Comando Conjunto de Operações Especiais: potencial contribuição para o enriquecimento do poder nacional

Abstract

There was a time when threats to a national state were mostly posed by another national state, not anymore. The wide range of recent technological developments brought gradually a lot of benefits to the society, but also new ways to fight the stronger adversary, initially represented by well-coordinated terrorist acts and lastly by hybrid threats which utilize military, political, economic, civil and informational instruments of power towards adversary’s vulnerabilities in a multidomain, fluid, ambiguous and short of conflict way, conceived by state and non-state actors, either directly or indirectly, regarding terrorist acts just one of their possibilities. The lack of interoperability among North American Special Operations Forces, during the faulty hostage rescue attempt in Iran in 1980 and Grenada invasion in 1983, resulted in the creation of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), directed by a four-star general officer who reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, exerting authority over the service’s special operations commands. The international acknowledgment of the high operational standards reached by its Special Operations Forces (SOF), followed by the successful war on terrorism after 9/11 – including effective fight against hybrid threats in Middle East, the countering weapons of mass destruction activities, the conduction of psychological and information operations, interagency coordination, as well as the establishment of new partnerships and dissemination of influence in the international environment, in association with the relative low cost of SOF employment, made more and more nations have their SOF organized the same way, turning Special Operations Commands (SOCOMs) almost as disseminated as Department of Defenses (DoDs) are today all over the world. Given that hybrid war is synchronized, systematic, permanent, and international, so should be the response to it. In this sense, SOCOMs became even more important in the context of comprehensive defense, the official strategy of the central governments in order to develop deterrence, resilience, and proper response, encompassing ermanent interaction among all the government sectors involved, employing SOF as the tip of spear in prompt, precise, and clandestine/covert actions below the threshold of armed conflict, exactly what had been already fostered by some SOCOMs to face such dynamic and disruptive threat. In the context above, this study sought to clarify in which way the creation of a SOCOM can contribute to the National Power’s enhancement, given that hybrid threats may become even more challenging in the future, demanding world-class SOF, only put together by SOCOMs at the strategic level, permanently and exclusively dedicated to SOF, as Brazilian Ministry of Defense has no office exclusively dedicated to SOF matters in its strategic organizational structure at this time, despite the strategic and joint aspects of SOF, as well as joint employment, interoperability, and integration of Brazilian Forces are reiterated in its national defense documents.