News & Briefings

For more than two decades, U.S. national security policy has repeatedly relied on leadership decapitation as a mechanism for catalyzing systemic change. In practice, this has often meant turning to military force as the primary instrument for resolving problems rooted in political decay, institutional corruption, and fractured legitimacy.

Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led approximately 600 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry against a Native American coalition of 4,000 to 8,000 people, led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and Two Moons. The Native Americans deployed decentralized command, superior terrain knowledge, mobility, psychological warfare, and cultural cohesion to defeat Custer’s force at Last Stand Hill, killing over 200 soldiers. The authors argue that Custer’s fatal underestimation of his opponent, combined with fractured command and control and a failure to conduct adequate intelligence preparation, exposed his force to a series of encirclements that his divided units could not survive.

Western military thought often assumes that faster sensors and better data lead to faster action. In gray-zone competition, however, ambiguity over escalation thresholds creates a gap between recognition and authorization, allowing decisional authority to lag behind situational awareness. When that gap becomes predictable, hesitation itself transfers tempo to adversaries operating comfortably between peace and conflict.

SOF does not administer governance. It operates where governance determines what is possible. That distinction matters. Operators encounter this terrain long before doctrine has language to describe it. In modern irregular warfare, outcomes are increasingly decided before the first shot is fired. They are decided in regulatory frameworks, compliance regimes, and bureaucratic authority structures: the administrative terrain that shapes access, defines escalation thresholds, and determines who is authorized to act. SOF has been operating in this terrain for years. The community already understands it intuitively. The problem is that doctrine has not caught up. The intelligence that operators collect on governance fracture, regulatory capture, and institutional coercion risks staying isolated at the team level rather than informing theater-level planning.