ARTICLE: Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command, BY SEAN D. NAYLOR, Armed Forces Journal, November 2007
This is exactly the dynamic I was trying to capture when I wrote about SOCOM in Blueprint for Action (although I didn't make the personalities clear in the text because I thought that would be too telling): Brown wanted to keep it all within Special Operations Command and Olson is the purist who's willing to consider separating the two in order to keep the direct action stuff safe from being weakened by too much emphasis on unconventional. This is a mini-me version of the logic that led me to propose the Leviathan-SysAdmin split: keep the politics and economics (SysAdmin) away from the pure kinetics (Leviathan) so as to keep the latter strong. In short, the arguments here aren't designed to "ruin" the Leviathan-like direct action capabilities but to preserve them.
Fascinating to watch, proving that even within SOCOM, there is the realization and the desire to develop the SysAdmin. I especially like the realization that making that function more pronounced isn't simply about gathering up existing units and slapping them together but about creating dedicated career paths. That's when the concept gets a whole lot more real.
(Thanks: a friend within the Intelligence Community)
