The rigorous process of recruiting, preparing and producing Special Forces soldiers has entered an era of continuous transformation focused on technology, human performance, resource management and advanced learning.

At the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where for decades young soldiers have been trained in unconventional warfare and earned the prestigious Green Beret, innovation is baked into the culture. But today, with technological advancements revolutionizing warfare, there is an urgency to turn out a new generation of Special Forces warriors who can operate at peak performance and innovate on the go in response to a multidomain battlefield.

The need for this type of warrior was spelled out by the commanding general of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, who said that because warfare is changing, “every facet of Army special operations is changing.”

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, who was slated to take command of U.S. Joint Special Operations Command in early October after leading Army Special Operations Command since August 2021, predicted that the side that innovates fastest will “win the next war, or the current war, or the war after that war.”

Army Special Operations Command, he said, is not resting on its laurels. “We’re changing formations, we’re changing our schoolhouse, we’re changing our doctrine, we’re changing our institution,” Braga said in October 2024 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C.

It’s a message of transformation that’s echoed across the Army as the war in Ukraine smolders on Europe’s doorstep, tensions in the Middle East intensify and China’s growing influence keeps the Indo-Pacific theater in focus. The global security environment is challenging the Army to innovate, boost soldier lethality and modernize business practices, tenets elucidated in the Army Transformation Initiative issued May 1 by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

At the Special Warfare Center and School, known as SWCS, the initiative has rapidly driven the organization’s own practices, according to Maj. Gen. Jason Slider, commanding general of SWCS, who said there is an urgency to keep ahead of the pace of change and transform smartly. “It’s not frenetic, it’s not without purpose, it’s not without deliberateness, but there is a sense of urgency,” Slider said.

As he navigates the changes underway at SWCS to meet the challenges of future warfare, Slider casts his information-gathering net far and wide by gleaning lessons learned and best practices from his professional relationships across the Total Army, academia and industry, an approach that fosters the agility that transformation requires.

While SWCS is the Special Operations Center of Excellence and not a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command school, Slider said he operates as if “there were a solid line, not a dotted line,” between his organization and the Army’s major commands. “If we’re going to move forward as an Army together, then it’s about integration, not synchronization,” Slider said. “The Army has always been in some level of change. I think it’s fairly significant change right now.”

Drone Warfare

On any given day, there are up to 4,000 students, including international students, attending SWCS courses that cover Special Forces, civil affairs and psychological operations, led by just over 2,000 commanders and instructors, Slider said. In addition to Green Beret hopefuls who are going through assessment and selection, students also are in courses at the NCO Academy or Special Forces Warrant Officer Institute, qualification courses, a culminating exercise such as Robin Sage for Special Forces candidates or one of several advanced skills courses, he said.

New courses address advances in electromagnetic warfare and signals intelligence, and one of the newest courses, the Robotics and Unmanned Systems Integration Course, is growing and slated for further expansion, Slider said.

RUSIC, as the course is known, covers the fundamentals of operating, building and tactically using first-person view drones and, for Special Forces soldiers, it provides a level of knowledge they can use to work through drone operations with international partners. Course graduates receive a master trainer certification that qualifies them to instruct soldiers in similar courses.

The comprehensive six-week course kicked off in October 2024 for 24 students with Special Forces MOSs and has now grown to 30 students, including those from other special operations forces and soldiers from some selected Regular Army units.

Students are introduced to additive manufacturing, airspace deconfliction, payload handling, counter- drone systems and flying in an electronically jammed environment, battery pack management, parts replacement and how to execute an attack. Tactics used in Ukraine are studied and discussed. “Conceptual employment is important because platforms are constantly emerging,” said Maj. Peter Reider, executive officer of 6th Battalion, 2nd Special Warfare Training Group (Airborne). “It’s not pre-mission training, it’s an institutional approach. We talk about all possibilities.”

The fundamentals of drone warfare also are being applied to portions of Robin Sage, the culminating exercise for Special Forces candidates completing the qualification course. The exercise’s field portion, which takes place over dozens of counties in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, involves 450 role players, some of whom act as guerrillas or freedom fighters.

About 200 students working in teams of 15 infiltrate at a designated point and are immersed in guerilla warfare scenarios that involve developing sources, traversing miles of unknown territory, relying on the local population in the fictional country of “Pineland,” leveraging information from a synthetic internet, and generally moving to an objective behind enemy lines.

About two years ago, enemy drones were introduced in limited numbers to provide awareness of a threat now prevalent on the modern battlefield. Recently, the teams were given their own drones.

“Now they’re being used in an offensive way, but to avoid having to train each [student], we use experienced operators, the foreign-forces role players, to operate the drones,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Cornprobst, the Robin Sage company operations warrant with D Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group (Airborne). “We’re trying to keep it as modern as it is by making it as real as possible, but not a worst-case scenario all the time because we need to be able to evaluate the students.”

Collective Exercises

Changes also are happening at the SWCS NCO Academy, where soldiers from Special Forces, psychological operations and civil affairs branches pursue required training, education and professional development at four levels of leader courses.

The NCO academy combines and delivers some content collectively to replicate in the classroom the realities of a real operational environment, said Sgt. Maj. Kevin Robbins, deputy commandant of the SWCS NCO Academy.

The collective exercises bring together NCOs who normally wouldn’t work together until there’s a specific mission. For example, Special Forces and civil affairs soldiers attending their respective Senior Leader Courses now do a culmination planning exercise together that replicates operational planning, helping them to build interoperability and familiarity with one another’s capabilities in school before they even receive a mission. “You don’t want the first time someone has to do it is when there’s a consequence,” Robbins said. “Obviously, there’s a consequence here, you could fail, but really the consequence here is, you’re in a learning environment, and … it’s basically replicating what they’re going to do for real, if that time ever comes.”

Filling the Special Forces ranks with operators is a critical part of SWCS’s mission, and in recent years, as senior operators retire or leave the service, there has been increased reliance on recruiting young people with no prior Army experience using a program established about 25 years ago, according to Braga.

Known as 18 X-rays after their initial entry MOS of 18X, the young candidates eventually make up 50% of the operational force, Braga said during his February 2025 testimony before the House Armed Services subcommittee on intelligence and special operations.

The young candidates are recruited by U.S. Army Recruiting Command in partnership with SWCS. They then attend Infantry One Station Unit Training and Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, before arriving at SWCS to attend the Special Forces Prep Program and beyond.

Human Performance

Playing an important role in enhancing candidates’ experiences and abilities to do well is a new purpose-built, 90,000 square-foot

facility known as Human Performance Force Generation, or HP Forge, where the Human Performance and Wellness program prepares candidates for Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The two-story facility includes a 40,000 square-foot fitness and training room, specialty rooms for a sports clinic, physical therapy and recovery, and a fully outfitted kitchen for cooking and nutrition training.

Tucked away on the second floor is a custom cognitive performance room with multiple technological instruments and simulators that guide soldiers through performance and recovery without the pressure of hovering instructors. Staffed by professionals in the mental, physical, nutritional and cognitive domains, the facility also has a cadre of “performance integrators,” former Green Berets who observe the soldier-candidates and shepherd them through the many facets of the program. “They can spot if someone is limping and ask if they’re OK, or if someone’s looking a little fluffy, maybe tell them they need to go to nutrition,” said retired 1st Sgt. Mike Taylor, a holistic training team lead. “The purpose of this place is exactly what it says, force generation. How do we get more people into the [qualification] course and through the [qualification] course and get them out to the operational force?”

Underpinning individual efforts at SWCS is the guiding intent of the Army Transformation Initiative, a critical part of which is eliminating waste and obsolete programs so the force can focus on readiness and lethality. Combining course content is an example of that, as is investing more in advanced robotics and autonomous systems, said Slider, SWCS’s commanding general.

Divest to Invest

But the academy also has driven hard on a “divest to invest” mantra that has yielded tangible results. “We took a very humble approach to how we operated here,” said Angela Gilner, SWCS assistant chief of staff, who noted that the organization began taking a hard look at its operations in October 2024. “We started really unpacking how we operate, how we spend … how are we managing [our] talent population and balancing that with civilians and contractors.”

Reducing spending on contractors alone has yielded an overhead reduction of about 15%, which has allowed SWCS to optimize the expertise residing in its NCO corps, she said. “In some cases, we identified that we were just not operating like a business, we were taking the easy way. It’s easy to hire very, very smart contractors to come in and run the program. It takes us a little bit more effort to train the NCOs to be at that level of proficiency,” Gilner said.

Continuous transformation “requires a lot of humility, and there are a lot of good things going on across the Army” that SWCS can learn from and adopt, Slider added. The big changes, he said, will be embraced quickly by a new generation of Special Forces soldiers. “If you’re a young soldier just joining the Army, and you got all this change going on, it’s just status quo,” Slider said. “But the kinds of things we’re talking about is largely the purview of [senior officers and NCOs] and career civilian professionals. It’s a lot of change, so the leadership and the humility required to bring everybody along is really important.”