By Daniel Ross
The Special Operations (SO) Imperatives just received a much-needed overhaul. These important U.S. Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) cultural artifacts changed relatively little over the past 35 years, but change has now arrived. The United States (U.S.) Army recently published the latest version of Field Manual (FM) 3-05, Army Special Operations. This long-awaited update to FM 3-05 (dated 26 June 2025) supersedes the Global War on Terror (GWOT) era iteration published on 09 January 2014. The following article briefly explores the new age of the SO Imperatives and revisits aspects of the recent conversation within ARSOF organizational culture that led to a more streamlined, integrated, and user-friendly list.
The legacy (pre-2025) SO Imperatives fell into obscurity throughout the GWOT years. A central problem was that the unwieldy list of 12 imperatives remained ambiguous or unapplicable to many end-users at the ground level. Additionally, the GWOT ending and shifting contemporary strategic environments forced organizational change across the U.S. Army. Some final precipitating factors for reforming the SO Imperatives occurred when FM 3-0, Operations, introduced U.S. Army-centric tenets and imperatives in 2022. Meanwhile, the pervasive influence of multidomain operations (MDO), large-scale combat operations (LSCO), and irregular warfare (IW) further contributed to the push for change. Uncharacteristically rapid updates to FM 3-0 in March 2025 by the U.S. Army provided the final guidance necessary for doctrine developers to complete and publish FM 3-05.
Figure 1. Original U.S. Army Imperatives (2022) compared to Legacy Special Operations Imperatives
The revised doctrine continues to highlight principles, tactics, and procedures employed by U.S. Army leaders and planners executing special operations and related activities. Even more importantly, (in accordance with Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 1-01), FM 3-05 reiterates that special operations continue to exist as one of the five core U.S. Army competencies. Joint Publication (JP) 3-05 defines special operations as “activities or actions requiring distinct modes of employment, tactical techniques, equipment, and training, often conducted in hostile, denied, or politically or diplomatically sensitive environments.” As with all warfare, the principles, tactics, procedures, tenets, and imperatives of special operations require constant review and adaptation.
Figure 2. U.S. Army Core Competencies
FM 3-05 arrives at a pivotal junction and provides important updates to maintain consistency with U.S. Army and Joint Force (JF) doctrine as ARSOF evolves to operate across the modern competition continuum. Phenomenological research from 2022 to 2023 on the leadership and management strategies that U.S. Army Special Forces (SF) senior noncommissioned officers used to be successful during the GWOT instigated an interesting dialogue concerning the SO Imperatives. The research and dialogue produced enlightening ARSOF perspectives on the SO Imperatives and their relevant application in future conduct of IW and LSCO. This prompted a revisiting of SO Imperatives’ importance to ARSOF doctrine and the implications of the U.S. Army’s 2022 introduction of overarching imperatives in FM 3-0, Operations. Creating these explicit U.S. Army imperatives, with notable similarity to the traditional SO Imperatives, produced an inflection point for ARSOF.
The May 2024 article in Special Warfare, “Revisiting the Special Operations Imperatives for Future Irregular Warfare Conflicts,” explored that inflection point and helped find ways to effectively streamline and integrate the SO Imperatives with the U.S. Army tenets and imperatives introduced in the 2022 FM 3-0. The article indicated that the SO Imperatives require constant, careful analysis and would benefit from closer examination to reveal imperatives crucial, memorable, and distinct to the conduct of special operations. The article also highlighted specific feedback from ARSOF senior leaders about which imperatives might be well-suited for integration with the overall U.S. Army imperatives. The new list of SO Imperatives in FM 3-05 appears to reflect many of the suggestions that stemmed from the outside research, professional ARSOF dialogue, and careful analysis by the Joint Army doctrine developers.
The current SO Imperatives have been pared down from 12 to five more concise and less redundant guiding directives.
Figure 3. Revised List of SO Imperatives in FM 3-05 (2025)
They have now been referred to as ‘additive’ imperatives to the U.S. Army’s list. Some might argue that this erases an important piece of ARSOF organizational culture and subordinates special operations to a more nebulous and overarching set of U.S. Army imperatives. Realistically, the SO Imperatives needed an update for quite some time. FM 3-0 revisions, in 2022 and then 2025, merely provided the final impetus to remove redundancy and irrelevance from the list.
Figure 4. Revised List of U.S. Army-centric Imperatives in FM 3-0, Operations (2025)
Many ARSOF leaders had already identified that some of the SO Imperatives were ambiguous or had become redundant, self-explanatory, and unnecessary. Others discussed how most soldiers in ARSOF only remembered the first SO Imperative (Understand the operational environment), and that the list would be more powerful if limited to five points, like the SOF Truths. This constructive criticism highlighted the potential to streamline, combine, or carefully revise FM 3-05 to be more in line with U.S. Army MDO (FM 3-0). In this regard, the new ARSOF capstone doctrine has accomplished its mission to better integrate with the U.S. Army’s current operational framework.
Specifically, FM 3-05 (2025) succeeds in streamlining and integrating the SO imperatives into the overarching U.S. Army’s tenets and imperatives. Simultaneously, the new list notably preserves the original intent of the SO Imperatives. The current FM indicates how the U.S. Army imperatives “are actions Army forces must take to defeat enemy forces and achieve objectives at acceptable cost.” Meanwhile, the SO Imperatives remain the basis for “planning, preparing, executing, and assessing [special operations] missions.” Importantly, alongside thoughtful improvements and changes, the revised SO Imperatives did not abandon the central focus on how ARSOF should think about its tasks and missions. Considering ARSOF’s role in the overall U.S. Army and the JF, the revision helps solidify special operations as one of the U.S. Army’s core competencies.
The new SO Imperatives illustrate an aspect of ARSOF’s capacity to rapidly learn and adapt to the complexities of the modern conflict landscape. Challenging entrenched institutional practices or culture is never an easy task. Nevertheless, the revised FM 3-05 has presented a concise and less redundant list of imperatives for ARSOF to carry forward into the IW and LSCO realm. Always recognize political implications, engage the threat discriminately, anticipate information’s psychological effect or impact, operate with and through others, and ensure long-term engagement (the hallmark of ARSOF). Nested within the overarching U.S. Army imperatives, this new language helps highlight ARSOF’s value proposition across multiple operating environments and phases of conflict. After all, the intent was to help ARSOF find balance with the U.S. Army’s newly chartered course and describe how ARSOF contributes to MDO. The recent revision of the SO imperatives represents an integral and successful part of that effort.