What Should SOF Be Built For Now?
R.D. Hooker Jr.’s “America’s Special Operations Problem” argues that SOF remain essential but that post-9/11 growth has “more than doubled in size” and elevated SOF to the face of the US military in ways that now warrant a hard look at strategic balance, especially as counterterrorism demands continue to shift. He suggests that such heavy investment in forces optimized for the lower end of the conflict spectrum sits uneasily beside national strategies that “explicitly prioritize Great Power and near-peer competition,” and he highlights redundancy, bureaucratic growth, and the downstream effects on the conventional force.
Meanwhile, the 2025 National Security Strategy defines its main effort as making a realistic connection between ends and means and insists that a serious strategy must “evaluate, sort, and prioritize,” criticizing sprawling “laundry lists” that dilute focus.
Read together, the two documents don’t settle the SOF debate so much as frame it, prompting the question of whether right-sizing and tighter integration, as Hooker recommends, would be a practical way to operationalize the NSS’s prioritization logic, or whether SOF’s current scale remains a necessary hedge within a more selective yet competitive global posture.
