American cult: Why our special ops need a reset

SOF and "Big Army"

Until relatively recently, the U.S. military had a problematic relationship with its special forces. The Vietnam experience soured many in the conventional military on the special operators, whom they saw as ill-disciplined and overrated. Others argued that concentrating superior troops and leaders in single units denied the rest of the force the leavening effect that those soldiers could have added to regular formations.

Despite the skepticism of senior leaders, however, SOF expanded on an ad hoc basis in the years following Vietnam, until its tenuous position with the Pentagon changed with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which established an overarching Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and strengthened the position of SOF within the defense structure.

The institutional strength of SOF relative to their conventional cousins was subsequently turbocharged by the 9/11 attacks and their leading role in the ensuing Forever Wars.

Today’s operators enjoy a privileged and inverted relationship with their parent services. SOF is now a caste apart, dominating the upper ranks of the military and monopolizing media and cultural attention. The “quiet professionals” many originally envisaged now have a media machine unrivaled across the military. Today’s SOF often treat the conventional military as the minor leagues from which they can selectively draw new talent. This distinction impacts the morale of conventional forces, even if few are prepared to publicly discuss it.

This stratification has impacts beyond hurt feelings, however. Separate chains of command and separate lines of effort can sometimes undermine what should be unified campaign plans. SOF theory begins with the proposition that specially selected and trained small units can have a vastly disproportionate battlefield impact, and this has often been the case. Sometimes, however, conventional units and scarce air assets have had to drastically intervene to pull SOF forces out of untenable situations of their own making, as happened in Mogadishu, and Operation ANACONDA, and elsewhere.

SOF and Society

America’s worship of its special operators raises uncomfortable questions about who fights America’s wars and how that affects U.S. policy.

For the better part of two centuries, America’s “special sauce” was its ability to raise effective mass forces in wartime. The U.S. ground forces that crushed the Axis represented a large number of (reasonably) well-trained, highly mobile, and lavishly supplied conventional forces, backed by massive firepower and embedded within a joint force capable of asserting and lethally exploiting U.S. dominance of the air and sea (dominance that were themselves products of mass mobilization).

These quality conventional units were by doctrine and design reliant on ordinary conscripts and volunteers. Even elite ground units of World War II, like our five airborne and six marine divisions, were tough but basically accessible to most troops, and, by extension, to the average American. By definition, however, not everyone can be SOF — a hard reality that raises difficult questions about who actually fights today’s wars.

It is a question that policymakers are in no hurry to explore, though. Small and insular SOF units provide a dysfunctional policy community with a lethal, capable, and discrete instrument that they can quietly employ with little political cost. Casualties stay within a self-selecting and narrow segment of society. Policymakers can wage war with minimal impact on broader American society and, all too often, they have little incentive to embed SOF efforts within a viable political strategy. Put simply, SOF can and does offer political leaders easy answers to complicated problems.

That being said, much of SOF’s vaunted secrecy is largely illusory: host country nationals and adversaries soon know that they are there and usually their activities are open secrets within the U.S. With each operation, it is worth asking whether SOF’s secrecy is designed to shield their activities from the enemy or from the American public and our various oversight mechanisms.

The Cult of SOF's Negative Impact on SOF

Even among the operators themselves, adulation can breed arrogance and a lack of accountability.

Most SOF troops will admit to sometimes seeing absurd episodes of indiscipline and favoritism that would have been crushed in even the most anodyne conventional unit, but which are quietly tolerated or overlooked in the fraternity culture of some SOF elements.

Most innocently, this entails quietly covering for illustrious senior troops whose bodies can no longer take the staggering demands SOF life. In other cases, it can give way to more insidious and even criminal conduct. The case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher may be the best known entry in SOF’s pantheon of misconduct, but is hardly alone. In 2017, a group of SEALS and Marine operators killed an Army Green Beret in a sickening hazing incident in Mali and followed it with a bizarre and shocking apparent ex parte effort to intercede with the soldier’s widow.

This followed a 2012 episode also in Mali, others in Iraq and Afghanistan, another in Erbil, and incident after incident elsewhere. In many cases, the troops involved have faced relatively light consequences for their actions, if, indeed, they faced any at all. To their credit, some SOF leaders themselves have openly addressed the repeated breaches of basic disciplinary standards.

Clearly, at least some SOF felt the strain of multiple combat deployments over the last 20 years. At the same time, however, we can also surmise that the command climate of some units was undermined by the ability to mask problems behind a shroud of public adulation, secrecy, and elitism.

A Warning From History

"When a nation reawakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for its liberation. When empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers."

—Menachem Begin, The Revolt (1951)

SOF are tremendously skilled and dedicated professionals and America is fortunate to have such troops. At the same time, though, SOF’s place within the broader military and society needs a reset.

Congress and executive branch officials should strengthen oversight of SOF and sharply question whether extravagant demands for secrecy are justified (from whom are we really concealing our hand?) Policymakers should ensure that when SOF is needed, their actions are synchronized with other kinetic and non-kinetic measures and embedded with a broader diplomatic and political strategy. SOF can be an exquisite tool, but they are not a stand alone policy.

The Special Operators themselves currently recognize that discipline and standards within their community need reinforcement. They can also ensure their training highlights their role within a broader force and ensure that the military as a whole is also recognized where appropriate. The fact that even an excellent film like “Black Hawk Down” barely mentions the 10th Mountain Division troops who incurred significant casualties while rescuing Task Force Ranger in Mogadishu should have incurred institutional pushback from the Army technical advisors and, frankly, from the SOF participants themselves.

More broadly, as we enter a different strategic setting from the 20-year war on terror, military commanders should seriously reconsider how SOF will be employed in a new mission set and what types of command relationships will this setting entail. We should note that SOF played a crucial role in the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Persian Gulf War — two of our more successful military endeavors of the postwar era — but they did so firmly ensconced within, and subordinated to, the larger conventional task force.

At the end of the day, though, redressing the imbalance will be difficult: the Cult of SOF has a long pedigree. An obsession with elite and specialized forces is a phenomenon observed in late-stage empires from Byzantium, with its Varangian mercenaries, through mid-20th century France with its Paras and Legionnaires, all immortalized in Jean Larteguy’s novels.

It is the unfortunate affectation of a restless and decadent society that is in constant conflict overseas, but whose own disaffected citizens feel little obligation to defend their country or to view their wars as anything other than spectator sports.

The public worship of today’s military is, in many ways, a political and emotional tithe that obscures the reality that the American public has outsourced its wars to a small and self-contained subset of society. SOF are simply the apogee of this phenomenon.

Through little fault of the operators themselves, they sit at the pinnacle of a warped religion only slightly of their own making.