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Guided by an unwavering commitment to our nation’s Special Operations Forces, our vision is to cultivate a future where all Special Operations Personnel and their families thrive with steadfast support. We envision a world where our relentless dedication ensures that unmet needs are met, enabling these elite warriors to judiciously employ their unique capabilities in achieving national security objectives.
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Special Operators often face barriers to treatment for mental health issues. Special Operations Forces Support offers discrete mental health services for Special Operators and their families.
The Special Operations Forces Support Congressional Fellowship Program is an exceptional resource for not only those who are involved in the military but also for our nation’s government.
Fellowship Program
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Special Operations Forces Support offers family support services to service members facing unexpected challenges in family life. Our confidential providers emphasize building personal and family resiliency.
Current News
Special Operations Research: Out of the Shadows marked an important moment in the development of special operations scholarship. Published in the inaugural issue of Special Operations Journal (SOJ), which later evolved into Inter Populum: The Journal of Irregular Warfare and Special Operations, Christopher Marsh, James Kiras, and Patricia Blocksome’s article argued that special operations research remained underdeveloped despite the growing strategic importance of SOF around the world. 11 years have passed since the writing of this piece and the SOF and IW community have made incredible strides to fill this gap, though there is always room for improvement. Dr. Marsh and Dr. Kiras are the Editors-in-Chief at Inter Populum, along with Dr. Ryan Shaw of Arizona State University.
Special Operations Forces (SOF) thrive in ambiguous, chaotic environments because the principles of chaos theory directly enable and accelerate innovation in modern warfare. To understand this connection, it is important to explore the interconnections between chaos theory and innovation. This analysis defines their key principles, highlights their similarities, and shows how SOF uniquely leverages these dynamics to create operational advantages.
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and non-kinetic irregular warfare (IW) represents both a qualitative shift in the nature of strategic threat and a quantitative increase in adversarial operational effectiveness. To be sure, IW has always relied upon exploitation of asymmetries of expectation, capability, attribution, legality, and response thresholds. Certainly asymmetries, and tactics like indirect approaches (e.g., employing covert and clandestine and non-kinetic operations) are factors in both regular warfare and IW. AI affords unprecedented capacity to operationalize these asymmetries and tactics at scale, and when employed within IW (often within a paradigm of “matrix operations” to coordinate exceedingly large number of participants in/across vast networks), can afford speed and precision to enable minimal cost (of resources and personnel) and augmented effectiveness of such engagements. Indeed, current peer competitors and state adversaries have explicitly recognized that strategic objectives can be achieved through persistent sub-threshold engagements that avoid triggering conventional military retaliation.
In 2013, Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno, Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos, and commander of US Special Operations Command Admiral William McRaven cosigned a document that should have grabbed the attention of the entire American defense establishment. Its central observation was unambiguous: The Pentagon’s concept of competition does not reflect the fundamental reality that “competition and conflict are about people.” A decade later, the Army proposed cutting its special operations forces by up to 20 percent. Congress felt compelled to insert a $20 million provision into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act simply to make permanent US special operations forces’ ability to conduct irregular warfare by, with, and through partners. The defense establishment continued its decade-long debate about whether irregular warfare capabilities are still needed at all. The warning from three four-star generals produced no durable institutional change. Why? And what should the defense establishment do about it now?
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