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Owen West’s brief remark during the 2026 AUSA Project Agincourt autonomous warfare panel deserves attention beyond the room. West, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, directed the question to Derrick Anderson, the office’s current occupant. The words “More to follow on that” were West’s. Anderson did not announce a new title. Nevertheless, the exchange raises a question with consequences beyond Pentagon nomenclature: If we remove low intensity conflict, who will protect the missions and capabilities it was intended to preserve?
The modern Special Operations Forces (SOF) leader operating in an Irregular Warfare (IW) environment cannot rely on command authority alone. As demonstrated in the Guerrilla Leader Theory, succeeding within the human domain requires leaders to recognize that in ambiguous spaces, influence replaces directives. This shift demands a radical reevaluation of how SOF leaders exercise judgment when strategic significance and environmental complexity collide.
Cognitive warfare refers to military and geopolitical contestation over cognitive processes as a means of affecting individual, group, and societal behavior. This essay argues that cognitive warfare shares important synergies with the paradigm of human security, due to the shared emphasis on the psychological processes that drive behaviors and dynamics in the civilian environment. The essay recommends that human security considerations be incorporated into cognitive warfare defense, while providing a call-to-action for further consideration of the implications of this synergy at policy and operational levels.
“Will to Fight is one of the most challenging elements of military capability analysis because of its fundamentally intangible nature,” states the framework, shared exclusively with Breaking Defense ahead of its publication. Unlike the specific number of tanks or the condition of fighter jets that form the basis for so much analysis of military readiness, the framework says “most elements relative to will to fight are not quantitative; nor are they easily observed.”
On September 29, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did something unusual. It published a lengthy open letter addressed not to Washington but to “the honorable people of the United States,” and particularly to American scholars, students and journalists. I checked each of its more than 300 factual assertions. The pattern is more effective than pure fabrication: verifiable facts and genuine grievances are mixed with unsupported, misleading and false claims, and opinion and prediction are repeatedly presented as fact.
William H. McRaven’s theory of relative superiority remains a foundational framework for understanding how special operations forces generate decisive advantage. This article reinterprets McRaven’s six principles—simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed, and purpose—for the contemporary operational environment and introduces adaptive superiority, defined as the organizational capacity to continually create and regenerate temporary advantages faster than an adversary can understand, counter, or replicate them. It argues that the future special operations advantage will depend less on possessing unique technologies than on building organizations capable of learning, adapting, integrating technology, and creating new operational solutions faster than their opponents.
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