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Contemporary security discourse is frequently captured by a false narrative on new forms of warfare. The recent emergence of the term “cognitive warfare” is a symptom of this misconception, suggesting a novel evolution in warfare that does not exist. This form of non-military aggression was not unknown to us; on the contrary, at the onset of the Cold War, the United States profoundly understood the critical importance of public opinion to national security, both domestically and within nations abroad. American leadership recognized that the Soviet Union, and later China, waged political warfare that specifically targeted these populations to undermine the United States without firing a shot.
This article examines ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) as the operationalized manifestation of unrestricted warfare in contemporary strategic competition, arguing that it collapses normative assumptions of access, attribution, and initiative. It contends that the renewal of irregular warfare lies in signature reduction as a counteroffensive gray zone doctrine that preserves freedom of maneuver by centering human operational judgment under pervasive surveillance conditions.
This essay argues that strategic sabotage must be a SOF core activity to win future conflicts. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) created a SOF community that is used to being the supported entity. SOF dismantled terrorist networks with support from conventional forces who held the advantage within their domains. Those roles will reverse in a large-scale conventional conflict. Conventional forces will be the supported entity and will not hold the same advantages they did during GWOT. SOF’s role will be to use its core activities to enable conventional forces to win. Strategic sabotage is a means to fill this role and must be incorporated as a SOF core activity.
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s Cat is often mischaracterized as a simple problem of observation. In reality, the thought experiment illustrates something more unsettling: a system can exist in multiple states simultaneously, and the act of observation collapses that complexity into a single, misleading outcome. Security force assistance (SFA) suffers from an analogous problem. Partner forces are complex institutional systems shaped by politics, incentives, institutions, leadership, and threats. When the United States chooses metrics to observe its security partners, complexity collapses into a simplified performance snapshot that obscures more than it reveals.
What the plan is trying to do in one sentence
It reorients diplomacy around a short list of national priorities and uses visas, bilateral deals, assistance, sanctions, standards setting, and commercial diplomacy as leverage to shape partner behavior and global systems in ways that strengthen U.S. sovereignty, security, and economic power.
Strategy is not abstract for the Special Operations community. It becomes deployment tempo, operational risk, and time away from home. And while the National Defense Strategy rarely needs to name Special Operations Forces directly, it assigns missions and priorities that, in practice, lean heavily on SOF’s comparative advantages: speed, access, partner enablement, and precision.
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