Sitting on my desk is a ship in a bottle my father gave me, made by Bill Donovan. When I look at the tiny masts, their delicate rigging, above the blue painted waves, I’m reminded how the precise qualities of an operator used to be measured.
And then I look over at Seth Harp’s book.
He explains Special Operations missions in the GWOT as:
…covertly liquidating the male population base of recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.
Ouch.
The book gets reviewed plainly by some as an emerging revelation about how badly things turned out under Bush. The far more important exposure actually needs to be about what’s developing post-GWOT.
SOF operators increasingly hint towards decoupled regional commands, district-style zones of interest, an end to the global sharing frameworks that defined twenty years of allied operations. Everyone points to the Delta operation in Venezuela using narrow cartel designations as proof the model works without foundational coalition architecture.
This is regressive doctrine dressed as adaptation. It’s like how people invoke Monroe as cover for the exact opposite doctrine. I mean, look at what “special” has meant and what operators increasingly want it to mean next.
Tailored and Relative Defense
The original Special Forces mission that we study, such as Bank, the OSS lineage, and de oppresso liber all defined “special” as being tight and tailored. Small teams shaped to specific cultural contexts, building indigenous defensive capability relative to local threats. The operator learned the language, lived in the village, measured success by what the partner force could do after Americans left. The 12-man ODA existed to enable durable local resilience. Medic as community entry point, intelligence sergeant building networks through relationships, team sergeant as institutional memory.
“Special” meant fit to context and oriented toward defense that enabled populations to protect themselves. Force multiplication structure, training, selection all followed from this. The screens were for cultural adaptability, communication aptitude, comfort with ambiguity, patience measured in years.
Universal and Industrialized Offense
GWOT flushed all that away with a rush to produce body tags. McChrystal’s F3EAD cycle (Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate) redefined “special” as universal champions of death tolls. One kill chain applied anywhere and everywhere. Track a target, kill him and every military-age male nearby, seize documents, generate more names, repeat again hours later. Speed through targets, shoot first, and only ask questions so you can start shooting again. The same process in Anbar, Helmand, Mogadishu, the Sahel. Context didn’t exist beyond the shape of the kill zones. Cultural knowledge didn’t matter beyond the direction the door kicked in. The machine was industrialized offense, optimized for speed and volume of kills on a full sprint.
This required total information access across allied networks and worked because Five Eyes plus NATO SOF plus partner nations operated as a single organism with shared targeting databases. The global architecture made universal application possible.
It also inverted de oppresso liber completely. Indigenous partners became consumable inputs to the targeting machine. Afghan commandos serviced American kill lists. A force designed to enable tailored local defense was reoptimized into universal industrial offense that depopulated resistance. And the more the thoughtless machinery depopulated areas, the higher the percentage of resistance. Just like Vietnam. Go figure.
Decoupled and Unleashed
The operators calling for regional decoupling lately think they are wisely preparing for a world where the U.S. no longer has authority. Turkey running SOF against the American-trained forces in Syria. France pushed out of the Sahel by Wagner. Gulf states with SOF relationships that bypass JSOC. The global sharing framework broke when Hegseth used it for war crimes in the Caribbean, so formalize it.
What they actually propose is a third model worse than either predecessor. Not tailored defense. Not even universal offense with its coalition constraints. It’s a decoupled offense of regional fiefdoms operating under their own legal authority, political cover, and information control, answerable to whoever holds the designation authority in their district.
“Special” stops meaning tailored or even universal. It means unleashed, above the law because loyal to the directed mission only. A force pointed at whatever target the political sponsor designates, with no doctrinal requirement to build anything, no allied framework providing oversight, and no cooperative architecture satisfying the SOF truths that most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
The GWOT model, for all the horrors that Harp documents in his book, at least maintained the structural possibility of allied pushback. Partners who share a common operational picture can object. Decoupled districts eliminate that. Each zone operates in its own information silo, like Chad or Guatemala under Reagan. Nobody outside sees the full picture until criminal tribunals investigate decades later.
De oppresso liber is a trust doctrine.
Populations considering partnership with American SOF watched what happened to the Montagnards, the Kurds, the Hmong, the Afghans. The institutional record is politically conditional treatment. Decoupled regional commands with rotating political sponsorship will only make that worse. What serious opposition figure in Venezuela or anywhere else will invest in a relationship with a force that has no doctrinal commitment to their survival and no allied framework holding it accountable?
Tailored relative defense built things that lasted. Universal industrialized offense destroyed them. The new trend towards decoupled and unleashed doesn’t even pretend to try.