Rethinking Global Engagement - The Requirement for Knowledge Before Action

摘要

The type of engagement necessary for U.S. security is not compatible with the interests of today's U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF). America requires a Global Engagement Plan (GEP) that is unprecedented in its patience and persistence, and that maintains a diffuse presence everywhere on the planet. Such a plan envisions and necessitates deliberate, intimate, and continuous American contact with sizeable segments of the world's population -- the predominantly non-elite majority that is inadequately observed and reported on by extant instruments of American power. Operatives tasked with executing the GEP would be permanently immersed in the host environment, taking a U.S. Army Special Forces mantra to operate by, with, and through indigenous forces and peoples to an extreme. Current U.S. governmental structures and methods of foreign engagement are unequal to such a task. America already has a force whose mission includes acting as 'global scouts': Army Special Forces. Nevertheless, the traditional method of Special Forces employment is inadequate for providing such deliberate, intimate, and continuous observation and reporting. A better method of global engagement can be found in both a Regional Engagement Concept (REC) for (military) soldiers, and a proposed Global Engagement Agency within the Department of State for (civilian) operatives. Retired and/or transitioning Special Forces soldiers provide an ideal nucleus for the formation of such an agency.