if it comes from somebody with a British accent or speaking an entirely different language. Chris, if I could pick up on one of the things that you just said, if that's all right. The interagency coordination in the war on terror was largely about the DoD enterprise trying to ensure that it had the right enabling support from other parts of the U.S. government to support our ongoing military operations. And clearly, in strategic competition, that has flipped to where DoD is the enabler to the interagency. And I think in many cases, the department is still stuck in the paradigm of needing to have kind of a holistic understanding and a holistic structures built to enable that coordination. But one of the things that we at least identified in this research is that a lot of the initial

efforts by soft or similar forces for these sorts of regular warfare campaigns, the long-term strategic objective of that or the long-term strategic gain that came at the end was not necessarily known in advance at every time. And so in many ways, it is an opportunity, I think, for the special operations community to proactively look across the field of interagency players and have potential options for SOF to enable interagency effects and lean in in advance, perhaps even before the full strategic clarity is known about what the long-term opening would be. And I think that's a real chance for the special operations enterprise to actually try to incentivize some of the interagency cooperation that we all know that we need to

achieve in campaigning, but we may not have the bureaucratic structures in place to do. Yeah, gentlemen, fascinating points all around. Chris, I liked your insight that the message or the action itself is important, but the messenger may be just as important. And same to you, Eric, right? A lot of times we don't even really know the opportunities we're uncovering when we maintain a presence in this region or that. But Eric, you state that SOF has five unique capabilities that give it a comparative advantage over other types of general purpose forces, which include resisting, supporting, influencing, understanding, and targeting. Could you explain what these capabilities actually mean? So we built this typology of kind of five core pillars of SOF's ability to support strategic disruption that's based on a number of prior works that looked at kind of ways to break down what SOF really can bring to the table.

And resistance is really focused on efforts to either enable resistance to an occupation, an insurgency to overthrow a government, or occupying power, what the army would generally call unconventional warfare. Examples of strategic disruption that fall into this lane would be, you know, there were significant efforts by the OSS in World War II to conduct resistance activities, both behind enemy lines in France, but also in places like Yugoslavia in Burma, that were trying to, in essence, fix enemy conventional forces in a rear area such that they could not be used elsewhere or attrit their morale, incentivize an adversary to spend additional resources. The second pillar is support. What we described, this would often be known as foreign internal defense, but we've framed it more broadly in the sense that there

are a number of things that special operations forces do that are really focused on building the capacity of foreign security forces and enabling their own efforts to defend not just against internal threats, which we primarily think of in the CT lens, but also against potential external threats to their sovereignty. Significant examples I'd offer there would be the long running legacy of relationships that we've built with actors like the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service in the Philippines, in places where we have been able to build up and support the growth of highly professionalized special operations and other military forces that we're then able to work with jointly on operations, but at least in the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service

case, that their professionalism and their ability to actually execute military operations with our support has served as a pretty effective hedge against increasing Iranian influence that's actually disrupting Iran's preferred approach in Iraq. The third pillar is influence, his efforts to inform or shape the attitudes, behavior, and decisions of foreign actors in support of our interests. Obviously, the significant domain of army psychological operations forces, huge interagency actors involved in the influence effort. This is where SOF really works hand in glove with specific diplomatic missions abroad along these lines. A good example that we analyzed was the Operation Observer Compass in Central Africa. That was really the campaign to disrupt the Lord's Resistance Army that relied really heavily upon psychological operations and messaging to try to incentivize LRA fighters to defect as a relatively indirect approach to attrit and degrade really their ability to continue to destabilize significant portions of that region. The fourth

pillar, understand, involves efforts to extract strategically relevant information from politically sensitive, contested, denied, otherwise hard to reach environments. The understand pillar for SOF is really critical in strategic disruption in the sense that if you're going to execute a campaign to try to disrupt an adversary from their preferred approach, you need to understand what they prefer at the start. So the efforts of being able to do that sort of strategic reconnaissance and understanding of an area will enable you to make the better decisions about what the potential escalation risks of such campaigns are as a result. And then finally, the target pillar. And I think this is the thing that many of us who have worked with special operations forces in the war on terror are most familiar with,

efforts to seize, destroy, disrupt, or even secure key personnel, equipment, infrastructure in those hard-to-reach areas. The easiest example of such campaigns would be the bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. But the real disruptive effect of that targeting effort was, in the end, bin Laden had been relatively marginalized in his ability to actually command and control al-Qaeda. But it sent a signal not just to the rest of al-Qaeda, but to Russia and China as to our ability to reach into truly denied or hard to reach areas. These five pillars of capability, there are additional things that we could lump into that in terms of the special operations community's ability to support broader DoD objectives. But we think that this is a pretty useful framing for how to think about what SOF are currently doing and should be doing

to execute these sorts of campaigns. Eric, that was an interesting point about the Iraqi CTS, because I don't know if, you know, operators and advisors on the ground who are actually training and supporting the CTS would have imagined that they would morph into a hedge against Iranian influence in the Northern Arc and the greater CENTCOM region. But Chris, how do you think about SOF's core competencies? Do you agree with Eric's assessment? I do. I think when we think about the end in mind again, and some of the things that are inherently skills that SOF has really matured in the CT fight. We think about networks and the ability to not only, as Eric said, understand the network and well beyond just

the piece that is the targeted aspect, but what makes it tick and really break that apart and increasingly thinking of it from the perspective of helping others to interdict it at key points and of course not always kinetic and as we use this term all the time you know agnostic finish i think we're talking about needing to do that much much more in the context of competition in some instances with lots of good examples in recent years, that's just exposing the illicit activities of the PRC or Russia in places that shining light on things means that the host government, if they're the ones being exploited or the victims of a parasitic approach, often then act on for a whole host of reasons, sovereignty, but also because they don't want to be called out as part of this. But it also often has the benefit of deterring whoever is conducting this activity using this network from continuing to build similar ones. So as we think about the places that a more regular warfare or asymmetric approach are applicable. I wouldn't always think about the places that

are undergoing armed conflict or even aspects of armed interventions. I would think about other places that look like where you might go on vacation, but if it's something that the adversary is looking at to hold at risk, we can play defense, but we can also go on the offense in those places and help shore up some of the host governments to be able to be more resilient against what we know will be parasitic or exploitative activities by these adversaries. So I think it goes to the core of what Eric's report says, which is in some instances, preventing the adversary from getting what they want is in and of itself a success. And it doesn't always have to be in the context of accomplishing our objectives. And I think we're well positioned from a SOF perspective to really be, in some cases, that maneuver force in some combatant commands where we're actually helping to really tee up the disruptions. Actually, even though SOCOM is known for having a good budget, it sounds like what you're describing is, you know, US SOF can be employed to disrupt our adversaries while staying on the right side of the cost curve, which I think is an important lesson from the Cold War.

Eric, you relied heavily on case studies to inform your report. Could you delve into some of the historical examples you used to inform your analysis regarding SOF's value proposition? Happy to offer a few kind of key examples and details. So one, I think we'll try to think through at least one that's relatively small, and then a couple that were more significant efforts. So one, I think, relatively discrete case is a SOF-led civil affairs operation, also in Bosnia, but this time in 2014, that was providing humanitarian assistance in response really to a natural disaster that had occurred. You wouldn't traditionally think about humanitarian assistance

as a tool for disrupting a great power adversary. But in this case, the Russians were simultaneously deploying their friend, the Serbians, what they were referring to as a high visibility rescue force and trying to sort of capture the information domain narrative that the Russians and the Serbians were the ones who were specifically there to support the relief from this natural disaster. Well, the U.S. soft civil affairs approach was really to work through the multi-ethnic Bosnian armed forces to provide that same sort of assistance directly targeted based upon their own understanding of the needs of the local populace and really establish the Bosnian armed forces as the legitimate bulwark and provider

of support in response to this natural disaster. Other examples of historical campaigns are obviously longer term. A lot of the examples from World War II, the OSS operations that required significant upfront investments in the early 40s to build resistance networks behind enemy lines, both in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific, were really about trying to disrupt either the German or Japanese efforts. There's one example, Detachment 101, OSS Detachment 101 in Burma, was able to lead a pretty significant counter-influence campaign that was able to, in essence, sap Japanese forces' morale by providing them both truthful and some-shaped

messaging about the actual nature of the ongoing war, the fact that Japan was losing significant territory, and that war was not going basically along the lines of how the Japanese were telling their own forces. We also looked at adversary examples. One of the things, at least from a social science perspective, that we often try to guard against is that we like to look at U.S. or at least Western examples that are often written up in English and accessible to us. But we really made an effort here to look at how both the Chinese, the Russians, as well as even other friendly forces, the Israelis, for example, have used similar capabilities. One that I'll describe from the Russian perspective, I mean, really is something that I think we all know somewhat well, is the Russian campaign in Syria to prop up the Assad regime.

We include that as a significant Russian special presence backed by air power. We include that in this report as an example of strategic disruption, really because of the logic of the Russian approach in Syria was to bolster up the Assad regime's ability to crush through brutal and violent means the local Syrian opposition forces that were having military success early on in the conflict and were significantly threatening the long-term sovereignty and the ability of the Assad regime to continue governing. The introduction of Russian military advisors and support really helped the Syrian armed forces to push back, and in essence, deny the opposition's preferred approach, which was military, and push them into a suboptimal diplomatic and largely requiring

external intervention from the U.S. and from other allies that never truly came. And that's a good example. There are many other Russian examples of this that I'm happy to dig into. So I like the Syria example, but from a different perspective than Eric presented it, which is the U.S. perspective. And I think here I'm hitting on a key point of areas where we've done counterterrorism work often are fertile ground for continued work in a more great power competition or regular warfare approach as well. And I think Syria is a classic case of the U.S. there for defeat ISIS purposes, and we still remain there. But our presence frustrates a number of adversaries. Iran, Russia would like to go further than they're able to working through the Assad regime. We know that other aspects of the border in Iraq, the Iraqis. Our presence and the activities

we're doing, albeit in a CT frame, very much frustrate our adversaries' preferred approaches. I think just the disruption in advanced conventional weapons we're able to do, I think is really important from the perspective of countering Iran's ability to project power and build deeper proxy relationships. And then I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Ukraine because there's just so many different perspectives to talk about there. I think we could talk about it from the perspective of declassifying intelligence early on to expose the Russians' very aggressive approach. And even in light of some of that exposure, the Russians decided still to go into Ukraine, and we know what happened there.

I think the longstanding relationship that Special Operations has had with Ukraine, going back really since shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, but actively since really the Little Green Men showed up there in 2014 and that period period afterwards has allowed us to work with the Ukrainians on a number of different asymmetric capabilities that we see them applying on a regular basis and have throughout the conflict. So I think some of that is in the context of resistance warfare. Some of that is just more traditional information operations and the ability to operate in a more soft, as we would do soft, as opposed to Spetsnaz model that might be still some of where the Ukrainian lineage had been. So at the risk of sounding like an exclusively soft podcast, which is actually not our goal,

I was wondering if we could think about this from both of your perspectives and that of the geographical combatant commander. What takeaways should high-level joint commanders consider when they think about employing soft forces to achieve campaign objectives? In other words, soft is just one subset of tools that combatant commanders have to access to. How should they use it? Chris, can we start with you? Sure, yeah, and I think we're starting to see just what you're asking about in more practical terms where I sit in the Pentagon, starting to see a lot more conversation at that four-star level of the combatant commanders, especially the geographic combatant commanders,

even though I know we don't use that term anymore, of talking about needing a regular warfare asymmetric approaches. I think on the functional side, so here I'm talking about needing a regular warfare asymmetric approaches. I think on the functional side, so here I'm talking about Spacecom, Cybercom, Stratcom, Transcom even, more understanding that SOF and more broadly other aspects of the department are going to be critical for placement and access to bring those capabilities to bear. So I look at it, and I'll answer your question in kind of those two different frames. So starting first with the geographic combatant commanders, the CENTCOMs, the UCOMs, the INDOPACOMs, the SOUTHCOMs, the AFRICOMs, the NORTHCOMs, it's really a means of feathering in some of the capabilities from an asymmetric perspective, even if the overall intent is a

more conventional approach. So deep relationships, and I often use the term generational relationships with allies and partners, is something that is going to be critical as we're thinking about nuancing approaches with a host government or in an environment that could be escalatory in multiple different dimensions. And that's something that I really think SOF and indeed our CT experience over the last 20 years has really laid the groundwork for. And then I think as well, one of the things that we've done particularly well in recent years, especially as we think about this in the counterterrorism experience, is a translation to small footprint, low visibility, and risk-informed efforts in small numbers. And so while, you know, we often joke that many of the combatant commanders are in the game of getting as much capability as possible,

and a lot of that tends to be conventional, those that are more resource-constrained or posture-limited in a very DOD term often have to rely on much smaller formations to achieve some of these effects. And some of the best uses and some of the best examples of an irregular warfare approach are almost, in my mind, driven by necessity, as opposed to having the option to have a fighter wing or a bomber task force or a large maritime crew DES deployment. Because those aren't available, it's a degree of creativity

that often is required. And some of the resource limited commands have been very, very effective at using the capabilities they have off and soft to really achieve some of these effects that frustrate our adversaries preferred approaches. And then just briefly on the functional combat commands, we're really in an interesting world at this point, from my perspective, where there's a degree of fellow travelers amongst the functional combat commands. We talk often from the soft perspective of this triad or nexus, depending on who you're talking to, that brings in cyberspace, STRATCOM, and soft often as the means to generate the placement and access, i.e. get proximate to a target that's close enough to then bring on the capabilities that cyberspace and STRATCOM probably can't project from home

station and get precise enough because a lot of times it's a proximity thing. And this is where I think SOF helps to create that. And not my area of expertise, but what I've heard from my colleagues who are much smarter on this than me is a lot of the space activity is cyber in nature, and much of the cyber capabilities have a space element to them. So when you start thinking about trying to exercise a campaign over time that has the ability to control escalation but toggle up and toggle down to the effects we want at various times to keep an adversary moving in the direction we want them, We need to think in the cyber and space domain increasingly as well, because they certainly are. That's both from the defensive, protecting our own capabilities and our partners, but also in the offensive, holding at risk the capabilities they may rely on. So there's a tremendous number of tools that our four stars that are running the combatant

commands, I think, have at their discretion. that our four stars that are running the combatant commands, I think, have at their discretion. And their staffs are going to, I think, increasingly be tasked to look in this holistic manner. And we certainly are standing by to help as much as we can. Thank you. And same question to you, Eric. How should combatant commanders be using SOF? Well, I really think that combatant commanders are actually well positioned. And in general general by virtue of the fact that they're seeing the threats that they face up front on a daily basis are actually at the leading edge of thinking about how to employ soft in our regular warfare context and i really think the goal and

the value proposition here is that soft can buy down risk for the combatant commander in really kind of two key ways one is a cost argument and just kind of like the forces required to execute the missions that SOF with a relatively small footprint, often a 12 person team can maintain significant relationships, can maintain significant access to many, many countries and hard to reach places of the world with a small footprint that doesn't really tax the department, not necessarily in terms of cost even, but in terms of the opportunity cost of actually employing SOF or the readiness that you need to maintain to actually prepare to fight a war should that actually happen. But I think that the second way that SOF really helped buy down risk is that they actually present less escalation risk to the adversary and invite less overt signals that would likely push an adversary to respond with increasing conventional aggression. A small special

operations team working largely by, with, and through a partner, often the host country, is going to be significantly less escalatory than a brigade combat team sitting across the border from Russia, or an aircraft carrier, or a other ship that's traversing the Taiwan Strait. And I think, as we think about how joint commanders really should and are, in many ways, employing SOF, it's about optimizing the balance of the big high end conventional capabilities that we have that send that strong deterrent signal with the persistent and very widespread access and relationships that soft can provide. And I think the only final thing I'd add is that, you know, as we think about what soft can do in this space, I think that there's a tendency to say that maintaining those relationships

has value of its own, which is certainly true. But as combatant commanders look at our adversaries and rivals' efforts to really achieve their own objectives short of war without fighting, in many cases, Russia and China are doing this left and right, acknowledging that our conventional warfighting capabilities are strong, and they don't necessarily want to fight a head-on-head war with us. It would be massively costly for everyone. Their approaches are designed to achieve all of their objectives without fighting. As a result, soft and broader interagency efforts for these sorts of disruption campaigns may actually be the less escalatory and less costly option in the long run, particularly when disruption campaigns are designed in such a way as to incentivize an adversary to take a

suboptimal approach, rather than simply trying to present a massive roadblock to them achieving their objectives, to which their only real response is to fight back. I think that's the kind of risk calculus that I think the department has really made significant strides over the last couple of years and having that kind of more nuanced understanding of risk. But I certainly think that there's still room for combatant commanders and the joint force writ large to really internalize that approach to risk. Chris, that was a great point about how sometimes necessity or even constraints can serve as a mother of invention. A couple of years ago, we brought General Mejia, Colombia's highest-ranking general officer, on to the show.

talked about the relative success of Plan Colombia and actually how U.S. imposed constraints, you know, limited advisors, troop caps, caps on military articles, may have actually improved the overall effectiveness of that security force assistance program. But Chris, I do know you're short on time. We're lucky just to have you today. So I'll ask our final question to you. Based on today's conversation, what are the major takeaways for policymakers, academics, and practitioners interested in irregular warfare and soft employment? Yeah, first off, thanks again for the opportunity to talk with you guys. I've really enjoyed it. So it's a great question. It's very open-ended, so I'll give you a couple things to think about. First, I would say talking especially to our operators who may be listening to this podcast, like our two hosts here, and who are thinking about how this applies to me. I think one of

the things we need to continue to challenge ourselves by is something that has made SOF unique in many respects, which is to ask the question, what's the strategic context that I'm operating in? I never hear when we bring up a non-commissioned officer or a company grade officer, hey, I just do my job. Somebody else tells me why this matters. I think it's continuing to think across that tactical, operational, and strategic context, even if you're operating at the tactical level or operational level, how this fits in is really going to be critical in not only building the trust amongst our senior leaders to take some risk in putting our SOFT into an environment that is going to require, if you will, those soft SOFT skills that might mean talking to foreign diplomats, might mean engaging with a country team, but understanding ultimately how to manage risk and what that risk is. It isn't just a risk in the context of a military type activity. the SOF enterprise to continue to think in those terms and be able to speak to,

especially our interagency partners in a way that they understand. And many of them will, from their own experience over the last 20 years, think of SOF as a direct action force. We know that's not going to be most of what we're called on to do, especially in a campaigning sense, even in maybe a crisis sense, but certainly in the left of conflict environment. As we're looking to campaign in places, it's going to be a lot of different tools and a lot of nuance that's going to be required. And I think we need to continue to invest in what we often call our enablers, our intelligence partners, our clan logistics, our logistics and our comms folks, we're really going to be the extension of the operator set in being able to operate in complex environments, especially on the intelligence side. And I say that not only

because I grew up in the intelligence community initially, but when we talk about being proactive that Eric talks about in his report, that's not sitting around the team room or at the headquarters thinking about where the threat's going. That's certainly useful, but that can't be the sum total of it. It's going to have to be the intelligence community helping to plot the way of where we think these adversaries are going and getting ahead of them. And that's going to be something that's going to have to be baked in to our thinking at all levels. Eric, you end the report with some implications for the future of SOF, primarily in cases where conventional deterrence alone will prove to be an insufficient tool. Could you discuss the conclusions of your research? Well, first and foremost, I think the

conclusion that our research team took away from this report is that these sorts of strategic disruption campaigns aren't just a possibility for future special operations. They're relatively common in the historical record. That SOF and the Department of Defense writ large doesn't have to simply accept its current largely reactive approach to campaigning. That strategic disruption represents a viable concept for how the department can go about undermining our adversaries' coercion in a proactive manner, which is really in line with what each of the last two national defense strategies have called for in some form. For future special operations forces in terms from a design perspective, as well as from a campaign design perspective, a couple implications. First,

the success of these campaigns should not be measured in whether they produce immediate strategic impacts. There's often a need for the MOEs and MOPs to prove that the campaign that you've conducted is actually working along the lines of the way that you designed it up front. But the long term strategic benefits of disruption efforts often aren't known in advance and materialize much later down the line. Second, to do these sorts of campaigns along the lines of what Chris was talking about with really the key role for the intelligence community in this space. Success in strategic disruption requires deep understanding

of what an adversary strategy actually is, where their priorities are, how they view the tools that they arrayed on the battlefield for Blue to ever have any hope of designing an effective disruptive campaign. SOF has a key role to play there in understanding what we call the understand pillar of strategic disruption, but it has also a key role to play there

in building the effective relationships with our partners, allies, and interagency actors to really build that understanding up front. Additionally, I think as we think about future campaigns for SOF, these types of efforts are really going to require campaign plans that are flexible, that adapt over time, that are able to adapt as the adversary changes in response to our campaigns. But they really have to maintain that long-term focus. And most importantly, they have to be built upon strong bedrock of interagency partnerships that are not just important to actually conducting the initial disruption campaign, but are important that when the strategic openings occur down the line, that such disruption can ideally produce, that our diplomatic,

informational, and economic partners in the rest of the U.S. government are there to consolidate the gains that are created as a result of strategic disruption. Chris, Eric, thanks for joining us today. That was a fascinating conversation on soft and strategic disruption. Thanks for joining us in the Irregular Warfare podcast today. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Nathan. Really enjoyed the chance to come on. This is such a great venue for these types of discussions. And Chris, as always, great to see you and to have this sort of a discussion. Yeah, pleasure's all mine here. Thanks, Eric and Nate and Ben for pulling this together. Really enjoyed the conversation. I hope your listeners take on board some of what we've said here, but also come back with critical critiques in instances where they may see things differently.

And that's the value of the forum you have here is to keep that dialogue going. So really appreciate the opportunity and thanks very much to all you and the work you do to pull this together on your spare time as it might be. Thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, we will discuss irregular warfare lessons from the Cold War with Professor Jake Shapiro. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all-volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners

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