Synthesizing the Relationship Between Gendarmerie-type Forces and SOF

Recent international military deployments have shown the prevalence of population-centric task settings. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 confronted the U.S. and its coalition partners with serious public order issues, caused by the dissolution of former president of Iraq Saddam Hussain’s former power structure. Some years after the Kosovo war, in support of the peace process, the European Union (EU) established the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) to help strengthen the rule of law in the newborn country.[1] Winning the hearts and minds of the local population through reconstruction and development activities was a key element of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) strategy in Afghanistan to weaken the position of the opposing Taliban forces.[2] The UN-led Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSMA) mission in Mali followed a strong security sector reform logic to get the African country back on its feet.[3] More recently, Russian Federation hostilities in Ukraine seem to deliberately target built-up inhabited areas to evoke social disruption, forcing the Ukrainian armed forces and supporting militaries to put energy into, for example, investigating war crimes, managing refugee streams, and dealing with subversive elements.[4]   

For Special Operations Forces (SOF), engaging with local populations is part of their nature. During World War II under the umbrella of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S. government deployed specifically trained military agents deep within enemy territory to gather strategic information and organize and coordinate local resistance groups.[5] Although large-scale conventional force structures dominated the military realm of the Cold War, SOF proved to be a valuable strategic asset for the proxy wars that surfaced around the globe. SOF were typically used by both the Eastern and Western block to train and professionalize indigenous warring factions in far off places to support overarching geopolitical objectives.[6] More generally, it could be argued that the undisputed existence of a separate civil affairs (CA) branch within the SOF community, proves the military relevance of knowledge and skills on the civilian domain.[7]

Gendarmerie-type forces (GTF) also have a strong societal focus. Originating from the Napoleonic era to maintain law and order in weakly controlled rural areas, GTF bridge the gap between police and military.[8] GTF are mainly a result of Europe’s turbulent state-building process, and as such, did not firmly take root in Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian countries.[9] Typical examples are the French Gendarmerie, Italian Carabinieri, Spanish Guardia Civil, Austrian Federal Gendarmerie, and Netherlands Royal Marechaussee. The rise of population-centric missions has raised the popularity of GTF, because they are capable of conducting critical public order tasks for which the military is not traditionally equipped such as “crowd control, combating organized crime, protecting returning refugees, and the reorganization of local police forces.”[10]

It is furthermore important to note that since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western military forces are refocusing on “traditional” modes of warfare. At the same time however, these Western forces are still engaged in a process of learning from their Security Forces Assistance (SFA) experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. and UK are leading the way by institutionalizing dedicated SFA and warfighting units within their force structures. As such, the SFA capabilities of these countries are somewhat protected from the major shift that is currently taking place towards warfighting. This is, however, not the case for most other Western militaries. Consequently, a gap in military SFA capabilities could arise for them. Historically, SOF are seen as the answer to such a deficit.[11] Interestingly, for Western states with GTF there may also be the alternative option of GTF complementing SOF to help bridge the SFA gap.

This article aims to analyze if collaboration between SOF and GTF could be beneficial, based on the assumption that most special operations require non-SOF support to live up to the changing nature of the international security environment.[12] In fact, scientific contemplations on the dynamics of the Grey Zone, as well as Hybrid Warfare, point to disrupting public order and stability through non-military means and approaches.[13] At the same time, literature stresses that a lack of knowledge on policing and legal aspects within SOF units affect population-centric engagements.[14] Also, strategic thinking on the future role of CA tends to be quite military oriented, focusing on the traditional task dimensions of initial entry, reconnaissance, engage and influence, and support to resistance.[15] Based on two empirical cases, in which SOF were confronted with public order challenges, we will investigate which knowledge and skill leaks occurred and discuss how GTF in a collaborative interagency effort could help to overcome these weak spots.

SOF and Public Order Tasks

This section discusses two well-documented cases in which SOF were actively involved in population-centric activities. First, an analysis of Mark Moyar’s study of Village Stability Operations (VSO) in Afghanistan is conducted. Second, John Alexander’s research on the concept of convergence, referring to SOF being increasingly used for civilian law enforcement tasks, is scrutinized.[16]

VSO

Moyar, former director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation at the U.S. Agency for International Development, has studied SOF deployment in Afghanistan extensively. His research focuses on two strongly related counterinsurgency (COIN) programs, namely VSO and Afghan Local Police (ALP), aimed at complementing the direct enemy-centric anti-terrorism effort in Afghanistan with an indirect population-centric approach of securing the Afghan populace.[17] This section discusses his findings along two lines. First, the origin and rationale of the VSO and ALP programs will be described. Second, the main public order challenges that have emerged in relation to these programs will be explained.

VSO Origin

In support of the VSO concept, experts were asked to analyze the history of Afghanistan, paying attention to societal evolution in general and security-related developments in particular. This analysis showed that in a matter of decades, starting with the communist coup in 1978, followed by the Soviet intervention in 1979, and the internal struggle that started when the Soviets left in 1989, Afghanistan’s traditional rural system of politics ceased to exist. In this system, the central government funded local elites to keep the countryside quiet. With this funding, local militias could be established under community control (i.e., shuras or jirgas) and regulated by a tribal code of rules. What remained after the Soviet era was a country torn along ethnic and religious lines with various warring factions fighting for self-interest, opportunistically coalescing and switching sides. With support of Pakistan, the radical Islamist Taliban gained the upper hand in this domestic power play and as of 1996 took control over most of the country. Granted refuge by Taliban rulers, the U.S. government decided to go after Osama Bin Laden, founder of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan as retribution for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. deployed SOF to Afghanistan to ally with the Northern Alliance, which was a partnership of different ethnic groups fighting the Taliban. With a combination of SOF operators giving military advice and directing air support, the Northern Alliance was able to overthrow the Taliban regime in a matter of weeks. After this regime change, Western countries sent troops to Afghanistan under NATO command to help the U.S. with its global fight against terrorism but also to avoid Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for extremism again.

The U.S. and coalition troops soon found themselves tangled up in an intricate web of warlords, militias, ethnic groups, and local communities. When NATO troops drove insurgents out of a certain area, the Afghan National Police (ANP) often proved incapable of preventing the insurgents from returning. The government-controlled ANP lacked the local knowledge, social ties, and sometimes commitment to gain community support and develop sufficient situational awareness. Due to this poor performance, and fueled by COIN successes in Iraq, the SOF community became increasingly interested in the development of local security forces. Brigadier General Edward Reeder, Commander Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan, first introduced the idea of community self-defense, arguing that enhancing local security would thwart the insurgents more fundamentally than anti-terrorist direct-action missions. Reeder’s successor, Brigadier General Austin Scott Miller, adopted his vision and convinced other senior commanders to move in this direction. Miller coined the more population-centric approach, Village Stability Operation (VSO). Departing from the assumption that improving the living conditions at the local (i.e., village) level would deplete the breeding ground of the insurgency, U.S. SOF teams were deployed in significant numbers to rural Afghanistan to empower local communities to actively participate in securing and developing their own areas. It is important to note that the abovementioned insights were not revolutionary; they were already put forth by former British military officer and COIN expert Robert  Thompson in his landmark book, wherein the trinity of “clear, hold and build” was central.[18] Over time however, the reality of counterinsurgency as experienced during the 1950s and 1960s was distorted into a simplified hearts and minds narrative.[19] It took the failing of this distorted narrative to relearn the inconvenient truth of hard security being a structural component within the “hold” phase of counterinsurgency.

The relatedness between security, governance, and development forms the heart of VSO. On one hand, development initiatives can only prosper when security and good governance are in place. On the other hand, security and development depend heavily on ruling governance practices and structures. VSO intend to comprehensively address these three core aspects by concentrating on the following two measures: (1) building a trusted and committed local security apparatus and (2) reintroducing shared community decision-making through shuras. The Afghan Local Police program was initiated in support of the former objective. Setting-up shuras was aimed at establishing a viable governance system, capable of constructively enacting security and development issues within communities prone to ethnic and tribal rivalries.

SOF Challenges

Moyar discusses several weaknesses regarding the VSO/ALP program, which can be categorized into two main challenges.[20] The first one refers to insufficient public order expertise. Although the military ascendance and professionalism of SOF were critical for gaining community support for the VSO approach, the more complex task of mobilizing local support that followed after the fighting proved less convincing. SOF non-military, knowledge and skills were underdeveloped, because selection and promotion processes do not explicitly take into account criteria such as “the comprehension of foreign operational environments, the influencing of foreigners through interpersonal communications, and the solving of complex and ambiguous problems through creativity, flexibility, intuition, and judgment.”[21] On a higher level of aggregation, the study shows that public order knowledge is primarily allocated to the CA branch, but practically all SOF elements in Afghanistan were either directly or indirectly involved in community-centric governance and development tasks. As such, Moyar stresses that “these subjects [governance and development] deserve to be taught in depth to SOF beyond the civil affairs community.”[22] In addition, rural residential areas formed the center of gravity of the VSO program. In fact, the idea resonates strongly with the traditional indirect approach of building defense capacity from the bottom up, adhering to SOF’s DNA of local empowerment.[23] However, villages and local communities are part of an overarching public order system. Interestingly, VSO initiators and supporters lacked sufficient knowledge on how to incorporate the VSO program into a comprehensive public order system that also involved the district, provincial, and national level. Consequently, public order successes at the community level could not be exploited or were even frustrated by public administration and judicial deficiencies higher up on Afghanistan’s governmental ladder. Moyar argues as follows: “One of the most important lessons of VSO and ALP was that permanent village stability required building partner capacity beyond the village level. The Afghan government needed capacity at the district and provincial levels in order to sustain the ALP once the Americans departed, and it needed capacity at the regional and national levels to manage the provinces and direct national programs and resources.”[24] Finally, VSO teams received information from regular U.S. intelligence organizations. These were not attuned to public order tasks, because enemy-centric activities predominated their operational focus. The fine-grained human terrain analyses required to properly fathom the social dynamics of a local community could simply not be delivered. In his study, Moyar states: “Targeting the enemy was a clearly defined and clearly attainable activity [of U.S. intelligence organizations]; an individual could be defined either as hostile or not hostile, and an individual’s location could be specified with precise grid points. Analyzing partner-nation leaders, on the other hand, lay outside the experience of much of the intelligence world, and the predominant collection resources were not aligned with that mission. It required subjective analysis of complex problems, with few clear cut answers.”[25]

Numerical capacity is a second major challenge. The fractal VSO approach of sending small SOF teams to residential areas and villages asked for a large investment in troops. Knowing that Afghanistan is a vast country and SOF are a scarce asset, one can imagine that enhancing the VSO footprint is problematic. To make progress, senior commanders could not be fastidious about which units to use. Ideally, CA officers augmented the regular SOF teams. Yet, this preferred configuration could only be deployed in limited numbers due to the relatively small size of the CA branch. As a secondary option regular SOF teams without CA support were sent to the villages. Moreover, when VSO gradually rooted and community demand increased, the U.S. military was forced to also allocate regular troops to the program in order to keep up. Moyar explains that such capacity-driven compromises affected VSO efficacy:

For the U.S. conventional forces assigned to VSO and ALP, governance and development expertise varied widely. Some of their personnel had been engaged in governance and development during prior tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, and possessed experience in redirecting intelligence assets to the human terrain. But the conventional officers assigned to VSO and ALP had not been handpicked for the mission, so some of those selected lacked relevant experience. Most of them did not receive significant pre-deployment training in governance or development, resulting in complaints that the conventional forces personnel assigned to VSO and ALP were not adequately prepared for their jobs.[26]

Acknowledging this problem, Wilkins states that “with quality as the goal, future SOF leaders should abstain from the temptation to employ conventional infantry forces to amplify irregular warfare programs.”[27]

Apart from delivering sheer numbers, VSO capacity also refers to committing resources over an extended period of time. The success of the program hinged on a high level of trust between the local community and the VSO teams. In short, if the locals feared the Americans abandoning them too soon, they would not actively oppose the Taliban insurgents for the sake of their own security. The resulting divergence of interests made it increasingly difficult to sustain unity of effort within the VSO program. This principal-agent problem of divergence has been noted by more scholars.[28] Following this reasoning, it is obvious that the prioritized political aim of bringing the number of Western troops back, thereby focusing on an end date instead of an end state, put a major strain on the VSO program.[29] In this respect Moyar concludes:

Plans for large-scale U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan coincided with plans for expanding the ALP, which multiplied the burdens on coalition forces assigned to VSO and required accelerated transition of ALP sites to the Afghans. Experience showed that prolonged coalition presence as long as two years was usually required to build enough local capacity to ensure successful transition.[30]

SOF and Civilian Law Enforcement

Alexander has written a monograph on the growing participation of SOF in law enforcement operations, both domestically and internationally.[31] He points to four developments that have fueled this trend. First, he explains that America’s global war on terrorism has resulted in a growing number of deployments aimed at preventing extremist groups to find sanctuary in internally-divided and weakly governed countries. The previous account of the VSO program in Afghanistan is a typical example of this phenomenon. Alexander uses the terminology overseas contingency operations, were SOF are typically used to strengthen the local security apparatus, but also to capture suspects, collect evidence, and acquire intelligence.[32] Second, the fight against international terrorism has also exposed the nexus between terrorism and organized crime. Illegal drugs and arms trafficking are major funding sources of terrorism. In a transnational chain of inter-locking criminal activities organized crime syndicates and extremist groups consciously join forces.[33] As a result, the clear divide between external and internal security has gradually eroded.[34] Traditionally, external security is seen as a responsibility of the military, whereas internal security is largely allocated to the police. SOF are increasingly called upon for domestic law enforcement tasks because of the amalgamation of the two domains.[35] Third, the level of violence exerted by organized crime groups is dramatically rising, evoking an arms race with law enforcement agencies. With the establishment of specialized units (e.g., SWAT), police forces are more and more adopting a military way of operating and organizing as well, also known as the “militarization of policing.”[36] SOF have played a central role in training these units. Fourth, Alexander mentions that to fight the crime-terror nexus, military assistance is offered to countries being destabilized by pervasive criminality.[37] For example, in Colombia and Mexico, organized crime groups have infiltrated all of society’s arteries. With near impunity, they make money with a variety of illegal activities that form a direct security hazard for the United States.[38] Based on bilateral agreements such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, materiel support, military advice, and SOF training are employed as ways to disrupt organized, often drug-related, crime in the countries of origin.[39]

SOF Challenges

The growing involvement in law enforcement, either at home or abroad, confronts the SOF community with several challenges—the most prominent one being a lack of judicial procedural expertise. Knowledge of the legal aspects of mission execution, as well as details of criminal prosecution, are paramount when operating under civilian rule of law. Citing Alexander:

In police academies across the country, recruits receive extensive instruction on civil and criminal law regarding the necessity for, and process of, obtaining warrants. Likewise they are carefully schooled on the preparation and delivery of testimony in courts of law. They learn in excruciating detail all of the pressures that may be brought in cross examination by defense attorneys. Unfortunately, SOF operators receive no such training and education. When asked how they learned about the conduct of raids that were bound by warrants and other legal constraints, or how they learned to give testimony in court, all stated they had none. Everyone interviewed for this project, who was involved in these operations, indicated they learned the process by trial and error after they were engaged in the process.[40]

Personal liability makes bridging this knowledge gap all the more important. When conducting law enforcement tasks, individual SOF operators have to be protected from legal prosecution. To avoid lawsuits, police forces keep detailed training records to be able to prove that individual officers are professionally up-to-date. Within the SOF community such a training repository is mostly focused upon the hard skills associated with direct action operations. 

The second challenge concerns a lack of knowledge on the collection and processing of biometric evidence. Correctly handling evidence is part of every police officer’s DNA. After all, improper conduct may lead to evidence being ruled inadmissible in court. When it comes to evidence collecting in a military expeditionary context, SOF are mostly the first security actors on the spot. In Iraq, they mostly relied on eyewitness testimony in court. Alexander states the following:

The main testimony by these American troops is to place the suspect at the scene and confirm the existence of weapons, explosives, or other contraband found at the site of the apprehension. This witnessing is often accomplished by having photographs of the SOF personnel and suspects at the scene with the material that was taken into evidence.[41]

 However, legally such an approach is questionable in today’s domestic law enforcement context. Due to advances in the field of biometrics such as DNA, iris scans, facial recognition, this type of forensic evidence has come to dominate court trials. Knowing that SOF personnel will continue to be involved in isolating and protecting vital evidence in different operational contexts leads to the conclusion that more intensive training in forensic science and producing evidence is paramount. 

Third, Alexander mentions the notion of preparedness. Where the Posse Comitatus Act strictly restricts the use of federal military forces on U.S. soil, the Patriot Act, which was introduced after the 9/11 terror attacks, made it much easier for the U.S. government to address the terrorist threat militarily within its domestic boundaries. The Patriot Act, being a temporary legislative measure, was repealed by the U.S. government in 2019. Still, the whole endeavor shows that in the event of a major domestic security contingency, legal changes are made easily, implying that SOF should be prepared to shift between external and internal security task settings without compromising operational readiness and performance. Alexander argues as follows:

if significant escalation occurs and/or the advent of terrorist attacks in which the actors strike multiple targets with the intent on holding buildings or other facilities, then it may be necessary to consider employing SOF elements domestically. Posse Comitatus Act acknowledged, it would be better to contemplate these options now rather than being called in after the event has unfolded. It is the expansion of the drug cartels that could easily force such a scenario.[42]

Discussion

The VSO and law enforcement case make clear that public order tasks can be troublesome for SOF. In a sense, they show that SOF have become a victim of their own success. Generally speaking, in the event of an extraordinary security situation, SOF are the first to turn to. The SOF label, after all, refers to the ability to conduct special tasks that regular security actors cannot undertake. However, the notion of being special has evolved in the course of time. Originally, during World War II, Special Forces had to execute missions that were unsuitable for regular military units. One can think of reconnaissance operations deep in enemy territory, hit-and-run assaults, sabotage, and supporting partisan groups.[43] Defense analyst Michael Fitzsimmons formulates the core specialty of SOF as follows: “They are stealthy and capable of operating independent of support and therefore can often penetrate denied areas that would be inaccessible to other forces.”[44] Based on their key characteristics of being team-based, versatile, self-reliant, extremely fit, and highly professional, the range of SOF missions has broadened and diversified as the years passed.[45] Ruling SOF doctrine lists a related mixture of enemy-centric and population-centric core activities, namely direct action, counterterrorism, foreign internal defense, unconventional warfare, special reconnaissance, psychological operations, CA operations, information operations, and counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.[46] In current times, where asymmetric threats predominate, SOF are still seen as a crucial part of the security answer.[47] Interestingly, many of these new “hybrid” threats remain below the threshold of officially declared war, with state and non-state adversaries using an intricate mixture of propaganda, military activities, economic pressure, social provocations, cyber attacks, and political influence to exert power.[48] Yet, the ambiguous and multi-faceted nature of hybrid threats has led to the conclusion that SOF can never be the sole answer for such security conundrums. Required expertise in social media dynamics, cyber tactics, but also in languages, foreign cultures, religions, global micro-regions, is so diverse  that it simply cannot all be found in one single organizational entity.[49] Consequently, strategic thinkers argue that in order to truly exploit the uniqueness of SOF in a contemporary hybrid context a customized collaborative multi-agency approach is needed.[50] The aim is to create a synergistic mixture of different complementing specialties, including SOF. In addition, content-wise, it is believed that public order plays a pivotal role in dampening opportunistic hybrid aggression. In short, stable societies, relying on credible and legitimate governmental institutions, are less prone to hybrid aggression than poor, politically unstable states, where chaos and anarchy may create a window of opportunity for malicious individuals and groups to undertake subversive activities.[51]

Knowing that the hybridization of conflict requires an interagency approach with SOF and other elements collaboratively conducting tasks to either safeguard, improve, or restore public order in a society, puts the spotlights on gendarmerie-type forces (GTF) as a promising matching partner. GTF hold the middle ground between military and police. Important to mention first, is that the military police (MP) branch, which is perhaps better known, and GTF, are similar but not the same. Both entities are trained and equipped to execute key policing tasks in support of overarching military operations, being: (1) policing the force, (2) mobility support, (3) detention, (4) security, and (5) stability policing. What sets the two apart, however, is that GTF are also used domestically for public order purposes under civilian law, like border control, policing rural areas, high-risk security, combating organized crime, riot control, fighting cross-border economic crime.[52] Having their roots in Europe’s nation-building process that commenced after the French revolution, GTF were mainly introduced within countries brought under Napoleonic reign. As such, GTF are not an asset common to all Western militaries. Today, countries like France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Romania, and Poland have GTF incorporated into their portfolio of forces.[53]

GTF are perceived a valuable tool for filling the security gap of contemporary policing contexts, at national level, but especially in international conflicts.[54] The main reason for this presumption is that civilian police forces are ill-suited for coping with situations of open or simmering armed conflict.[55] Due to their military training and heavier equipment, GTF offer a robust alternative, capable of seamlessly cooperating with regular military troops at the most extreme end of the spectrum of violence, if necessary. However, despite their paramilitary characteristics and combat potential, GTF are not a typical fighting element. Always aiming to bring a violent public order disturbance back to normality, the semi-police nature of GTF will urge them to focus on the de-escalation of violence. This ability to use force restrainedly makes GTF a perfect security instrument for population-centric activities.

The security gap for which GTF can be used has three appearances according to Retired Air Force Colonel Michael Dziedzic: (1) a deployment gap; (2) an enforcement gap, and (3) an institutional sustainability gap.[56] A deployment gap refers to the time lag to field an operational civilian police contingent by the international community in support of a peace process following armed conflict. This time window is quite risky, because of the likelihood of hostilities re-erupting or lawlessness taking root in a war-torn area where a functioning local security apparatus is absent and weapons are readily available. An enforcement gap has to do with lacking capabilities to perform activities that fall between major combat operations and non-violent community policing activities. To fill this security void in the aftermath of armed conflict robustness, scalability and a broad law enforcement repertoire are crucial to properly deal with political-criminal power structures, rogue intelligence organizations, warlords, fanatical religious groups, or global terrorists trying to actively undermine the peace process. Opposed to the first two gaps, the institutional gap does not primarily refer to a post-conflict public order void. The institutional gap concentrates on the issue of creating sustainable security in a country. This implies a long term perspective of political development, comprehensively addressing the complete legal chain, from law making, to law enforcement, administration of justice, and imprisonment. It is believed that by delivering justice for all citizens the risk of simmering public discontent can be mitigated, which then helps to prevent institutional decay or collapse from turning into an actual situation of armed conflict. Important to add, however, is that security scholars stress that an institutional gap does not have to emerge in a weak state only. Due to the blurring of internal and external security, institutional judicial vacuums are currently also arising in Western countries with well-established legal systems.[57] As such, improving ones’ national security assemblage in response to domestic concerns like pervasive criminality, refugee streams, and radicalization and extremism, is a major point of concern in many of these developed countries too.[58]

GTF and SOF

Peter Neuteboom offers an oversight of the activities that GTF can execute to help bridge the different security gaps.[59] He differentiates between formal public order (e.g., crowd and riot control), law enforcement (e.g., criminal investigations) and miscellaneous activities aimed at signaling, preventing or deescalating social disturbances (e.g., advise and training). Based on this repertoire and the accompanying set of equipment, GTF could be a useful partner for SOF too. In the event of a population-centric tasking, it could, for example, be worthwhile to have a provost marshal office incorporated into the SOF command and control structure to fuel decision-making from the start with knowledge on law enforcement and public order. Another impulse could be to augment SOF teams on the ground with gendarmerie specialists to enrich performance with policing knowledge as well as useful skills, techniques, and equipment. The conscious use of non-lethal weapons, especially, could help SOF to be coercive while minimizing the risk of public sentiment backfiring. To improve SOF scalability, partnering with GTF could be an interesting option as well, because adding GTF and SOF numbers creates a far larger resource base for population-centric operations. This numerical gain can be exploited differently. For example, a phased app

roach can be followed with SOF teams in VSO-like settings being relieved by GTF units if the security situation allows it. Another way is to work complementary to one another. A good example in this respect is the recent contingency that took place in Afghanistan at Kabul International Airport. Many countries deployed a national SOF element to execute a Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) when the Taliban retook control over the country. The television images showed that these relatively small units were largely outnumbered against the massive crowd of people trying to gain access to the airport in an attempt to escape the country. GTF, trained and equipped for crowd control, would have been an ideal additional tool to offer both the mass and tactics required for dealing with such crowds. Such a partnering force would have given SOF far more leeway in conducting pinpoint actions, for example, to bring national citizens to safety.[60]

Tactical collaboration between SOF and GTF requires above all joint training programs in which integration, interoperability, and interdependence can be forged.[61] In addition, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence David Gompert suggests investing in a more flexible force structuring approach to better deal with today’s multi-faceted and uncertain security environment. More precisely, he proposes a basic design of a core combat nucleus (i.e., SOF) complemented with additional capabilities.[62] These add-ons are schematically presented in two concentric circles of, respectively, core joint capabilities and regular service building blocks. Core joint capabilities refer to supporting elements for which the probability is high that the combat nucleus will need them when deployed. Regular service building blocks can also be called upon but offer less critical support or can take more time to prepare. Given the increasing focus on population-centric tasks with a variety of judicial complexities, it could be argued that GTF should become part of SOF’ primary support circle of core joint capabilities. Establishing such a formal interrelationship will certainly help the two specialized communities to grow toward each other.

Conclusion

This study aimed to analyze the collaboration potential of SOF and GTF. Because this topic is relatively underdeveloped in academic literature, empirical cases of U.S. SOF dominate this work. In particular, the case on SOF and domestic law enforcement has a strong American focus because of its connection with the war-on-drugs strategy. It is, therefore, questionable whether the experiences of the U.S. with employing SOF domestically or expeditionary in response to drug-related crime are also one-on-one applicable to other Western countries. Despite this bias, security literature in general paints a convincing picture of internal and external security merging, stressing that law enforcement and public order will no longer be the sole responsibility of police forces. Increasingly, the military will have to play its part as well. In fact, the VSO and domestic law enforcement case make clear that SOF are already actively involved in tasks where military and policing activities intertwine. Although, generally speaking, population-centric behavior is a well-developed SOF trait, the cases also bring to the fore that many of today’s task-settings have a strong civilian law enforcement dimension for which SOF are less prepared. To exploit the unique capabilities of SOF in a civilian law enforcement context, this article introduces GTF as a promising enabling partner. On a daily basis, GTF conduct public order tasks under civilian law, but because of their semi-military status, also have the knowledge and robustness to tackle social disturbances in contested environments in collaboration with other military units. This dual-headedness makes GTF an ideal complementary partner for SOF, as civilian law enforcement techniques, tactics, equipment, and knowledge can, in a plug-and-play fashion, be added to the operational portfolio under varying circumstances. Lastly, it is interesting to note the similarities between the 19th century context wherein GTF forces came to be and the reality of contemporary COIN and SFA missions. In a way, one could argue that the call to add GTF to SOF’s operational repertoire marks a modern-day, expeditionary return to the early state-building logic from which GTF originate.

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[12] Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), Special Operations Forces Interagency Reference Guide, Fourth edition, (Tampa, FL: Joint Special Operations University, 2020).

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