Sharpening SOF Tools, Their Strategic Use and Direction: Optimising the Command of Special Operations amid Wider Contemporary Defence Transformation and Military Cuts

Focusing on contemporary Special Forces (SOF/SF), this article analyses expanding SF developments in the context of conducting rapidly proliferating multi-functional operations during an overall era of globalised strategic risk. This is while SF simultaneously have to negotiate the not necessarily reconcilable challenge of wider national-to-global-impacting defence transformation and military cuts, which include extending to closely impacting on SF support units. When examining the optimisation of the command of special operations, including better developing Special Operations Commands (SOCOMs) or closest nearest equivalents, and when evaluating the attendant advancement of what can be best characterised as the improved strategic direction and use of SF, several helpful operational-to-strategic and structural-to-cultural lessons soon emerge. For both now and for differently ranging futures, further consideration of these noteworthy lessons is warranted.