“The future of warfare will dictate how special operations forces operate,” said Army Gen. Richard Clarke, Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
“Warfare is going to be multidomain, it’s going to be partnered, and it’s going to be contested in every step,” he told the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa. “Our goal is to maintain a strategic advantage.”
“Special operators will be in demand even as U.S. strategy moves to a world of near-peer competition with China and Russia,” Clarke said.
Special operators shone in actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. They led the way onto Afghanistan in 2001 and will be among the last troops to leave the country at the end of the retrograde. Clarke, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division in 2002 and with the 1st Ranger Battalion in 2004 in Afghanistan, understands that world quite well. But times have changed.
“I think most of you understand the counterterrorism mission,” he said. “Competition, or as some refer to it as strategic competition, may be less familiar. In short, it’s winning without fighting. It’s taking actions below the level of combat.”
“Strategic competition is different. There won’t be a victory parade at the end of a violent war like there was in New York at the end of World War II,” he said. “Instead, our competition will endure, and … it may be infinite because there’s no precise end; there is not necessarily a winner. Just nations seeking competitive advantages,” the general said. “And that advantage can ebb and flow.”
“This has always been a part of the international system, but new tools and new technologies have given adversaries new avenues to compete. In the past, this competition played out on land, sea, and air. Now it is contested in the cyberworld and space as well — extending the battlefield to infinity and beyond. And it is going to be contested in the information space as well,” Clarke said.
Clarke said the contest in the information space will impact all domains of warfare. “To be clear, it is a battle in the cognitive space,” he said. “It takes place on the Internet, but not always. This is purely distinct from cyber from the ones and zeros in the [Colonial] pipeline attack. It is a cognitive space where we must prevail.”
He noted that when he first went to Afghanistan, roughly 95 percent of his time was spent on finding and killing or capturing enemy forces. “Today, if you visit our commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ll say that they focus 60 percent or more of their time on non-lethal effects in the information space,” he said.
All this requires that special operations forces commanders get the tools they need to decide and act more quickly. They also need the capabilities to more effectively interact with allies and partners and with local populations.
“New technologies or new ways of using technologies will be key moving forward,” he said. “How do we more effectively search through our mountains of data? That is, across all classifications and all domains?” he asked. “How do I move data from [unclassified] to secret to top secret, with no problem, and so it is useful? How do we harness mission command of our forces … but also combined operations with ours, so that we’re all seeing the same picture?”