Excellent RAND perspective on modern special warfare and its relevance.
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SPECIAL WARFARE: THE MISSING MIDDLE IN U.S. COERCIVE OPTIONS
Dan Madden
November 20, 2014 • in Analysis
http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/spe...rcive-options/
In the face of adversaries exploiting regional social divisionsby using special operations forces and intelligence services, and dwindling American appetite for intervention, the United States needs to employ a more sophisticated form of special warfare to secure its interests. Special warfare campaigns stabilize or destabilize a regime by operating "through and with" local state or nonstate partners, rather than through unilateral U.S. action. Special operations forces are typically the primary U.S. military forces employed, but successful campaigns depend on bringing to bear a broad suite of U.S. government capabilities. The figure below differentiates special warfare from more familiar forms of conflict. Special warfare has particular relevance to the current global security environment as policymakers seek options short of large-scale intervention to manage both acute crises (e.g., ISIL, Ukraine) and chronic challenges (e.g., insurgency in the Philippines).
Special warfare fills the missing middle for exerting influence between the costly commitment of conventional forces and precision-strike options provided by drones, aircraft, missiles, and special operations forces' direct action. The potential for escalation associated with precision-strike capabilities may render them too risky to employ in some circumstances, while in cases where the targeted regime's core interests are involved, precision-strike options may be too little to compel desired changes in behavior. Despite policymaker antipathy toward the costs and risks of intervention, observed and forecasted instability around the world will continue to create situations in which policymakers are forced to act to protect U.S. interests. Special warfare provides these decisionmakers with an additional option that can help protect American interests and manage risks in some important cases.
Special warfare is not new. The United States has a long (and somewhat checkered) history of special warfare operations. Classic cases from the 1980s include U.S. support to the government of El Salvador against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front Marxist insurgents and to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. In the former case, the U.S. military was restricted to providing no more than 55 advisors, who did not participate in combat operations. In the latter case, operations were conducted almost entirely from and through a third country, Pakistan. However, more than a decade of focus on counterterrorism, Iraq, and Afghanistan has atrophied U.S. special warfare campaign design skills in the military and appreciation for special warfare's employment as a strategic tool in the policy community. Efforts are being made, however, to reinvigoratespecial warfare capabilities.
The United States is not the only country with special warfare capabilities, as explored by other analysts and practitioners on War on the Rocks, includingDave Barno, Nadia Schadlow, and Lawrence Freedman. Russia has recently been successfully exploiting a mix of coethnic sentiment, special operations activities, and conventional deterrence to annex Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine. Some Baltic officials, sensitive to the presence of substantial Russian minorities in their own countries, are anxious over what might come next.
Iran has skillfully employed its own special warfare capabilities as part of along-term regional strategy, using state tools and nonstate proxies to advance its regional interests. Iran's actions in Syria, for example, have contributed to a vexing dilemma for the United States, in which both action and inaction threaten policy disaster-the former an Iraq-style quagmire and the latter an uncontrolled regionalization of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict. The Syria dilemma is symptomatic of Iran's broader efforts to establish a sphere of influence in the Middle East through mechanisms that ingrain instability in the structure of sectarian interrelations, which are similarly exemplified by its patronage of clients such as Hezbollah and its Quds Force activities in Iraq and other Arab states. Coupled with its quest for nuclear capability, Iran's activities risk a cascading proliferation of nuclear weapons in a deeply divided region. In the longer term, if Iran's quest for, and Russia's exercise of, nuclear deterrence and irregular influence are seen as successful asymmetric strategies for circumventing U.S. conventional dominance, other regional or aspiring global powers might adopt similar approaches to securing their interests.
The United States should consider employing special warfare campaigns to counter the aggressive employment of proxies by states competing for regional influence. Though there is no obligation for the United States to fight its adversaries symmetrically, adversaries are challenging the nation in waysdifficult to credibly deter with conventional campaigns or precision strikes alone. If the United States were to rebalance its dependence on precision-strike, conventional, and special warfare capabilities, and how they are used to complement one another, it might constitute a change in strategic posture analogous to the shift from Eisenhower's New Look dependence on massive nuclear retaliation for deterrence to Kennedy's Flexible Response policy for deterring aggression at multiple levels of the escalation ladder.
Our findings and recommendations are based on semi-structured interviews with special warfare practitioners and researchers, observed military exercises, a review of relevant literature, country and theater campaign plans, case studies, and analysis of a dataset of special warfare operations that our team constructed for this study.
(Cont. at link above)
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