A Ranger task force strikes a Chinese space port in South America, a civil affairs soldier hunts for rogue genetically modified crops in Africa, an experimental dive unit destroys Chinese infrastructure, and Special Forces conduct influence operations in Tel Aviv in a new fictional anthology published by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The Fourth Age: The Future of Special Operations published by the Joint Special Operations University and SOCOM and edited by P.W. Singer and August Cole contains a series of fictional vignettes that are intended to offer challenging new ideas, as well as offer forward the future aspirations that SOCOM has about their future.
In The Fourth Age gone is the muscle bound tattoo'ed operator shooting guns and kicking in doors. This anthology envisions an alternative take where Special Operations should evolve, one where enablers are more important than operators, where using key technologies is what wins battles, and where it is largely women who are calling the shots. That's right Chad Thundercock, your time has come and gone, along with your homophobic jokes...and 20 years of combat experience, sorry bro.
While that cliche carries a bit of truth, the Special Operations community really is imagining a future force that is more diverse both in terms of the composition of its team members but also in the special skills that are brought to the fight. Currently, Special Forces is experimenting with different types of team composition, possibly even a 16-man (and woman) Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) that includes psychological operations specialists, civil affairs soldiers, cyber warfare experts, and even Space Force liaisons.
But of course, this is nothing new. Such endeavors have been attempted before. The so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, Don Rumsfeld's net-centric warfare, and today's flirtations with mixed reality goggles that reportedly have soldiers stumbling around training areas vomiting on themselves. In recent years SOCOM blew through millions of dollars developing a silly "Iron Man" type powered armor suit that never went anywhere.
Some of these technologies and tactics pan out, others don't.
In the Fourth Age, a not so-distant future is imaged where Iran and Russia continue to be annoyances to the United States, and China far from having its economy stall out as some predict, continues to roar forward into the 21st century. In this fiction, the men and women of Special Operations Command are called to fight a global battle against the Chinese communist party as a part of full blown political warfare fought across all of the spectrums and domains of warfare not just for influence, but for access to rare earth minerals.
Many of the vignettes in The Fourth Age are indeed thought provoking and interesting, but one can't help but notice what is absent. Combat is left off camera or simply is not present. One of the final stories details the Ranger Regiment and SEALs capturing a Chinese space port where a few PLA soldiers are killed, again "off camera."
While a project like this by no means can, or necessarily, should be a blood and guts shoot 'em up, one cannot help being slightly disturbed by how sterile this future vision of war is. Such premonitions have been made in the past, that robots would fight our wars for us, that conflicts would become more humane through our treaty obligations. Instead we've witnessed wholesale slaughter and barbarism from Syria to Ukraine to Gaza just over the last few years.
Technology is going to change the modern battlefield, but decisions in combat are unlikely to be made on the deck of the star ship Enterprise by a female Green Beret with a graduate degree wearing VR goggles. As we've seen recently, despite living in a world of technology at some point soldiers have to assault the enemy trench line and when it happens, the result is not far removed from what troops in World War I did a century ago.
The dream of two Green Berets in a hotel room with M4 rifles, laptops, and suite of hacking tools that are able to conduct direct action, special recon, and cyber warfare is not a new one. The stumbling blocks to get there are partly the massive shift in Special Ops culture (mentioned above) that would be required as well as bureaucratic and legal issues over authorizations and title authorities.
Many of the activities described in The Fourth Age are things that Special Forces would love to do, but absent of an AI "black box" that authorizes mission plans without human oversight as one short story details, these ideas are solidly in the realm of science fiction.
While technology acts as an enabler for Special Forces, rarely discussed is how it acts as a disabler. The force has made great strides in modernization but one area that Special Forces has actually backslid on is decentralization. Due to limited communications technology, Green Berets in the past had to act on their own and be trusted to carry out the mission and satisfy the commander's intent with little or not input from higher headquarters once deployed to the field.
With the proliferation of communications technologies, commanders now have the ability to reach all the way down through the entire military bureaucracy, down to the individual soldier level. They demand constant updates, want to monitor soldiers in real time using drone feeds, and mitigate risk at each stage of the operation in a zero defect military culture. Real time intelligence has become real time oversight on the soldier. In this scenario, the question is not whether the hyper-enabled technologically competent soldier can defeat the enemy, but rather if his command structure can get out of its own way.
P.W. Singer and August Cole were the perfect team to compile this anthology, having written near future military fiction such as the novels Ghost Fleet and Burn In. They not only edited but also wrote three of the short stories. Other authors include academics and Special Forces officers. The Fourth Age is a worthwhile read for anyone wanting to understand what the future aspirations of Special Operations Command is. It's an interesting work of fiction, for now at least.
The anthology can be downloaded and read free of charge on the JSOU website.