What SOCOM Has Learned From the War in Ukraine

Special Operations Command

The war in Ukraine has been underway for a little over three months now, and the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has been paying close attention. So what is USSOCOM (sometimes simply referred to as SOCOM)? It is the unified combatant command responsible for overseeing the special operations components of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Created in 1987, it provides command, control, and training for all special operations forces (SOF) in the United States.

As I’ve said, they’ve been paying close attention to the war and have learned at least two important lessons. The first lesson being that the military relationships the US has been cultivating over the past several years are paying off for us and our allies. For years, Ukrainian troops have been trained at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center (CTC) near Lviv. The most recent US soldiers providing the training were part of Task Force Gator. With a name like “TF Gator,” you should not be surprised to find out it was comprised of the Florida Army National Guard’s 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

The 45th BCT trainer shown above was part of an international coalition dedicated to improving the combat training center’s capabilities and helping to build professionalism within the Ukrainian Army. Not even a year ago, about 6,000 multinational troops from 15 different nations came together at the Ukrainian training complex under the banner of “Partnership for Peace,” a cooperative program for NATO and Euro-Atlantic partner countries. The exercises ran from September 20th to October 1st, 2021.

One might wonder why the US would send National Guard Units to train Ukraine’s army instead of regular army units and the answer is kind of interesting. While National Guard units were once comprised mostly of people who had no prior active duty military service and were called “Weekend Warriors,” the modern unit of the Guard of the last 20 years have deployed repeatedly to combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They are chock full of men and women with combat experience.

In the US Senate

Last month, leaders of the special operations commands of the various services testified before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. While budgetary issues and general readiness were discussed, the main focus was on the situation in Ukraine.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa wanted to know, “What are the follow-up risks of the invasion? Where do we need to expand our footprint and presence in EUCOM (US European Command).”

Army Lieutenant General Jonathan Braga stated that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “added emphasis” to the need to expand “longstanding generational relationships” across eastern Europe. But, he added, “With the scale and scope of the threat of Russia and China, we won’t be able to do this alone. “That’s why I talked about our international partners and how increasing their capacities  is so critical.”

The impact of international partnerships with special operations forces of a “multitude of different countries” in Ukraine is an “untold story,” he said, most likely referring to still classified operations. The General went on to say:

“I won’t name the number right now, but they have absolutely banded together…And I think that really bore out from the last 20 years of working together, sweating together, bleeding together on different battlefields, on different continents.”

Naval Special Warfare Commander Rear Admiral Hugh Howard spoke up and added that, on the homefront, US special operations is at an “inflection point” and that Ukraine represents “a fifth modern era for special operations, one that shifts away from the counterterrorism capabilities that US special operations have so heavily focused on for the past two decades.”  

Speaking of our current mission focus, Howard continued, “We over-rotated on counterterrorism. Clearly.  And we have lost some ground in the distinctive things that only we can do, and we are moving with urgency to make the main thing the things that only we can do in the maritime domain.” By that statement, I’m assuming the Admiral means that Naval Special Warfare will return their focus to the “Naval” part of their name.

It was then that Marine Corps special operations commander, Major General James Glynn, chimed in to agree with Admiral Howard. He said:

“The choices that we’re having to determine right now is what of the counterterrorism skill set, the stuff that we’ve invested in and developed very well over the last 20 years, how much of it translates? How well does it translate? And what else do we need to be able to do?”

Drones: The Future of Modern Warfare

The truth is that special operators are learning in Ukraine what the future non-counterterrorism battlefield may look like, and a lot of that is not on the ground. General Braga clearly explained this fact to the gathered lawmakers. “It’s impressive to see the impact that manned and unmanned drones are having,” he said. While drones were already part of the Army’s modernization effort, he said, their impact in Ukraine has led USASOC to consider creating a military occupational specialty or branch within special operations dedicated to manned and unmanned drones so that it’s “not just an additional duty, it’s an actual specialty.”

He continued, “I cannot envision a future battlefield without ever-increasing manned and unmanned robotics and the application of AI to maximize their effect and impact across all warfighting functions.”

And so…the second lesson learned by SOCOM is, “we have seen the future of warfare, and it is drones.”

The third lesson maybe “Have Secure Communications.”  SOFREP Editor in Chief, Sean Spoonts recently returned from the Special Operations Forces Industry Convention(SOFIC) in Tampa.  This is a kind of technology expo of manufacturers wanting to do business with SOCOM and the military.  He told me that while drone tech was certainly on display in abundance(including autonomous underwater vehicles) communications technology seemed dominant on the convention floor.

In Ukraine, the Russians have been plagued with communications problems.  In the first days of the war, we noted that Russian tanks, vehicles, and even helicopters were carrying markings to visually identify their own vehicles which told us that the Russian army did not have radio ID systems installed that allowed them to electronically keep track of units and their locations on the field.

The Russians had an encrypted battlefield communications system that used cellular signals(We use satellite-based systems) but they destroyed the cel-phone towers to limit Ukraine’s communications and crippled their own comms in the process. As a result, they were using off-the-shelf UHF/VHF radios and talking in the clear.  The Ukrainians could not only intercept those signals but triangulate their source and bring artillery down on them. We also think the success of Ukraine in bumping off so many high-ranking Russian officers has to do with being able to track their use of cell phones to talk and text. It is almost unimaginable to us that they did not realize how dangerous it is on a modern battlefield to carry on your person a uniquely identifiable radio transceiver that is constantly emitting a radio signal to update its own location.

We have also seen Russian helicopters and aircraft with commercially available Garmin GPS navigation systems taped into their cockpits.  The Russians have their own global positioning satellite system that Ukraine was also using and of course, this means the Russians shut them off which probably did them more harm than it did to Ukraine.  We also wondered if perhaps the satellites they had were all working? About two weeks ago the Russians fired off a rocket to boost several military satellites into orbit. The rocket got up there all right, but none of the satellites it deployed returned a signal, they were all dead on arrival.

In 2018 we reported on Raytheon’s $2.5 Billion dollar OCX system for the Air Force. We were in such a hurry to launch this constellation of 34 GPS satellites hardened against hacking and with better positional accuracy that we got them up and deployed before the ground system for tracking them was even online. This tells you something about how serious secure communications are to battlefield success.

Sean said that he saw various and sundry radion communications devices for Special Operations Forces that all touted their compact design, high transmitting power, and encryption capabilities, not from giant telecom companies but from small and medium-sized suppliers. The tech to do this is not in the exclusive hands of the government but in the R&D departments of these small private tech companies. Some of them even offered encrypted personal devices that would allow commanders to know the location of each of their troops in real-time and displayed over a photorealistic map of the battlefield in color on a tablet device.  At resolutions much higher than Google Earth gives you.

So, we can go much further now than just identifying individual tanks and vehicles on a battlefield.  We can keep track of individual soldiers on that battlefield.  Some may think we go overboard on spending for this stuff, but the 30,000 dead Russians on the field in Ukraine ought to inform us of the cost in blood you pay when you try to go cheap on military technology and think lots of warm bodies with rifles will win the day.