"Senior SF leadership must begin by acknowledging this crisis and commit to understanding and defining who Green Berets are and what Green Berets do."
COL Ed Croot ends his paper with this recommendation- and I agree.
But I offer the problem may go beyond the identity crisis he has identified. If the SF community is misaligned on 19 of the 25 archetypes and has subsequently divided into 3 sub-identities (Direct Action, Legacy, and Modern ID) this has concerning ramifications across the entire DOTMLPF spectrum for USASOC.
If our value proposition is that we bring partners to bear at the right time and place to have outsized effects as MG Brennan said, does our current wave of innovation match this goal? Do we have the appropriate warfighting concepts? Are we backwards planning from a preferred position in the future? Are we maintaining our fundamentals and truths as we innovate?
Will the things that we are developing and investing in enable us to be a better "Premier Partnership Force"? Or, will they simply enable us to be better unilateral versions of ourselves?
Recommendation: Gather thought leaders from across the USASOC DOTMLPF spectrum and facilitate a strategic dialogue about the future of SOF. What does the future look like? What are the needs of our future partners? How do they see the future? What are their circumstances and environments?
What "jobs to be done" await us? The answer is in the future and we need to backwards plan from there.