News & Briefings
Get the latest news and SOF commentary here. Your source for all news SOF since 2017.
The raid that removed Nicolás Maduro and the sudden designation of Marco Rubio as the de facto steward of Venezuela did more than end a regime. It exposed a truth Washington prefers to avoid. Modern statecraft now lives in the gray space between war and peace, where legitimacy, narrative, and perception decide outcomes faster than divisions or carrier strike groups. When the Secretary of State is asked to stabilize a nation, divide oil assets, manage sanctions, and shape elections at once, the problem is not bandwidth alone. It is architecture.
In the situation rooms of Washington and the chancelleries of Europe, the future of warfare is often visualized as a contest of high-velocity hardware: the silent glide of a hypersonic vehicle, the swarm logic of autonomous drones, or the cryptographic shield of quantum computing. Yet, this fixation on the end-product of kinetic warfare obscures a primitive, decisive vulnerability in the gray zone. We are obsessing over the tip of the spear while our adversaries have quietly seized control of the shaft.
For the last decade, the West has slowly awakened to the reality of resource insecurity. We read breathless headlines about the “scramble for Africa” and the rush to stake claims on lithium deposits in the Nevada desert. But this awakening has birthed a dangerous strategic error—what I term “The Mining Fallacy.”
On October 14, 1918, in the waning days of the First World War, 35-year-old Army Lieutenant Colonel William Donovan led a battalion of the famed 165th Infantry Regiment through the Argonne Forest in an assault on Landres-et-St. Georges, France. The terrain was brutal, the enemy deeply entrenched, and communication was, at best, unreliable.
At 0201 local time this morning, helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the Night Stalkers—crossed into Venezuelan airspace carrying Delta Force operators toward a target in Caracas. Less than three hours later, they were back over water with Nicolás Maduro in custody. The operation, codenamed Absolute Resolve, represents the most significant U.S. direct action operation in Latin America since Panama in 1989.
This analysis examines the operation through an asymmetric warfare lens: the intelligence architecture that enabled it, the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) campaign that protected it, and the doctrinal implications for future operations. The purpose is not political commentary but operational education.
F3EAD: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyse, Disseminate. It is an acronym known and used widely within special operations. It’s kinetic and sequential, and that surface simplicity is its power: it bundles the life-cycle of a target from awareness to actionable intelligence into a flexible workflow. In practice, F3EAD is both a targeting doctrine and a mental model that helps intelligence and operational teams move faster while preserving analytic rigour and legal/ethical guardrails.
F3EAD is simply the latest in a long line of targeting methodology acronyms still doctrinally taught and operationally used today. For example, the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) methodology, developed by John Boyd, is famously taught to many military officers and is distinctly incorporated into the F3EAD process. Even in the mysterious world of cybersecurity and ethical hacking, we see a version of F3EAD that simply repackages the process into an acronym using the lingua franca of the cyber world: Reconnaissance, Weaponise, Deliver, Exploit, Install, Command and Control (Cyber Kill Chain). [source, source]
Missions are carried out through the lens of F3EAD. It is the framework by which all intelligence disciplines fuse together to remove individuals from the battlespace.
For generations, the Indian Scouts served as the essential eyes and ears of the United States Army across the vast, unforgiving landscapes of the American West. Decades before radios, satellites, night-vision devices, drones, or GPS changed warfare, these Indigenous warriors perfected the arts of tracking, reconnaissance, infiltration, and survival.
No results found.
Stay Up To Date
Subscribe to Our Newsletter and Stay Up to Date with the Latest Special Operations Forces Support News and Events