The 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier

Special Forces operators in team rooms around the world are talking about the new NSS and NDS. They are trying to judge what it means for their regions. They are trying to see what it means for their teams and the missions they will be told to execute. I miss those arguments. I miss the map on the table, the coffee gone cold, and the hard questions that follow.

I view the strategies through the two SOF trinities: the missions – irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare and the comparative advantages of SOF – influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations. They do not use any of these words. Yet these concepts support the strategies.

I read strategy the way I read a village after dark. I look for what is protected, what is ignored, and what is feared. The 2025 National Security Strategy tells me what the administration wants. The 2026 National Defense Strategy tells me what it thinks it must do first, and what it plans to do less of.

The NSS is blunt about the home front. It wants control of borders and immigration flows. It wants infrastructure that cannot be held at risk. It wants missile defense, including a “Golden Dome.” It frames “destructive propaganda and influence operations” and “cultural subversion” as threats alongside trafficking and predatory trade. It treats industrial power and energy as pillars of national strength, not side issues.

The NDS matches that posture and then narrows the aperture. Its first line of effort is homeland defense. It pairs that with a hard insistence on access to “key terrain” in the Western Hemisphere, naming the Panama Canal, the “Gulf of America,” and Greenland. Its second line of effort is deterring China in the Asia-Indo-Pacific “through strength, not confrontation.” Its third is burden sharing. The document says that as US forces focus on homeland defense and the Asia-Indo-Pacific, allies and partners elsewhere will take primary responsibility for their own defense and resilience, with critical but more limited support from American forces. It repeats that logic for Europe, the Middle East, and the Korean Peninsula, again using “primary responsibility” and “critical but limited support.”

So, I start with the first question. If the United States does less forward by default, what must it do more of to keep outcomes favorable. And what must Special Forces be ready to do that others cannot.

This is where a Special Forces soldier sees the shape of the fight. The strategies talk about borders, industry, missile defense, and alliances. They also talk about propaganda and influence operations, and they demand that partners carry more weight. Those are not problems you solve with platforms alone. Those are contests of will, legitimacy, cohesion, and local capacity. That is the human domain. That is where the two SOF trinities live.

The Mission Trinity Hidden in Plain Sight

Irregular warfare is present because the NSS treats influence operations and cultural subversion as threats to national security. When a state treats propaganda as strategic attack, the response cannot be only rebuttal, and it cannot slide into censorship as a substitute for strategy. It must be competitive influence that is persistent, credible, and local. That is irregular warfare logic, even when the document never says the term.

Unconventional warfare is implied by burden sharing. The NDS says partners must take primary responsibility, with the United States providing limited support. If that is true in peacetime posture, it becomes more true in crisis, when distance and prioritization constrain what the United States can surge. In competition and conflict below the threshold of war, the decisive force will often be indigenous because they have to be. The strategic question is whether we are building the kind of indigenous capacity that survives shock, or the kind that only looks good in exercises.

The strategies’ focus on burden sharing also evokes the foundational Special Forces operational concept in unconventional warfare Colonel Mark Boyatt coined in 1994: working “through, with, and by” friends, partners, and allies. Without stating it explicitly the strategies call for this on a grand scale.

Support to political warfare sits under both documents because both are about order. Borders, industrial base, energy, alliances, and influence are political foundations. Political warfare is the contest to shape decisions without open war. Our adversaries understand that. Do we. If we do, do we organize for it, fund it, and lead it, or do we improvise each time and call it innovation.

The Comparative Advantage Trinity That The Strategies Depend On

• Influence. If propaganda and influence operations are strategic threats, then influence is strategic defense. Influence is not talking louder. It is being trusted. Special Forces build trust through presence, competence, and shared risk. That work is slow. It is also the only work that holds when the crisis comes and the internet goes dark.
• Governance. The NSS emphasis on resilience, infrastructure, and control implies a governance problem at home and abroad. You cannot missile defend your way out of institutional weakness. You cannot buy unity. Special Forces do not run ministries, but we understand power networks and local legitimacy. We can help partners harden their institutions against coercion and subversion, which is what “cultural subversion” is designed to fracture.
• Support to indigenous forces and populations. The NDS burden sharing line is central. Primary responsibility will sit with allies and partners. That means the United States needs forces built to enable others at scale, not just strike for effect. This is the old Special Forces truth. The best way to expand reach is not to clone ourselves. It is to help others defend their own homes with competence and confidence.

Now the hard counterargument. Some will say this is too indirect, too slow, too political. They will argue that the age demands missiles, ships, cyber, and industrial mobilization. The strategies elevate missile defense and the defense industrial base, and they should. But the deeper question remains. What happens when the enemy chooses terrain where missiles are marginal and legitimacy is decisive.

POTUS can set priorities. Strategies can declare lines of effort. Competitors still exploit seams. They pressure allies. They poison trust. They fracture societies. They use fear, money, and narrative. If we accept the NDS premise that US support will be “critical but limited,” then we must accept the next premise too. The deciding fight will often be fought by partners, among their own people, under political pressure. Are we preparing them for that fight, or are we preparing them only to receive us.

So, I end where a Special Forces operator should end. With questions.

If propaganda and cultural subversion are strategic threats, do we treat influence as a core military competency or as an afterthought. If allies must take primary responsibility, are we investing in their will and cohesion, or only in their inventories. If the homeland is first, are we building forward networks that prevent crises, or are we accepting a future of late reactions and high costs.

Strategy is choice. The 2025 NSS and 2026 NDS choose the homeland, choose industry, choose missile defense, choose China deterrence in the Asia-Indo-Pacific, and choose burden sharing. The SOF trinities are not decoration for those choices. They are the human machinery that can help make those choices real.

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