News & Briefings

A recent argument that the United States Army Special Forces have become a campaign afterthought is right about the diagnosis but provides an incomplete assessment of the cure. The decisive terrain of great-power competition is cognition, and the culturally immersed and distributed character of Special Forces—built on a “by, with, and through” —gives the regiment a latent comparative advantage in that contest. Realizing this advantage depends less on new equipment than on professional military education redesigned around four interlocking capacities: complexity analysis; epistemic humility; principled decision-making under uncertainty; and adaptive resilience. Together, these traits amount to the ability to lead in the complex—rather than the complicated—domain.

The contemporary security environment is crowded with terminology. Policymakers, strategists, and military professionals routinely discuss gray zone competition, hybrid warfare, cognitive warfare, influence operations, strategic competition, and other related concepts. While each term offers some analytical value, the proliferation of terminology often obscures the enduring nature of conflict. Excessive focus on labels can create intellectual paralysis rather than strategic understanding.

It is hard to read national security literature and social media posts without coming across the term cognitive warfare. The conflict with Iran. China’s current operations. Russia’s way of war. North Korea’s nuclear strategy. Reports from NATO’s chief scientist. Countless articles from national security experts, including distinguished scholars, renowned Special Forces officers, and leading think tanks. The hype surrounding cognitive warfare has even spread beyond the national security space. The journal Pastoral Psychology published an article about cognitive warfare and religion, while Greater Good Magazine, a publication devoted to turning scientific research into tips and tools for a happier life and more compassionate society, has articles about “cog war.”

In January 2013, French forces entered Mali to conduct Operation Serval and did what Western militaries do well: they moved fast, hit hard, and pushed jihadist fighters out of the northern cities seized the previous year. By conventional measures, it was a successful operation. Yet within two years those same fighters had returned, were dispersed across a wider area, better networked, and harder to find. By 2019, after years of the follow-on Operation Barkhane, the Sahel was measurably less stable than before the intervention. By 2022, French forces had been expelled entirely. Today the region is among the world’s fastest-growing conflict zones. This is not a story about French incompetence; on the contrary, French forces were skilled and well-led. It is however a story about a recurring pattern that has appeared in the Philippines, Somalia, Iraq, and dozens of campaigns across the last century: the gap between what military intervention can accomplish and what irregular conflict requires.