New administration may take special operators back to roots.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

Barack Obama chose MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, to deliver one of his final speeches of his presidency to address his record on counterterrorism.

The home base for both Central Command and Special Operations Command played a key role during the eight years his administration fought the forces of radical Islam.

He gave credit to special forces for beating back the Islamic State in its strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

"We took the fight to ISIL in both Iraq and Syria, not with American battalions but with local forces backed by our equipment and our advisors and, importantly, our Special Forces," he said.

Special operations forces over the past two administrations have been used mostly as "door kickers"--commandos charged with targeted capturing or killing of so-called high-value targets.

While that is an important part of what special operators do, experts interviewed said the elite forces may find themselves under the Trump administration returning to their roots as advisors and trainers for foreign forces.

The Obama administration relied heavily on special operations forces with a "small footprint" approach to tackling terrorism, said Linda Robinson, senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corp., and author of the book, "One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare."

Part of that strategy--especially in Iraq and Afghanistan--involved capturing and killing terrorist leaders in order to take down their networks' nodes. However, there are limits to this so-called "whack-a-mole" approach, SOCOM leaders have acknowledged.

"There is only so much you can get out of killing and capturing leadership, because they can be replaced, and have been replaced," Robinson said. There is no end game using this strategy, she noted.

The second part of the small footprint approach is to rely on indigenous forces to not only help suppress terrorist networks, but to also provide local and ongoing capacity to do those kinds of operations. The biggest emphasis on this approach has been in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it has also been employed in places such as Yemen, East Africa, Colombia and the Philippines, she said.

Jonathan Schroden, director of CNA's special operations program, said at least for the foreseeable future, putting special operations forces against the terrorism problem would likely continue.

CNA gathered together a group of six former special operations commanders, a former assistant secretary of defense and a few dozen active duty officers to talk in a closed setting about the future of...