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One of the greatest threats to national security is the outdated social and economic compact between civil society and the US government.
For twenty years our national security apparatus was optimized for counterinsurgency in faraway places, with uncontested logistics and freedom of movement. While we focused there, our pacing threats focused on the information domain and on economic levers. They adapted and we did not. This is particularly true in the rising vulnerability of the resilience of our physical, economic, political, and social infrastructure to interdiction from adversarial powers, networks, and groups, effectively merging national and homeland security.
In the dead of night, the underground network surged to life, flooding the streets with coordinated protests, blazing storefronts, and targeted strikes on military outposts. Simultaneously, the armed forces fractured from within as officers chose sides, either following clandestine letters from the fleeing Shah or being bought off by deep-pocketed black funds. Within 72 hours, a mission its planners thought had failed that very night achieved total victory, collapsing the Iranian regime and removing what Washington and London saw as a major threat to the West in a single lightning stroke.
The Special Forces teams arrived in civilian clothes, posing as a government survey mission; uniforms and military IDs were left behind. They were there to train an army.
The United States had the military weight to deploy conventional forces in Laos. That was never the problem.
An overt ground intervention risked widening the conflict and undermining the neutral, independent Laos Washington sought to preserve. North Vietnamese occupation and control of parts of the country demanded a response. Policymakers needed a way to act without making the overt commitment they sought to avoid.
In October 1961, thirty Tibetan fighters slipped out of Mustang, a remote Himalayan region in Nepal, and crossed into Chinese-held Tibet. They ambushed a People’s Liberation Army convoy and returned with a commander’s pouch containing more than 1,600 classified documents. The documents exposed problems within the Chinese army and Communist Party and provided the first hard evidence of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. CIA officials called it the best intelligence coup since the Korean War.
During the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), the United States has operated in an environment characterized by persistent, uncontested intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). This environment reshaped elements of US Special Operations Forces (SOF), particularly those focused on counterterrorism and direct action, emphasizing precision strike capabilities over traditional Special Reconnaissance. The Russo-Ukrainian War suggests a paradigm shift is underway. Electronic Warfare (EW), Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (cUAS), and integrated air defenses contest the technical ISR capabilities of platforms such as drones and aircraft. This limits a battlespace commander’s ability to maintain constant situational awareness. As persistent ISR becomes less reliable, the comparative advantage of SOF grows. As the United States prepares for future conflicts, SOF must place renewed emphasis on Special Reconnaissance, self-sufficient operations, and deep-penetration intelligence collection in nonpermissive environments. Using historical examples of the Special Air Service (SAS), Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRPs), and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) alongside lessons from Ukraine, United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) should rebalance and reorient itself towards providing Special Reconnaissance and intelligence in denied spaces.
The PRC’s security goals include denying the United States unchallenged freedom of maneuver under the Arctic ice and the northern approaches to the PRC’s home waters. The PRC is systematically using instruments of national power flexibly to gain access to scientific treaty memberships, enter denied areas via scientific missions, and obtain comprehensive seafloor topographic data through undersea mining, commercial undersea cable ventures, and clandestine mapping missions. The PRC will probably use any intelligence advantage to ensure that, when it chooses conflict, it does so with an undersea presence that is both technologically advanced and informed by extensive knowledge of undersea topography, sensor arrays, currents, and NATO/US tactics.
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