Owen West’s brief remark during the 2026 AUSA Project Agincourt autonomous warfare panel deserves attention beyond the room. West, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, directed the question to Derrick Anderson, the office’s current occupant. The words “More to follow on that” were West’s. Anderson did not announce a new title. Nevertheless, the exchange raises a question with consequences beyond Pentagon nomenclature: If we remove low intensity conflict, who will protect the missions and capabilities it was intended to preserve?
I would support replacing “Low Intensity Conflict” with “Irregular Warfare.” I would oppose deleting it to define special operations primarily through support to large-scale combat operations. SOF must contribute to the joint force in major war. It must also provide strategic options across the spectrum of conflict, especially in the human domain, where people decide whom to support, what to resist, and whether to fight.
Why Congress Put LIC in the Title
The history matters. The Nunn-Cohen reforms were a congressional response to institutional failures, including those exposed by the failed 1980 hostage rescue in Iran and operational shortcomings during the 1983 intervention in Grenada. Senators Sam Nunn and William Cohen, supported in the House by Representative Dan Daniel, sought to protect capabilities the services had repeatedly neglected. Congress acted because the existing system had not corrected itself.
Enacted on November 14, 1986, as part of the Fiscal Year 1987 National Defense Authorization Act, the Nunn-Cohen Amendment required a unified special operations command. USSOCOM was activated on April 16, 1987. Its distinctive combination of combatant command responsibilities and service-like authorities, supported by dedicated resources, helped build an exceptional joint special operations force. The reform went beyond improving tactical cooperation among elite units.
The legislative design also included a senior civilian official responsible for special operations and low intensity conflict. The broader initiative addressed national-level coordination for LIC. Congress recognized two related problems: the readiness and institutional protection of special operations forces, and the government’s ability to address conflicts that conventional military institutions were poorly organized to manage. LIC was an explicit responsibility, not an incidental addition to a title.
That distinction remains embedded in law. Title 10, Section 138 assigns the assistant secretary oversight of both special operations activities and low intensity conflict activities. A permanent statutory renaming requires congressional action. More important, changing the sign on the door does not answer who will exercise the responsibility behind it.
My judgment is that we realized the service-like force-building portion of Nunn-Cohen more fully than its broader LIC purpose. We built superb operators and increasingly effective joint formations, but too often treated irregular conflict as a lesser included case or a distraction from the war the services preferred to prepare for. The danger today is that we will repeat that institutional choice while calling it modernization.
Replace the Intensity Scale, Preserve the Mission
“Low intensity” is an imperfect label. It can imply limited stakes, modest violence, or secondary importance. None necessarily follows. A struggle that employs small forces can determine a government’s survival, an alliance’s cohesion, or a population’s political future. Irregular warfare also occurs during major conventional war. It does not stop when divisions cross a border.
“Special Operations and Irregular Warfare” therefore provides a better title. It identifies a force enterprise and a form of warfare without relegating the latter to the bottom of an intensity scale. The department’s 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex called for institutionalizing IW rather than repeatedly relearning it. DoD Instruction 3000.07, “Irregular Warfare,” dated September 29, 2025, makes this responsibility explicit: IW is a joint force activity conducted by conventional forces and SOF. The instruction provides a current policy foundation for preserving the mission even if Congress modernizes the office’s title. A civilian advocate should ensure department-wide attention, not claim exclusive ownership for USSOCOM.
The strongest counterargument deserves a fair hearing. After two decades of counterterrorism operations, SOF must prepare for contested communications, denied access, sophisticated surveillance, and high battlefield attrition. Commanders need integrated reconnaissance, targeting, partner operations, and other special operations capabilities. An autonomous systems incubator can also deliver capabilities useful throughout the joint force.
That argument establishes a requirement for integration. It does not justify narrowing SOF’s strategic purpose. If the measure of relevance becomes only the contribution to a conventional commander’s immediate battle, who develops options to prevent that battle, undermine an adversary’s coercion, or convert battlefield success into a durable political outcome? We need forces that can help win campaigns and shape the conditions under which campaigns become necessary.
The Two SOF Trinities
The two SOF trinities provide a clear framework for preserving this focus. The first consists of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare. These are overlapping concepts, not three mutually exclusive mission categories. Together, they direct attention toward political purpose, resistance, influence, and the relationship between military action and national strategy.
The second identifies comparative advantages: governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations. It focuses attention on the people whose decisions determine whether a political objective can endure. These advantages are especially important to Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations, while complementing the wider SOF enterprise. They require language, cultural understanding, relationships, judgment, and sustained engagement. Technology can strengthen these capabilities, but it cannot manufacture trust.
Consider their application across the spectrum of conflict. Before war, these capabilities can strengthen partners’ resilience, help expose coercion, and develop resistance options that complicate aggression. During major combat, they can connect operations with local knowledge, support indigenous resistance, and help commanders understand civilian behavior. Following combat, they can help legitimate authorities restore essential functions and address the grievances an adversary might exploit. These are proposed applications of enduring capabilities, not promises that SOF can solve political problems alone.
Nor does support to political warfare mean placing diplomacy under military command. Civilian leaders must set policy and political objectives, while diplomats and other agencies exercise their responsibilities. SOF contributes military capabilities within that larger effort. The point is strategic coherence: military actions, information, diplomacy, and other instruments must reinforce an agreed political end state.
A Third Revolution Must Remain Human
In 2020, I argued for a third special operations revolution to strengthen civilian leadership, oversight, and institutional standing. That proposal went well beyond a title change. Its enduring relevance is the need to align responsibility, authority, resources, and accountability. A renamed office without the means to protect its missions would preserve the institutional weakness under a different label.
Autonomous systems deserve serious investment, and SOF should help develop them. But an organization can become captivated by what it can purchase and count. Trust, legitimacy, and political judgment develop less neatly. They still determine whether partners remain committed and whether tactical gains produce strategic advantage. Real revolutions involve people making political choices, even when machines transform the battlefield.
Neustadt and May’s Thinking in Time offers a useful discipline: examine the historical problem before borrowing its solution. The lesson of 1986 is not that every new capability requires a new command. It is that neglected missions require advocates with enough authority and resources to protect them. Today’s organizations differ from those of 1986, but the temptation to subordinate unfamiliar forms of warfare to conventional institutional preferences remains.
Congress and the department should judge any proposal accordingly. Preserve explicit responsibility for irregular warfare, resource civilian oversight, and assess campaigns against political objectives as well as battlefield performance. Retain education, language proficiency, influence capabilities, and enduring relationships alongside investments in autonomy. Require SOF integration in large-scale combat while protecting its ability to create options outside that frame.
Do not jettison low intensity conflict unless you replace it with irregular warfare and strengthen the responsibility it represents. We need machines that help our forces fight better and people who understand whom we are fighting, whom we must support, and what political outcome we seek. If we modernize the weapons while neglecting the human domain, what have we made ourselves better prepared to win?
David Maxwell, executive director of the Korea Regional Review, is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. He specializes in Northeast Asian security affairs and irregular, unconventional and political warfare. He is vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. The executive Director of the Korea Regional review, and a senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, where he works on a free and unified Korea. After he retired, he became associate director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is on the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society and is the editor at large for the Small Wars Journal.
