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Actually, Naylor is correct in that they added two more primary SF missions in the past few years. From the USASFC website:
"Special Forces units perform seven doctrinal missions: Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, Special Reconnaissance, Direct Action, Combatting Terrorism, Counter-proliferation, and Information Operations. These missions make Special Forces Command unique in the U.S. military, because it is employed throughout the three stages of the operational continuum: peacetime, conflict and war.
Special Forces Command’s Unconventional Warfare capabilities provide a viable military option for a variety of operational taskings that are inappropriate or infeasible for conventional forces, making it the U.S. Army’s premier unconventional warfare force.
Foreign Internal Defense operations, SF’s main peacetime mission, are designed to help friendly developing nations by working with their military and police forces to improve their technical skills, understanding of human rights issues, and to help with humanitarian and civic action projects.
Often SF units are required to perform additional, or collateral, activities outside their primary missions. These collateral activities are coalition warfare/support, combat search and rescue, security assistance, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, humanitarian de-mining and counterdrug operations."
Concur with your comments about SF and CT. The USASFC policy statement above reinforces the comments about the uniqueness of UW and FID as well.
I am not privy to any classified info now, but the primary candidates for additional UW efforts right now would seem to be Iran and NK.
If we have not identified indigenous groups in those countries with the potential for resistance yet, we are making a big mistake. Obviously, any NK effort would be largely material with possible SK support. In Iran, I believe that we could actually operate near the border areas (particularly the Iraqi and Afghani borders) with team sized elements. I personally believe that there is sufficient opposition to the governments of those two countries, particularly among the young, to create a good resistance movement in both countries. Even if the movements remained small, they would give the governments an internal threat to worry about, likely further alienating additional members of the populace. PSYOP and IO would play a great part in those efforts as well.
Just my .02, YMMV.
TR
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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
De Oppresso Liber 01/20/2025
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