OPINION — “If the numbers are what they are, then we need to man SOF (Special Operations Forces) to the numbers we can man to make sure that we have the quality that we owe the country. That’s where SOF is. There’s no doubt in my mind. If we could have the Army we know we need, not the Army we can resource, which is why recruiting is so important, we probably wouldn’t be discussing the cuts that we’re discussing.”
That’s Sergeant Major Mike Weimer, the 17th Sergeant Major of the Army and the first Green Beret selected for the role, from an interview he gave the Green Beret Foundation last August.
I print it now because an October 7 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report has raised questions about the future of SOF and questions that Congress ought to consider, including the proposed reduction of SOF personnel, as Sgt. Maj. Weimer mentioned.
Just over two years ago, I wrote a column which said, “U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which has grown to become the world’s top counterterrorism (CT) force over the past 20 years, is now facing some change in mission and reductions in personnel under the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy…optimally suited to support the Joint Force and the Nation as part of integrated deterrence.”
I wrote in October 2022 that then-SOCOM Commander General Richard Clarke and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Christopher Maier had announced in their earlier “Vision and Strategy” statement that with China and Russia as major power competitors, “Over the next 10 years, we will modernize SOF, pioneer dynamic and unorthodox approaches (including the full toolkit associated with irregular warfare), leverage emerging technologies to mitigate adversarial activities by China, and create asymmetric advantages for current and future conflict.”
I pointed out back then that SOF, perceptively in line with the new strategy, had begun in 2014 in Ukraine to work with other allies to help build up the Ukrainian special operations forces. Those forces were already threatened by Russia, while counterterrorism was still the main focus of SOCOM.
But two years ago, SOCOM was still operating all over the world. During calendar year 2021, the Government Accountability Office found SOF had 28 action units or task forces operating, primarily in the Middle East (12) and Africa (6). And between 2018 and 2021, it had terminated 27 SOF task forces and transitioned another 30 to other missions.
SOCOM, which grew out of the failed 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran, has become a major military force — from about 45,700 military and civilian personnel in 2001, to almost 74,000 in 2021 and today, “approximately 70,000 Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard, and civilian personnel assigned to its headquarters, its four components, and sub-unified commands,” according to the CRS report.
Falling numbers
Recently, however, as the Army has struggled to meet its goals, recruitment of Army Special Forces (Green Berets) soldiers has faltered. CRS reported that “between 2018 and 2020, the service recruited an average of 1,011 new Special Forces soldiers, missing its goal of 1,540 each year.” It also noted that this figure was the number of recruits that signed up for SOF, “not the total number of soldiers who make it all the way through Green Beret training. Those who don’t make it sometimes get second chances or are put into the regular Army infantry.”
In 2021, the Army scaled back the Green Beret recruiting goal and ended up with 1,358 new recruits. However, contracts dropped again to 779 recruits in 2022, as the service struggled to bring in new talent after the pandemic. Although the Army met its overall recruitment target in fiscal 2024, it has not yet made public the number of new Green Beret contracts.
Moreover, it takes a second year of training after joining the Army before you finish the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) and only then will you earn your Green Beret. The CRS reported, “That pass rate [for the SFQC] was between 60% and 80% in the early 2010s, but has plummeted to around 45% and 60% in recent years. It’s unclear what led to that lower pass rate, though failing land navigation accounts for roughly 70% of all failures…It is not known publicly if the SFQC pass rate and numbers of applicants for SFQC has improved from 2023 through 2024.”
The CRS report contained what I consider another important factor: “Fewer serving soldiers and junior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) are volunteering for Army SOF, which could result in a less experienced, less knowledgeable, and less mature Army SOF, which could prove problematic in the highly complex and dynamic security environment where Army SOF currently operates.”
In 2023, according to the CRS report, the Army was considering cuts as deep as 10% to 20% of its special operations forces, with most coming from logistics and information warfare teams. But the actual plan was released on February 27, 2024. That day, the Army published a white paper which described “changes to its force structure that will modernize and continue to transform the service to better face future threats. Under the plan, the Army will reorganize over the next decade to ensure it can deliver trained, cohesive and lethal forces to meet future challenges in increasingly complex operational environments.”
The white paper said the Army examined its SOF “requirements for large scale combat in multiple theaters and applied additional modeling to understand the requirements for special operators during the campaigning phase of great power competition. This analysis indicated that that existing Army SOF force structure meets or exceeds demand in large-scale conflict relative to other capabilities.”
Working with SOCOM, the white paper said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “determined the Army could reduce Army special operations forces by approximately 3,000 authorizations. Specific reductions will be made based on an approach that ensures unique SOF capabilities are retained. Positions and headquarters elements that are historically vacant or hard-to-fill will be prioritized for reduction.”
The day the white paper was released, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy A. George met with the Defense Writers Group. Discussing the SOF reductions, Wormuth echoed the white paper, saying, “We tried to identify obviously jobs that they’ve had trouble filling. Things again like print media, psyops kinds of capabilities that are sort of no longer needed. Those are the kinds of things that we looked to get rid of.”
Then, Congress jumped on the issue.
Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a retired Army Green Beret and Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, has been fighting the 3,000-person cut for more than a year – even before it was announced.
Back in October 2023, Waltz put out a statement saying, “I am stunned and appalled by reports indicating the U.S. Army will cut 3,000 troops from its special operations ranks as a means to manage their worst recruiting crisis since the Vietnam War. The Secretary of the Army is trying to claim she’s only cutting support troops like intelligence analysts, psychological operations troops, and logistics personnel. In reality, these support troops are critical to our special operators’ success in remote locations in 60-70 countries on any given day all over the world.”
This past June, when an amendment to the fiscal 2025 Defense Appropriations Bill which prohibits the “realignment or reduction of special operations forces end strength” in fiscal 2025 and 2026, was approved in the House version, Waltz told the Green Beret Foundation. “I’ve been fighting it [the SOF reduction] all day long and the Secretary of the Army keeps telling me, ‘No, these are the intel folks and the logistics folks and the support. These aren’t actual Green Beret trigger pullers.’ I just think it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what those special operations trigger pullers need. We need embedded intelligence.”
When less is more
In a September 2024 letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Austin stated that the department strongly objected to section 1044 of the House-passed bill, which would prevent reducing or realigning SOF end-strength authorizations for all of calendar years 2025 and 2026.
The CRS report suggested that that the language be removed and “the issue Army SOF force structure…could be subject additional examination and action by Congress in the future.”
Meanwhile, the fiscal 2025 Defense Authorization Bill has yet to pass Congress.
For guidance, I went back to what Sergeant Major of the Army Mike Weimer said last August as a Green Beret himself: “We’re at tension for the same talent. We’re in a resource-constrained environment. That’s a little bit of what you’re seeing. I go back to my SOF DNA. I don’t worry about it for SOF as long as we don’t compromise quality. We’ve accomplished a lot with very small numbers when it was the right people with the right leaders and trust…I’ll take that all day long. As a matter of fact, you’re usually more lethal and you get things done faster.”
I’ve found over the years, as Sgt.Major Weimar implied, whether it was my time in Army Counterintelligence, running investigations for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or reporting for The Washington Post, that smaller works better, and larger leads to bureaucracy.
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