U.S. Special Operations Forces at 9-11, Today, and for the Future by LTG Charles Cleveland, USA Ret., and COL David Maxwell, USA Ret., The Cipher Brief

Following the tragic attack on 9-11, U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) and the CIA, supported by airpower, conducted a punitive expedition that resulted in the Taliban and al Qaeda being routed from Afghanistan.   In 2003, working with the Kurds, U.S. SOF conducted operations in northern Iraq, accomplishing the mission intended for a U.S. infantry division that was not allowed to deploy through Turkey.  U.S. SOF were already advising and assisting Colombian military and police operations as part of Plan Colombia that contributed to the peace agreement in 2016.  And in Asia, U.S. SOF supported the Philippine security forces in degrading and destroying terrorist organizations linked to al Qaeda while supporting peace negotiations with Moro insurgent groups. 

U.S. SOF were well positioned and ready in 2001 to execute their fundamental doctrinal missions for which they were organized, trained, equipped, educated, and optimized: unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense or Special Warfare. However, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations soon came to dominate the U.S. military campaigns for both special operations and regular forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later in Yemen and throughout Africa…

The emergence of The SOF Campaign, consisting of a balanced application of surgical strike and special warfare in conjunction with conventional forces and other instruments of national power in support of statecraft and political warfare, can address the future security challenges, where revolution, resistance, insurgency, and civil war is the only viable form of struggle.  It is there that wars are now fought and won.  

Our traditional tools of warfare, having been focused on state-on-state war, are in many ways ill-suited in war among the people where large-scale expeditionary warfare is not feasible.  We must consider The SOF campaign in this old domain that is new again…

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The Center for Security Studies Lunch Series: "Interrogation, Intelligence Gathering, and Public Policy" - A Conversation with John McLaughlin and Dr. Elizabeth Arsenault.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence community faced significant pressure to capture, detain, and interrogate suspected terrorists. However, the question remained: once they were found, how should the US handle captured fighters in U.S. custody? What measures were legal, moral, and effective to acquire actionable intelligence in the war on terror?

John McLaughlin, who served as the CIA's deputy director from 2000 to 2004, and Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault, who teaches in the Security Studies Program, examined these questions as well as the implications of these decisions.