TAMPA, Florida — The U.S. faces a “decisive decade” as it stares down great power challenges from China and Russia, regional threats from Iran and North Korea, and the resurgence of extremist groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda — and America’s Special Forces will play a central role in confronting each, said Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.
Gen. Fenton, speaking Tuesday to an audience at the Special Operations Forces Week convention here, said he expects the number of Special Forces missions to increase dramatically over the next decade. His comments underscored the expanding competition and conflict between global adversaries, which has reached far beyond traditional physical battlefields and deep into the economic, cyber, information and space domains.
What role U.S. Special Forces — often tasked with highly secretive missions that never make headlines — will play in the 21st century’s great power competition is a key topic here. Current and retired military officials sketched out a future in which elite Special Forces units will deepen partnerships with allies abroad to stave off enemy influence in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
They said that America’s Special Forces are working intently to counter Chinese and Russian economic, information and influence campaigns designed to weaken America’s standing in its own backyard of North America, particularly in the increasingly competitive Arctic region, but also elsewhere across the continent.
Special Forces could play a leading role in America’s own “irregular warfare” efforts, one former military official said, as a way to weaken enemies from within and chip away at their ability to conduct traditional and non-traditional war against the U.S.
The scope of the threats facing the U.S. today, combined with a rapidly evolving technological battlespace that will be defined by drone swarms, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence, have come together to create one of the most consequential periods in American history.
“In this decisive decade, autocrats and terrorists alike seek to upend the free and open international system,” Gen. Fenton said during a keynote address here.
Those adversaries want to “divide and weaken the power” of America and its partners, he said.
The threats posed by state actors, even the most powerful ones such as China and Russia, are sometimes viewed as playing out primarily in theaters beyond U.S. shores. The most immediate threat from China could be an invasion of Taiwan, while Russia‘s direct military action has been against its neighbor, Ukraine, in a war that has now stretched into its third year. Malign activities by Iran and its proxy network seem mostly confined to the Middle East, targeting U.S. assets there and key allies, most notably Israel.
But officials here were quick to make the case that North America and the broader theater around it could also become a major battlespace.
“In the event of a conflict, we would expect them to try to isolate us in the homeland, to not allow us to project forces to whatever region might be driving some sort of global conflict, And really, to diminish our domain awareness, take away our ability to see their strategic capabilities so they can increase the perception, or the reality, of holding the homeland at risk, should they seek to impose a direct cost on the homeland itself,” a Special Operations Forces commander said in a discussion with a handful of reporters here.
Adversaries’ goal, the commander said, will be to “erode our national will and our national cohesion in the hopes that we will put up the weakest fight possible.”
“Our role is to impose those wicked problems on our adversaries,” the commander said. “So, as we think of the other side of that coin, we’ve got to be able to deny our adversaries the ability to impose wicked costs on us.”
Getting more ‘aggressive and offensive’
That phrase, “wicked problems,” has been repeated across speeches and sessions here. The term has been used for decades within military circles. A 2014 article in the online magazine Small Wars Journal defined it as: “Wicked problems have no definable problem statement, no objectively correct answer, and layers of uncertainty and unpredictability that make efforts to ‘solve’ them, especially through bureaucratic consensus, naive.”
Such problems grow even more difficult to tackle on a modern battlefield that extends farther than the traditional land, sea and air domains.
“I can make an argument for anywhere from five to eight different domains. It was hard enough taking three domains and combining those,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, director for joint force development for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, speaking Tuesday at a panel discussion.
“It gets exponentially more difficult with how you look at seven, eight domains and how you bring forces to bear,” Gen. Anderson said, citing space, cyber and other modern-day domains.
For the U.S., that’s often viewed through a defensive lens: How can America defend against Russian disinformation campaigns or Chinese economic coercion, cyberattacks by Iran or North Korea-linked hackers, or influence operations to weaken the population’s faith in its government?
But current and former officials said that America’s Special Forces could find themselves at the center of those “irregular warfare” missions to undermine a foreign adversary from within and compromise their ability to wage war.
“We’re also the masters of these irregular warfare capabilities that right now seem to be used mostly by our adversaries against us,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Kenneth Tovo, former commander of the Army Special Operations Command.
“But at some point, I expect that we, the West, will get serious about competing in a more aggressive and offensive manner. And those irregular warfare capabilities will serve us well to create dilemmas for our adversaries, to create issues for them to deal with on their peripheries,” Gen. Tovo said at the panel discussion Tuesday, naming China, Russia and Iran as specific U.S. enemies.
“The thing they fear most is internal instability,” he said of those nations. “When you look for cracks we can put a lever into, one of those is our ability to create unconventional warfare efforts.”
