A Green Beret with the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) trains U.S. Soldiers and Philippine Marines on proper aircraft load and unload procedures April 3, 2022. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Ryan Hohman)
SOF WEEK 2023 — After 20 years of high-tempo combat operations in the Middle East, parts of the US special operations community are facing a “morale challenge” now that much of the mission has shifted to less direct “campaigning” in the era of great power competition, according to the commander of US special ops in the Pacific.
“There is absolutely, when we get right down to deck plates, there’s a morale challenge, because there’s a lot of folks that quite frankly have joined the organization with a vision of what their day’s work, what their career would look like, and that’s rapidly morphing and changing,” Rear Adm. Jeromy Williams, commander of US Special Operations Command Pacific, said Wednesday during a panel at the SOF Week 2023 conference in Tampa, Fla. “But I think the paths [are] laid out very well for us, the cognizance of the challenge that’s on our shoulders.”
Williams’ comments came after he was asked if he had seen any issues with the transition away from counter-terrorism operations to “campaigning” as the US settles in for a long-term competition, especially in the Pacific, with China. Campaigning generally refers to non-kinetic special operations responsibilities — key among those is training, advising and establishing long-lasting relationships with the special operations forces of foreign partners and allies in hopes of preparing for, or better yet deterring, conflict.
“Some of our folks don’t have as much experience in competition,” said Williams, himself a former Navy SEAL. “The thing that we have to be very careful [of] is our cultural affinity in terms of the bias for action, our desire to gravitate back to what we know versus embrace what [we are] maybe a little apprehensive or insecure about. But I think we do have formative experiences” in the campaign-related operations, and some “fundamentals” cross over.
Williams’ contention that some operators may question their role, however, wasn’t shared by his boss, US Special Operations Command head Gen. Bryan Fenton. Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, Fenton told Breaking Defense the morale issue is “absolutely not” something he’s seen himself nor heard in his discussions with commanders around the globe.
“I think they [special operators] signed up to solve wicked problems,” he said, in whatever form those problems present themselves.
Partner Building As Focus, But Action Still Required
Special operations forces are certainly still engaged in direct counter-terrorism and crisis response operations; American commandos reportedly killed an ISIS leader earlier this year in Somalia, and special operations forces (SOF) were the backbone of the evacuation of diplomats from Sudan last month. In another panel Wednesday, National Counter Terrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid emphasized that the terror threat, like from ISIS, is still very relevant.
“We should not kid ourselves that that network’s highly sophisticated threat has been defeated, because it has not,” she said. She also reminded the audience that the US special operations are still very active in Iraq and Syria.
By and large, though, the White House and the Pentagon have shifted their focus to nation-states: the “acute” threat of Russia and the “pacing challenge” of China. That move, years in the making, meant that American special operators have had to conform to the new reality.
Partner relationship-building is hardly a new mission for US special operations — it’s been the bread and butter for US Army Special Forces, specifically, for decades — but the renewed emphasis was hard to miss in the first days of the SOF Week conference. It was a theme in Fenton’s own keynote address with regard to the key role US special ops have played in training and advising the Ukrainian military, and the panel following Williams’ was titled “Partnerships as a Pacing Item.” At the beginning of that panel, the moderator asked foreign partners in the audience to raise their hands, and flurry of arms draped in different camouflage patterns shot up while the crowd clapped.
The panel after that one, the last of the day, was dedicated to special operations’ continuing role in counter-terrorism, but in it the head of American special ops in Africa, perhaps the command with the most kinetic potential short of Central Command, acknowledged the world has changed.
“The future of SOF and CT [counter-terrorism] in Africa is really about allies and our African partners, coming together, unity of effort. Our focus is really going to be to serve as connective tissue between nations to enable African solutions,” Rear Adm. Jamie Sands III said. “When we look at what we’ve done before when it comes to CT, to crisis response, you have to think hard about what tools do we need to drop, which new ones do we need to pick up” for what he called the “new paradigm.”
“We do kinetic things, but we also do a lot of other things,” he said. Sands, for his part, didn’t mention any morale issues.
Abizaid, speaking alongside Sands, suggested that it was a false choice between the counter-terrorism or crisis response missions and competitive campaigning. The CT work, she said, would provide opportunities for the partnerships and the trust-building that’s so critical to keeping Russia or China at bay around the world.
Still, others on Williams’ panel seemed to agree that some special operations personnel needed some reassurance about their importance in the Pentagon’s modern strategy, and the direction they’re meant to follow. (Kimberly Field, director of J5 for strategy, plans and policy, said policy-makers similarly had to be reminded of the importance of special operations, saying there was “fight” to get a special operations “hook” in the National Defense Strategy.)
Vincent Brooks, former commander of US forces in Korea and before that a senior official on the Joint Staff directing the War on Terror, said special operations leaders should tell their people to focus on their mission and not be “consumed” with the greater question of what competition means for them.
More bluntly, he said leaders have to keep those under them from “getting lost in” thinking, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I winning or losing? How come I’m not shooting somebody? Why am I not in a stack?
“That’s not all there is to it,” he said. “But they have to be able to do that, and also able to deal with someone with a generational relationship, recognizing how important that is… It’s critically important.”
