Going on the Offensive: Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set for the Age of Strategic Competition

Executive Summary

In an era of strategic competition, America’s adversaries are engaged in persistent operations against US interests in a spectrum of low-intensity conflict frequently referred to as the “gray zone”. The legal and bureaucratic limitations for the use of power that have served America well in the past are being effectively exploited by peer and near-peer adversaries. The US should proactively aim to divert, distract, and degrade enemy capabilities through restructuring the US Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) mission set to operate against its adversaries in the gray zone. Counterinsurgency and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance should be removed from SOF’s Core Activities and given to other entities, and Persistent Gray Zone Operations (PGZO) should be added to SOF’s Core Activities. PGZO will seek to deter enemy provocations by lowering the threshold for attribution of subnational actors’ operations to the foreign states whose interests they serve, increasing SOF’s information warfare capability to project US messaging into adversarial countries, and fomenting instability in diverse regions where the US seeks to gain an asymmetric advantage over its adversaries.

Wars Between Nuclear Powers

The development of the nuclear bomb brought with it an onslaught of academic thought on how this newfound power should be used. Theories of mutually assured destruction, second strike, and nuclear triad became prominent, bringing with them an era of tense peace between nuclear powers. Today, as the US sits on the verge of potential conflict with China and Russia engages in a land war that may one day spill into Eastern Europe, that same academic fervor for the question of how wars between nuclear powers should occur is disturbingly lacking. The world no longer seems to bat an eye at the idea of American and Chinese forces fighting head-to-head — and to merely hope that such a situation will not end in nuclear disaster in the absence of arms control agreements and reliable nuclear hotlines is both dangerous and naive. This reality would make the great nuclear strategists of the Cold War turn in their graves.

So, how should wars between nuclear powers be fought? The adage regarding the recipe for frog provides a clever solution to this question. The saying goes that a frog placed directly in boiling water will jump out of the pot, but a frog that is placed in cold water that is slowly heated to boiling will stay in the pot until dead. The water reaches a boiling point in both cases, yet the difference in result is due to the absence of inflection points. The lack of sudden changes deadens the frog’s sensitivity to its perilous situation and removes natural decision points that would otherwise demand drastic action; its insensitivity to slow and persistent changes leads to its destruction.

Enemies of the West seem to have already realized a range of use cases for this theory. They actively pursue and achieve political goals while limiting inflection points through the use of a spectrum of low-intensity conflict, commonly referred to in the West as the “gray zone”. The US must retool its military ways and means to compete effectively in this space and to protect its status as a hegemon in an era of strategic competition.

Force-on-force conflict with nuclear opponents is neither inevitable nor desirable. Proactive, offensive actions in the gray zone can create intense pressure on America’s opponents while avoiding inflection points that could drive uncontrolled escalation. Changes in the US’s approach to the gray zone will allow it to establish deterrence in this space and push its enemies from a cycle of proaction to reaction. There is no time to waste; the US is currently being boiled without protest like the proverbial frog. It is high time that the US went on the offensive.

A Narrow Continuum of Force

Analysis of Russian and Chinese military doctrine reveals that both countries have a broader acknowledged continuum of force than that of the United States. Though Russia and China do not share the US’s terminology for the gray zone, they are doctrinally well-equipped to conduct these kinds of activities. Russian military doctrine emphasizes fighting asymmetrically, placing high value on tools such as cyber and information warfare. China’s military doctrine follows the tenets of Mao and Sun Tzu, seeking to win without fighting through codified tactics like that of the “Three Warfares”. From Russia’s “little green men” of 2014, the cutting of underwater cables, and the use of hacktivist groups, to China’s maritime militia and decades of strategic intellectual property theft, America’s opponents seek to obfuscate attribution and put the US in a state of delayed reaction while pursuing and achieving political goals.

Definitions for gray zone activities vary, but generally agree that these actions are designed to fall below the threshold of a kinetic response, rely on obfuscation of the source to make attribution difficult, and use technology to target specific audiences for maximum effect. Writing on the subject often describes the gray zone as “neither peace, nor war”. Defining this realm of conflict as such is dangerous. It creates room for the West to pursue lackluster responses to overt provocation by actors with known but intentionally unclear links to adversarial nations. Warfare in the gray zone is warfare; China and Russia actively accomplish political goals through these activities. Make no mistake, if the enemies of the West are winning without fighting, then the West is actively losing without fighting.

One of the major difficulties of US responses to gray zone provocations is that the US military is not doctrinally tooled to succeed in this fight. US policy makers need a broader array of responses to incursions in the gray zone to enable them to establish consistent deterrence to adversarial actions. This toolbox should go beyond merely establishing deterrence and seek avenues for the US to act decisively and offensively in the gray zone. This will require the careful and fluid alignment of multiple instruments of national power. Grand strategy demands that the US move to a state of proaction, forcing the enemies of the US to react as America molds the battlefield, choosing when, where, and how to fight rather than allowing the enemy to determine the same.

The perfect tool for this expanded mission is America’s SOF. US SOF are flexible, adaptable, and have funding and procurement systems that will allow them to retool their mission set at a rapid pace. SOF are also more experienced at conducting low attribution activities and running operations parallel to US intelligence agencies. In order to retool SOF for the era of strategic competition, they must be unburdened of their current excessive set of responsibilities and given a new range of tasks that will allow them to focus on winning at the strategic level through asymmetric warfare in the gray zone.

Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set

Modern SOF is the result of several decades of painful evolution and reinvention. This evolution is an ongoing and sometimes uncomfortable process, but it remains crucial to mission success. There is a clear desire within US SOF to achieve an ideal balance of authorizations and responsibilities, and to apply those changes to future problems. SOF must reject institutional rigidity and become more unpredictable to potential adversaries by becoming more proactive – and by embracing their roots of small, foreign, unconventional operations to remain relevant in the current strategic environment.

SOF is well positioned to leverage many instruments of national power, such as cyber warfare, information dominance, military action, and diplomacy in ways that the larger conventional military is not. These unique skills and authorizations contribute heavily to mission success. The US should slightly alter SOF’s authorizations and mission with a goal of driving slow and persistent increases in pressure on adversarial nations through operations in the gray zone. If SOF were authorized and enabled to conduct persistent, disparate, small-scale gray zone operations across diverse geographic areas, the US could steadily increase the resource and cognitive burden on its adversaries, allowing it to proactively combat adversarial operations in this space. This would compel America’s enemies to become more reactive and shift the balance of power noticeably in favor of US objectives.

The list of SOF core activities is oversized, and historical trends suggest that without intervention, they will continue to grow unconstrained. In the modern political and economic environment of limited resources, SOF capabilities will either have to proportionally decrease with the addition of new mission directives, or they will have to eliminate legacy missions to make room for the new. A potential solution to this problem is to remove Counterinsurgency and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance from SOF’s core activities to make room for a new task — PGZO.

Counterinsurgency is an exceedingly difficult mission that requires the use of long-term economic and diplomatic instruments of national power, and is better suited to the conventional military and other non-military organizations due to its complexity and significant manpower requirements. Foreign Humanitarian Assistance, though admirable, does not contribute to SOF’s warfighting mission and is an additional strain on SOF’s limited budget, personnel, and capabilities. If SOF were to eliminate these activities from its mission requirements, it could reallocate its limited resources towards conducting strategic-level, offensive PGZO.

PGZO will have three core tenets discussed in more detail below. The first will be to lower the threshold for attribution of subnational organizations’ provocative activities to the foreign states whose interests they serve. The second will increase SOF’s information warfare capabilities, allowing them to push information favorable to the US to the populations of adversarial countries in support of operations. The third will be to conduct or foment insurgency and unconventional warfare against adversaries in diverse regions where the US seeks an asymmetric advantage. With statutory authorizations and resources devoted to SOF to accomplish this task, SOF is ideally positioned to obfuscate attribution and to drive change at the strategic level.

Policy Recommendations for Enacting PGZO

Direct Attribution of Obfuscated Groups:

Gray zone activities thrive when subnational actors’ affiliations to the state are unclear. Obfuscated affiliations do not need to be extensive to be effective. As long as they slow the US cycle of attribution, they can delay its reaction time to provocations enough that a response is too far removed from the incident to be feasible. The US feeds into this cycle by allowing adversaries to disavow themselves from the actions of subnational groups that actively work to accomplish their strategic objectives. The US should hold adversarial nations accountable for the actions of subnational actors within their borders. Responses against the state for the actions of subnational actors — whether financial, cyber, or kinetic — would establish consistent deterrence, negate the advantage gained by obfuscating these ties, and encourage states to rein in malign actors that are truly unaffiliated.

Increase US SOF’s MISO Capability

US SOF should invest heavily in increasing its Military Information Support Operations (MISO) capability. MISO is currently one of SOF’s core activities, providing US SOF a tentative information warfare capability. Increased MISO operations are central to increased US kinetic activity in the gray zone. MISO operations should not only counter Russian and Chinese information warfare, but also project US narratives in support of SOF gray zone operations into target countries. Utilizing third countries to drive desired narratives into heavily controlled internet and communication environments will be vital to shaping the information environment in ways that will favor the US.

Fomenting Insurgency, Central Asia

Central Asia is rife with PGZO opportunities that America could leverage. The presence of Chinese nationals and corporations in the region pursuing the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) are ideal political targets that would force a reaction from Beijing if attacked. The persecution of Uyghur populations in Xinjiang is a severe point of discomfort for Muslims throughout Central Asia, though government response to these violations has been lukewarm. Terrorist and insurgent groups in the region, such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the Taliban, and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), are all ideally positioned and motivated to carry out attacks against Chinese and other foreign interests. These organizations are also exploitable due to their lack of financial resources and diplomatic recognition.

A key political player that could assist the US in projecting power and supplying foreign militaries is India. India has a long adversarial history and ongoing border disputes with China. If America and India were to align their anti-China goals by leveraging PGZO in Central Asia, the results could drastically change the political landscape of the region. An anti-China India-America partnership could exploit Central Asian insurgency organizations against Chinese interests by offering intelligence, military, financial, and other resources to them, as well as diplomatic recognition. SOF should be the primary US military asset leading this effort.

Fomenting Insurgency, Myanmar

Myanmar is another area where the US should seek to gain an asymmetric advantage over China. China is heavily invested in the Kyaukpyu Deep-Sea Port, located in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The port is a central piece of China’s BRI land corridor through Myanmar, intended to give China access to the Indian Ocean and provide an alternative to passage to the narrow Strait of Malacca. Myanmar has been embroiled in a civil war since 2021, when Myanmar’s military, the Tatmawdaw, removed the democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi from office. Myanmar is now torn between ethnic armed organizations under Suu Kyi’s National Unity Government (NUG), the Tatmawdaw, and a wide range of unaffiliated groups.

Arms could be smuggled to NUG-aligned militias to support their fight against the Tatmawdaw in exchange for attacks on Chinese nationals, ports, or oil infrastructure within the country. The goal of these attacks would be to draw a Chinese response within the state. China would likely rely first on the United Wa State Army (UWSA), situated in the autonomous Wa State on the Chinese border, to regain control. The UWSA is armed and trained by China, and acts as a generally neutral lynchpin to drive Chinese policy within Myanmar through violence when necessary. US SOF-backed operations to dismantle the UWSA would likely draw additional Chinese security forces into the country to secure the land route and protect their investments.

Once the UWSA is dismantled and China commits additional resources to the country, US-backed attacks would subside for a time, allowing the Chinese a brief victory. This lull in combat would be paired with SOF MISO operations to project nationalist narratives into China regarding their victories in Myanmar. Once this narrative becomes widespread within the country, China will have decreased political ability to divest itself from its Myanmar operations without embarrassment. The US will then drastically increase the intensity of its attacks against Myanmar-based Chinese interests through its established partners, drawing China in. China will be forced to commit ever-increasing resources to the fight to save face. Myanmar could easily become China’s Afghanistan or Vietnam; the war they never desired, but the one that bled them dry.

Conclusion

Pivoting any organization towards unproven ideas is difficult under normal conditions, let alone within the anarchic and often deadly playing field of international relations. With the right political will and economic support, US SOF could bend the future to its will, unlike any other organization in American military history. The US must begin proactively meeting its opponents in the spectrum of warfare that they have chosen to fight in. America can now either seize the day or continue to play the doomed role of the boiled frog. SOF is perfectly positioned to go on the offense for America — and America can no longer afford to wait.

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