By Claudette Roulo
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 5, 2013 – While there's no shortage of doctrine on how the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps provide value to the nation, special operations forces aren’t restricted to any of the traditional doctrines, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command said here today.
The three great military theorists of the past 200 years -- Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Giulio Douhet -- made powerful arguments for the land, sea and air domains of warfare, Navy Adm. William H. McRaven told the audience at an Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis-Tufts University Fletcher School conference.
“But where does SOF fit into all of this?” he asked.
While special operations forces are comfortable in the realms of traditional warfare, the human domain is perhaps more important -- both to the troops and to policy makers, McRaven said.
The human domain encompasses the totality of the physical, cultural, and social environments that influence human behavior, he explained. Success in this domain won't be achieved by traditional ground, naval or air forces, he added.
“Instead, success in the human domain will depend upon understanding the human terrain and establishing trust with those humans who occupy that space,” the admiral said. Building understanding and trust takes time, but once it’s built, “we can apply unique capabilities that are designed to assess, analyze, operate and prevail in population-centric strategies or struggles,” he said.
While operating in the human domain is not the sole purview of special operations forces, it is one of their core competencies, McRaven said. “It is where our language training, our cultural skills and small footprint all lend themselves to developing the military-to-military trust necessary for success,” he explained.
Any discussion of the global special operations forces network is incomplete without including the human domain, the admiral added.
When that network is laid on top of the human domain, its full potential begins to be revealed, McRaven said. This potential, he added, is what he was trying to capture when he developed the Special Operations Command 2020 vision.
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