{"title":"America’s Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare From 1776 to the War on Terror, by Crandall, Russell","authors":"Jason Heeg","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1254497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1254497","url":null,"abstract":"Russell Crandall’s book America’s Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare From 1776 to the War on Terror is a valuable resource for unconventional warfare practitioners. Crandall is a professor of international politics and American foreign policy at Davidson College in North Carolina. He has served in various high-level policy jobs in the U.S. government and has published multiple books on Latin America. This most recent book covers a vast swath of history and focuses on irregular warfare. His first key argument is that although dirty wars are challenging to study, the United States will face this type of warfare in the future, and military personnel and government officials must understand it. The second is that although there are some similarities and consistencies among counterinsurgencies, each is unique and must be fought according to the situation in the particular country or region. He uses the comparison of General Petraeus’s success in Iraq and later challenges in Afghanistan to highlight this aspect. This review covers each of the four sections of the book individually.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123153515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State of Special Operations Forces Education","authors":"P. McCabe","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310554","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. Special Operators are the most highly trained and educated military professionals in the world, but we must continually improve existing training and education programs. —General Joseph Votel, U.S. Special Operations Command Command Training and Education Guidance Although Special Operations Forces (SOF) are well educated, existing education guidance and programs must continue to be improved, including better articulating the requirement for education specific to SOF, beyond existing service education programs. An examination of the existing guidance documents allows for an outline of the gaps and limitations for special operations education and a few recommendations are provided to address the more obvious limitations in special operations education. The state of SOF education is moving in a positive trajectory, but it will only remain so if guidance is clear and the special operations community educational needs are heard and met.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115175001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ethics of Military Privatization: The U.S. Armed Contractor Phenomenon, by Barnes, David M.","authors":"Ryan Shaffer","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310588","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123795940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building Competencies for Special Operations Forces’ Readiness in the Gray Zone","authors":"S. B. Meredith, D. C. Walton","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310546","url":null,"abstract":"Special Operations Forces can be used for policy goals from long-term political influence operations, to engagements taken either to stabilize or dethrone regimes on the basis of U.S. interests. Those actions are taking place more frequently in the Gray Zone, where actors, actions, and areas of engagement merge between traditional interstate relations and nonstate challenges. Many of these contribute to a changing character of war, something that requires adaptable Special Operations Forces to support U.S. national security success. This article looks specifically at ways to ensure Special Operations Forces’ readiness in the Gray Zone across a spectrum of issues and environments. It focuses on educational techniques that rely on tried and tested categories of scholarly analysis to ensure Special Operations Forces’ adaptability in different contexts and to ensure that lessons learned can be applied to commonalities across them.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130007405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SOFWERX’s Return on Collision: Measuring Open Collaborative Innovation","authors":"Nina A. Kollars","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310593","url":null,"abstract":"Special Operations Command has engaged a number of different strategies intended to improve the agility and performance of its technology acquisitions process. Among these efforts is its newly opened idea space known as SOFWERX. This article examines SOFWERX’s structure and function and argues that while SOFWERX exists as a traditional bureaucratic bypass for technology sourcing and development, its greater contribution to innovation will be in harnessing its knowledge returns on collision; the knowledge created and managed by that entity will be its most important asset. As such, proponents of the space would do well to establish metrics that measure collision as well as systems that can manage that knowledge.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"109 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124241256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organizing Special Operations Forces: Navigating the Paradoxical Pressures of Institutional-Bureaucratic and Operational Environments","authors":"Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310549","url":null,"abstract":"Increased focus on the potential of special operations has lead several countries to establish dedicated special operations organizations. Analysts have warned against bureaucratization, yet little research has explored the effect of organizational formalization or asked how best to organize. This article draws from research into high-reliability organizations and interviews in Denmark’s Special Operations Command. It contrasts the demands of the command’s institutional-bureaucratic and operational environments and argues that the ability to straddle them is key to success. The high-reliability organization’s ability to match divergent problems with dissimilar internal organizational behaviors is held out as a model for inspiration.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"23 11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125780825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eyes, Ears and Daggers: Special Operations Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency in America’s Evolving Struggle Against Terrorism, by Henriksen, Thomas H.","authors":"J. G. Breen","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1314711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1314711","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114809255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conceptualizing Terrorism with the Complications of Unconventional Warfare in Mind","authors":"Daniel G. Cox","doi":"10.1080/23296151.2017.1310587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23296151.2017.1310587","url":null,"abstract":"Conceptualizing terrorism, even defining the term, has been highly contentious. The lack of an agreed-upon definition or even an agreed-upon set of concepts that every definition should encompass creates rifts between scholars and potential confusion among practitioners. This article attempts to examine the difficulty of conceptualizing terrorism juxtaposed against the practice of unconventional warfare. Because Special Operations Forces help foment insurgencies when conducting unconventional warfare and because insurgencies often resort to terrorism, it is important for practitioners of unconventional warfare to understand what terrorism is, how to detect it, and, perhaps, how to steer insurgents away from this tactic. This article explores these concepts as well as the potentiality that the intersection of terrorism and unconventional warfare produces a new type of collateral damage not fully covered in the existing international law of warfare.","PeriodicalId":276818,"journal":{"name":"Special Operations Journal","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124639600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}