Special Operations Forces in the 21st Century ― Perspectives from the Social Sciences

This volume sets out an agenda for the social scientific study of Special Operations Forces in Western industrial democracies, using case studies from around the world.

Despite consistent downsizing, over the past two decades the armed forces of the industrial democracies have seen a huge growth in special operations forces (SOF). Whether in terms of personnel and units, the number of commands and supporting forces, or budgets and technologies at their disposal, SOF have seen unprecedented rates of expansion. This is the result of developments in the complex environments within which today's armed forces operate, and the geopolitical dynamics of industrial democracies. These developments have lead to the emergence of "new" or "hybrid" wars (interweaving high-intensity encounters, terrorism, insurgencies or other forms of violence), an emphasis on precision warfare (derived from social expectations regarding casualties), technological advances (which allow small units to deploy massive firepower), and budgetary constraints (small units are cheaper to maintain than massive formations). However, there is relatively little sustained social scientific research on these forces. In fact, apart from scattered articles (and a very occasional volume), the scholarly social sciences community knows relatively little about SOF and their political impact.

SOF present rather unique problems for the social scientific study of the armed forces and civil-military relations. While certainly a part of the armed forces, SOF inhabit rather autonomous spaces within militaries with their own recruitment systems, budgets and decision-hierarchies. While increasingly seen as a key solution to many security problems by political and military decision-makers, SOF nevertheless pose potential problems in terms of political control for political leaders since their relative autonomy from the military hierarchy and the covert nature of many of their missions make oversight difficult. While SOF are ready units capable of being dispatched around the world, we know relatively little about the policy processes that lead to their deployment.

Against this background, this book explores the distinctive features of SOF in terms of the classic questions posed by the social sciences in the study of the military: questions about the political control of the agents of organized armed violence; how SOF are used in the creation and maintenance of legitimacy for national policies; and explorations of the internal organizational dynamics by which these special units are generated, trained, selected for and deployed. It is arranged along an axis leading from the macro-sociological level of civil-military relations and policy-related concerns, through the mezzo-level of organizational dynamics and on to the micro-level of small group dynamics and individual characteristics. No less important, as almost all extant social scientific research about SOF has been carried out on American and (to an extent) British forces, our volume adds cases from Belgium, Canada, Israel, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The structure of the volume and the inclusion of a variety of national cases allow contributors to ask comparative questions about the differences between such forces and the "regulars", the similarity between SOF within and between national contexts, and about the global community of such forces.

Filling a clear gap in the literature, this book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, civil-military relations, irregular warfare, security studies, and International Relations.

Jessica Glicken Turnley is?President of Galisteo Consulting Group, Inc.,?and a Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), US Special Operations Command.

Eyal Ben-Ari?is currently Director of the Kinneret Center for Society, Security and Peace, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel. He has written and edited over fifteen books.

Kobi Michael is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

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