Editor's note: This is a Focus Area article intended to facilitate rapid dialogue among practitioners. The analysis, research, and original thought within the article remain the sole responsibility of the author.
A question resurfaces in Special Forces circles whenever the Department of Defense/War pivots to a new priority effort: Who are we? It appeared after Vietnam when Groups stood down. It appeared after the Cold War. It appeared in the post-9/11 buildup, and again after the drawdowns from Iraq and Afghanistan. It has reappeared in the era of strategic competition.
Recent articles float around ideas that Special Forces (SF) are no longer special, that the A-Team construct is obsolete, or that it is time to "bury the beret." The articles generate intense responses. Comment sections are swarmed by serving officers, retired noncommissioned officers, and practitioners dismantling others’ arguments piece by piece. Debates are fierce. The gloves come off in Signal group chats.
Besides the substance of the think pieces, the recurrence of this debate cycle is itself fascinating. No one is asking the same questions about the infantry, the armored corps, naval aviation, or Marine rifle battalions. No one is writing two-part manifestos questioning whether the SEAL model has outlived its purpose. No one is demanding that the Ranger Regiment examine its soul. But in SF, this kind of institutional self-examination has become a near-tradition. There are reasons for its recurrence in the Green Beret community, and they say something important about the nature of the force itself.
Start with what Green Berets actually do, or more precisely, what they are supposed to do. The core mission of Special Forces, unconventional warfare (UW)—from which everything else stems—is not defined by clear physical objectives. An infantry battalion’s job is to close with and destroy the enemy. A fighter pilot’s job is to acquire a target, deliver ordnance, and return home. The metrics of success are defensible in a budget hearing. UW is something else entirely. The effects are real, but they are indirect, diffuse, and difficult to attribute. When SF succeeds at its core mission, no one quite knows how to count it. When Green Berets fail, their failure is usually attributed to something else anyway.
Compare that to the SEALs. Whatever internal debates exist within the Naval Special Warfare Command don’t tend to surface in public the way SF debates do. The SEAL mission set, at least as it has evolved through decades of the GWOT, is tightly defined. Direct-action raids yield kills, captures, intelligence, and images that can be emailed as attachments for inclusion in congressional briefings. The mission is justifiable in language that the rest of the military and Congress understand. Green Berets do not have that. Even as SF embraces emerging technologies—space, cyber, AI, etc.—their end products are relationships, influence, and access. None of these outcomes copy and paste well. So, when the priority shifts, when budgets tighten, when a new National Defense Strategy changes the game, SF has to rebuild its justification. That is exhausting and generative. The exhaustion produces the articles. The articles produce debates. The debates, at their best, produce real thinking. At their worst? Well, it can get ugly in the team room.
Another dynamic is at play here. Green Berets are selected from the beginning, literally, not just for physical capability but for cognitive flexibility, language aptitude, and what the Qualification Course loosely describes as the ability to thrive in ambiguity. The people who get through the Q-Course and succeed on A-Teams, tend to be thinkers and problem solvers. The Regiment’s culture rewards a certain kind of intellectual restlessness. That restlessness is an asset downrange where teams have to improvise with limited guidance and no template. That same restlessness, when the team is at home and looking for problems to solve, tends to turn inward. The force examines itself. The question of purpose is never fully settled for people who were trained to question everything.
There is also a degree of institutional insecurity at work. Granted, it is rational insecurity. SF occupies an uncomfortable position within the American military establishment. The Joint Force was built for decisive combat operations, for massing power and destroying enemies. The American way of war, as Russell Weigley described it, prizes annihilation. Special Forces were designed for a different outcome: shaping environments before and during conflict, building partners, and working through indigenous networks. These skill sets are supposed to achieve strategic outcomes that direct action cannot. The problem is that the Joint Force has never fully bought this theory. Nobody in the conventional military plans around UW. Geographic combatant commands tend to view SF as either premium conventional infantry or placeholders for theater security cooperation, rather than employ Green Berets in their intended UW role. When the force is not employed for what it was designed to do, and when the institution itself knows this is happening, the value proposition becomes more real. Is anyone actually using us the way we were built to be used? If not, what are we?
Recent debates, whatever their prescriptions, are a product of this uncertainty. The responses they generate, including the methodical, DOTMLPF-structured rebuttals posted in the comments, reflect the same underlying anxiety, expressed differently. Both the critique and the defense ask the same question: Does SF have a clearly defined role that the rest of the military and civilian leadership actually needs and intends to use?
This ongoing debate is healthy even when it gets heated. An institution that does not interrogate its own purpose in a changing environment tends to optimize for the wrong things. We experienced exactly that during the GWOT, when the demand for counterterrorism missions was so relentless that the regiment effectively abandoned its UW identity to answer the call. That was not a failure of individual Green Berets. It was a failure of institutional discipline: the inability to say no to missions that fell outside the core competency, because the demand signal never stopped, and the consequences of refusal were too costly. Today’s responses are manifestations of the force seeking to do better and hold itself accountable, in a way SF leadership did not always do during the door-kicking years.
What Green Berets are really doing when they write these pieces and argue about them at SOF Week or online is performing a function the institution needs, and the rest of the military largely does not bother with. They are asking whether the force is justified by what it actually does—rather than by what it claims to do. That is a harder question than it sounds, and the fact that Green Berets keep asking it, without embarrassment, is one of the things about the regiment that we should be proud of. The introspection is not a sign of weakness. It is the force taking its own principles seriously. We acknowledge that truth in reporting is an obligation. That obligation applies to what happens downrange and also to when a Green Beret declares the enterprise obsolete. Our concern should not be SF guys questioning who they are. Our concern should be whether anyone at Bragg and MacDill is listening.
Dr. “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD, is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, resistance, and special operations with the Department of War. He is a 2026 Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). Lumpy can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia
The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Government or the Department of War.
