Strategic Disruption by Special Operations Forces

Researchers from RAND Corporation develop a new concept for strategic disruption by special operations forces, involving proactive campaigns to delay, degrade, or deny an adversary's ability to achieve core interests through its preferred strategies. This research provides a clear framework, grounded in concrete historical examples, for how strategic disruption campaigns can create the time, space, and opportunity for strategic gains across diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of national power. For the special operations community, this research provides a rubric for how future campaigns can disrupt nation-state competitors' efforts to win without fighting, particularly when potentially escalatory options rooted in conventional deterrence are ill-suited or infeasible to achieve similar disruptive effects.