Introduction
In a widely read essay published in June 2026, a recently retired senior Green Beret argues that the United States Army Special Forces have slipped from being the U.S. military’s premier irregular force to “a campaign afterthought,” built for a world that no longer exists. He is right that the operating environment has outrun the force, and that presence is not strategy. But his prescription—consolidate a small remnant and, in his words, “bury the beret”—mistakes a changing mission for an irredeemable structural one.
The terrain he says Special Forces can no longer reach—the closed, surveilled human environments of authoritarian competitors—is precisely where the decisive contest of this era is being fought: in the cognitive domain. The attributes the regiment was built around are the attributes that cognitive warfare rewards. The binding constraint is not the mission but a defense posture still optimized for a complicated world rather than a complex one.
The argument here is therefore narrower and more hopeful than burying the beret: select harder, shrink where prudent, and above all reforge how Special Forces officers and NCOs are educated to think. Accordingly, overhauling professional military education (PME) is a critical aspect of changing our defense posture and capitalizing on the capabilities of our Special Forces.
From Irregular Warfare to the Contest for Cognition
Cognitive warfare is not a slogan for the information age; it is a distinct object of competition. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Allied Command Transformation describes it as activities, synchronized with the other instruments of power, that affect attitudes and behavior by influencing, protecting, or disrupting individual and group cognition. The point worth holding onto is that the target is the mind itself—perception, judgment, and decision—rather than territory or materiel. In this domain, the key terrain of our adversaries is their people.
This is what separates cognitive warfare from the broader notion of hybrid warfare. Hybrid approaches blend conventional, irregular, cyber, and informational means to blur the threshold of conflict. Cognitive warfare is narrower and deeper. As a NATO exploratory concept puts it, it exploits psychological bias and reflexive thinking, using networked technology to manipulate human cognition over time. A recent conceptual analysis of that concept makes the same distinction: the aim is cognitive effect, achieved through both kinetic and non-kinetic means, against populations and decision-makers alike. NATO, as one Small Wars Journal contributor recently framed it, treats information operations, psychological operations, strategic communication, and cyber as means rather than the whole; the whole is the contest over cognition, and the prize is advantage in decision-making and influence. Another recent contributor traces how this plays out: cognitive warfare does not replace propaganda or psychological warfare but extends them to a deeper level—perceptions, emotions, beliefs, and political judgment—turning contemporary conflicts into wars of interpretation in which a narrative, once seeded, proves more durable than the facts that would refute it.
Read in this light, the retired commander’s own list of demands—survive in hyper-contested environments without a signature, deliver effects across domains, and operate with genuine cultural fluency inside the world’s most closed societies—is not a list of reasons Special Forces are obsolete. It is a description of the cognitive battlespace, a domain that a recent assessment argues is more consequential than the physical domains, because operations against decision-making strike at the moral agency that the laws and ethics of war presuppose. The question is, who in the joint force is best postured to operate there
Why Special Forces Are Suited for the Cognitive Domain
The original design points to the answer. World War II veterans built Special Forces for guerrilla operations in which the A-Team—the Operational Detachment Alpha—derived its security and combat power from indigenous partners. That discipline is now shorthanded as operating “by, with, and through.” Stripped to its essence, the construct is the deliberate shaping of human networks: gaining access, building trust, understanding motivation, and influencing the behavior of a population under contested conditions. That is cognitive-domain work by another name.
The competencies the regiment cultivates in its operators compound the fit. Language training, cultural immersion, sustained presence among populations, and the habit of small teams making consequential decisions far from headquarters are not incidental skills. They are the human-terrain competencies that cognitive warfare requires and that few other formations possess at scale. The comparative advantage is real, even if it is currently latent.
It is also the antidote to a specific risk of failure. Effective operations and deterrence in the cognitive domain depend on a granular reading of an adversary’s culture and belief systems, and a recent capability assessment warns that planners who lack those cognitive skills default to mirror imaging across an enduring cultural “parallax.” Cultural fluency is precisely what closes that gap.
This reframing also answers sharpest charge: that Special Forces have never been essential to how the joint force conceives of winning, and so remain an afterthought in planning. That is largely true, but it is a statement about the planners, not the regiment. The joint force has conceived of victory in physical terms—terrain seized, targets serviced, capacity built—and so the human terrain that Special Forces occupied was tolerated, rather than valued. Cognitive warfare changes the value of that terrain. When the decisive domain becomes the mind of a population and its leaders, human-network expertise stops being a seam-filler and becomes a main effort.
The caveat matters, and the critique is correct on this point: suitability is potential—not present—capability. Marsh is also right that a basic accession pipeline and six-month rotations through the Special Forces Qualification Course produce cultural familiarity, not the mastery a surveilled, adversarial cognitive environment demands. The gap, however, is one of education and selection. That is a problem PME exists to solve.
The PME Gap: Educating for the Complex, Not the Complicated
The deficit is cognitive before it is material. Equipment can be procured; a mode of thinking must be cultivated. PME is the institution to cultivate it. The most useful lens for naming what PME must build comes from David Snowden and Mary Boone, who—in a 2007 framework— distinguished the complicated domain from the complex one. In a complicated environment cause and effect are knowable to experts, so the correct posture is to sense, analyze, and respond: apply good practice and the right answer can be found. In a complex environment, cause and effect cohere only in hindsight, so leaders must probe, sense, and respond—letting patterns emerge, rather than imposing a template.
Cognitive warfare lives almost entirely in the complex domain. The recurring error of current military education is to teach the human environment as if it were merely complicated—solvable with checklists, target packages, and best practices imported from the physical domains.
The corrective action is to design PME around four interlocking capacities, each a facet of the same underlying disposition. The instinct is not idiosyncratic: a recent capability assessment recommends embedding cognitive-warfare content and critical-thinking instruction across professional military education, the war colleges, and combatant-command curricula. For Special Forces, however, the requirement runs deeper than added content. It is a reorientation of how Green Berets are taught to think.
Complexity as a Distinct Style of Analysis
The first capacity is the ability to see the human system as a complex adaptive system rather than a complicated machine to be reverse-engineered. A population responds to intervention, learns, and changes the very conditions the planner measured. PME should train Green Berets to diagnose which domain a problem occupies before reaching for a method, and to resist the strong institutional pull to apply complicated-domain tools to complex problems.
Epistemic Humility
The second is comfort with incomplete knowledge. Inside closed, surveilled societies an operator will never hold full situational understanding, and the gravest danger is false confidence. PME should reward Green Berets who can state plainly what they do not know and act anyway. PME should teach teams to treat convergent certainty—every report saying the same thing—as a signal that opposing viewpoints have been suppressed, not that truth has been confirmed. Operating in an environment that is uncomfortable and complex is already a key trait of Special Forces. This trait needs to be cultivated and become habit in a cognitive domain.
Decision-Making Under Radical Uncertainty, Anchored in Values
The third is the ability to decide when the data is absent or deliberately corrupted. In cognitive warfare, this the normal condition—the information environment is adversarial by design. Adversaries engineer exactly this moment. One analysis describes targeting leaders during crises of cognitive overload and saturating the environment until even sound decisions cannot be implemented amid informational chaos. Such decisions cannot be optimized; they must be guided by intent and principle. This is the logic of mission command and commander’s intent—disciplined initiative inside a framework of shared values. PME should build the moral and conceptual anchors that let dispersed leaders decide rightly when they cannot decide perfectly.
Adaptive Resilience in Conditions of Constant Change
The fourth is resilience understood as cognitive and institutional adaptability. The cognitive battlespace reconfigures continuously as platforms, narratives, and adversary techniques evolve, and any fixed playbook decays on contact. One account of the present moment describes an ecology of war in which generative artificial intelligence acts as an emotional force multiplier, spawning narratives and techniques faster than any settled doctrine can answer. Resilience here is the capacity to keep learning, to recover from having been deceived, and to adapt faster than the adversary. PME should prioritize learning velocity over the mastery of static procedures.
These four are not separate competencies to be checked off. They are facets of a single capacity—what Snowden and Boone would recognize as the ability to lead in the complex domain. Complexity analysis is its diagnostic condition, epistemic humility its epistemology, principled decision-making its method, and adaptive resilience its discipline over time. Education that develops them in isolation will produce technicians; the aim is the integrated disposition that lets a leader probe, sense, and respond where others freeze or force a false answer.
The following framework summarizes how each capacity maps to the cognitive contest and to PME design:
| Cognitive capacity | What it counters | Cynefin correlate | PME implication |
| Complexity analysis | Treating a human system as a solvable machine | Recognizing the complex, not the complicated, domain | Teach Green Berets to diagnose the domain before importing tools |
| Epistemic humility | False confidence in a surveilled, deceptive environment | Patterns visible only in retrospect | Reward naming what is unknown; treat convergent certainty as a warning |
| Principled decision-making | Paralysis when data is absent or manipulated | Acting on emergent patterns and intent | Build the moral and conceptual anchors of mission command |
| Adaptive resilience | Obsolescence as adversary techniques evolve | Probe, sense, respond, then re-probe | Privilege learning velocity over mastery of fixed procedures |
Figure 1. A PME design framework for cognitive-domain leadership.
Bury the Beret, or Reforge It?
An honest reform must meet the critique where it is strongest. Marsh notes that the enterprise has grown too large to be secret, that the founding principles of the force demand quality over quantity. He warns that capable special operators cannot be mass-produced or created after an emergency. He argues that structural reform has been ducked—a 2013 transformation roadmap diagnosed these very problems. It was filed and forgotten. He adds that a force in constant deployment cannot run the deliberate experimentation that transformation requires. These are real constraints, and any serious proposal must reckon with them rather than wish them away.
But his essay’s own central metaphor cuts the other way. It concedes that the airframe is sound and only the mission has changed. In a cognitive-domain framing, the human-network orientation is the airframe; what is obsolete is the curriculum that prepares the crew. One does not scrap a sound airframe to change its payload; one re-engines and re-arms it. “Burying the beret” would discard the single institution with seven decades of human-terrain experience at the precise moment the human terrain becomes decisive.
The disagreement, then, is narrower than it appears. A smaller, more selective, harder-to-detect force is fully consistent with the cognitive mission, which rewards secrecy and quality over mass. The call to shrink and consolidate is not wrong. The argument is the end state. Reform should mean tighter selection coupled with a radically redesigned education—not abolition. The cure for a force that has confused presence with strategy is not fewer Special Forces; it is Special Forces educated for a different war.
Conclusion
The decisive terrain of strategic competition is the cognitive domain. Special Forces hold a latent comparative advantage there, earned through generations of operating among populations “by, with, and through” partners. The binding constraint is a PME system that still teaches the human world as if it were complicated—solvable, templated, and stable—when it is complex, emergent, and adversarial. The institutional clock is running: a Senate Armed Services Committee review reportedly concluded that the United States lacks both the strategic clarity and the operational capability for cognitive warfare even as competitors advance—an enterprise-wide gap that mirrors the educational one. The remedy is to reforge the beret around the capacity to lead in the complex domain, built from complexity analysis, epistemic humility, principled decision-making, and adaptive resilience. The choice is not between the last A-Team and no A-Team. It is between a force educated for the war it last fought, and one educated for the contest over the mind—one already well underway.
A transformed PME approach is not a cure-all, nor can it compensate for unclear national objectives, shifting political priorities, or flawed strategic decision-making. However, PME does become critical to preparing leaders to navigate the uncertain and uncomfortable environments of the cognitive battlespace. If future conflicts are increasingly decided in the cognitive domain, then intellectual preparation becomes a readiness issue, not an academic exercise. If we expect the next generation of leaders to achieve the kind of intellectual overmatch required in an era of cognitive warfare, then we must deliberately invest in developing their minds with the same seriousness that we invest in developing their warfighting skills.