The Role of Emotional Awareness in Special Warfare

ABSTRACT

Whether the mission is Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, or Counterinsurgency, success is often dependent on an individual’s and/or unit’s ability to both understand the vulnerabilities of their foreign counterparts on psychological, cultural, and operational levels, and to influence those counterparts in a manner consistent with US military and political objectives. While many of the criteria for assessment and selection, training, and employment of Special Operations Forces (SOF) supporting Special Warfare are skill-based, the conduct of Special Warfare is often relationship-based. In fact, ARSOF Next lists not only empathy as a characteristic of an Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) unit but also love as a desired trait of an ARSOF soldier. These psychological constructs are applicable both internally (toward one’s in-group) and externally (toward one’s out-group) and are measurable, albeit not easily, and therefore capable of being evaluated in assessment and selection and cultivated during training. However, the spectrum of today’s assessment and selection arguably misses the most valuable psychological characteristic, emotional intelligence. For the past 2 years, the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) has provided a specialized version of the Evaluating Truthfulness and Credibility (ETaC) seminar to Special Forces soldiers. These facial micro-expressions, or “micros,” are proven to be both cross-cultural and involuntary, and are thus an ideal fundamental skill for ARSOF soldiers. ETaC focuses on understanding the five channels of communication (face, body language, voice, verbal style, and verbal content) and their behavioral manifestations to better assess the credibility of another. The seminars were not only well received by the participants but also, despite a relatively high baseline competency, demonstrated statistically significant performance improvement in a matter of hours. Not only do such results begin to validate the emotional intelligence of this specifically chosen audience, but it helps to demonstrate the capacity of these unique soldiers to develop their cognitive processes to effectively influence their environment. While the sample size is small, the results are promising and are worthy of additional research. This paper presents the background and summary of these seminars, as well as some recommendations for incorporating more emotional components of Special Warfare.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional awareness
• human source intelligence
• facial microexpressions
• irregular warfare

Funding

This work was supported by internal research and development funding from The Johns Hopkins University-Applied Physics Laboratory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).