About this event

The Joint Special Operations University Future of SOF Forum: Strategic Influence and Communication Paradigms in a Compound Security Environment took place on 6-7 December 2022.

The purpose of this forum is to examine influence and outline potential paradigms that could yield advantage from strategies or approaches, strategic alliances, and/or cost differentials.  Adversaries to U.S. interests recognize that high-intensity, conventional force-on-force conflict with the U.S., its partners, and allies will require an unacceptable cost except under extreme conditions.  While remaining aggressive in competition, most emphasize non-defense means (economic, informational, diplomatic, financial, intelligence and legal), unconventional approaches, and asymmetric advantage to disrupt, undermine, deny, or usurp what they perceive as U.S. hegemonic power.  The goal for all competitors is often to exercise influence and the forces in the USSOCOM enterprise, enabled by conventional capabilities, are frequently called to action to generate strategic effects through operations, actions, information, and investments. 

JSOU Future of SOF Forums are a sequence of quarterly-running learning experience forums meant to explore themes, topics, and questions that are important to the current and future profession of special operations and the SOF Enterprise. We pose questions and pursue discourse among divergent perspectives to frame and understand problems, before looking for solutions. 

The SOF Identity Forums explore matters ranging from the promise and potential perils of emergent and disruptive technology, ethical implications, and diversity and inclusion, exploring SOF - as a profession - as it has been, is now, and will be tomorrow, considering evolving global challenges, national interests and operational requirements.

The SOF in Strategic Competition Forums focus on matters relating to use and utility of special operations forces, exploring our role in a competitive global environment with highly complex, complicated, intersectional, and 'compound security' challenges. We address questions regarding the United States' roles and interests in the context of our National Security Strategy and, more specifically, SOF's responsibilities and potential contributions. Each event in the SOF in Strategic Competition Series focuses on a unique region and various related problem-sets. 

Together, these quarterly forums drive our research initiatives, produce fresh research topics and questions that refresh and contemporize SOF teaching and learning curricula, all while promoting discourse and critical and creative thinking about complex issues in SOF. These Future of SOF Forums strengthen the network of thinking and doing SOF professionals for our nation.