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Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, Special Operations Command commander, described how research had showed that the organization’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, “had shortened World War II by five months.”
“But what if it had been there in 1939? How much shorter would the war have been? Would there have been a war at all?” he asked.
More than just historical trivia, the question comes loaded with implications for today.
If there was a single word that defined the opening day of SOF Week 2025 in Tampa, it wasn’t one that the average American keeps in their vocabulary. It was SOF-Peculiar—a term that sounds like a Pentagon punchline but is actually a legal authority and a worldview. It’s how the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) navigates the defense bureaucracy—not around it, but through it, with speed, trust, and an unapologetic devotion to mission.
The role of special operations forces in global conflicts has steadily increased amid what the U.S. Special Operations Command's top leader called the most complex security environment the United States has faced in decades.
In a not-so-distant future, the United States may face a combination of National Defense Strategy competitors in a shooting war while still holding terrorist groups at bay and responding to yet more crises across the globe. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which things go badly, quickly.
The Russia-Ukraine war has emerged as a watershed moment in modern military history, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of contemporary warfare. This white paper analyzes five transformative domains that have defined this conflict: autonomous systems, information operations, electronic warfare, contested logistics, and evolving air defense strategies.
In the past six months, two different opinion pieces, here and here, have raised the possibility of reviving the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). These recommendations are by no means new. Over the past 80 years, there have been multiple efforts to revive the OSS or, at the very least, to revive the ethos of this special operations organization that served in World War II from 1942–1945.
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