MAY 20, 2026 – More than 29,000 members of the military’s special operations forces community and the public converged both in person and virtually on downtown Tampa, Florida, today for the official kickoff of Special Operations Forces Week 2026.
Cohosted by U.S. Special Operations Command and the Global SOF Foundation, this year’s convention is hosting representatives from more than 70 allied nations, a majority of whom gathered together for a morning opening address by senior Socom leadership who underscored the importance of maintaining peace through strength across a volatile geopolitical landscape.
“Peace through strength is the way the United States thinks about deterrence. The strategy of deterrence that has guided us for generations remains ever true today,” said Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley, Socom commander, at the outset of the morning’s address.
“We must deter adversaries not simply by threatening punishment but, frankly, by making it obvious that their aggression will fail if they attempt to launch a war. By building partners’ capabilities and integrated force structures that are so formidable and so resilient that no adversary can calculate a path to victory,” Bradley explained.
Joined on stage by Army Command Sgt. Maj. Andrew J. Krogman, Socom senior enlisted leader, the two men framed the path to peace through strength via multiple priorities including multiplying capabilities through strong partnerships, scaling SOF across the joint force to achieve deep integration, remembering that people — and not materiel — are the “irreplaceable advantage” that fuels success within the community, maintaining a technological edge on the battlefield, and getting industry to continue developing and innovating at a rapid pace.
Regarding partnerships, Bradley made clear that while the U.S. SOF community’s alliances are strong — perhaps the strongest in the world — they are always in need of strengthening.
As an example of successful partnerships, Bradley referenced the more than 90 nations that came together over the last decade to combat and defeat ISIS.
“Those 90 sovereign governments, each with their own politics, their own histories, and their own equities, united around that single objective: the enduring defeat of [ISIS]. We didn’t simply coordinate airstrikes and share intelligence, we built something durable, something that exists still today,” Bradley said, adding that the power of partnerships and coalition are what the U.S. needs to leverage for the future.
On the topic of scaling SOF across the joint force, Bradley said the crises and challenges the community faces today are different from those faced over the past 25 years since 9/11, and that the counterterrorism conflicts of today and tomorrow require more significant joint force synchronization.
“SOF is not just on the periphery or leading its own operations separate from the joint force, but [it] is a core element of the main effort — a main effort that will be borne out by our joint force colleagues in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, our cyber and our space forces,” Bradley explained.
He then gave the floor to Krogman, who spoke about the SOF community’s most valuable asset: its people.
“What we have observed across the force is that our people are dedicated to being humble, credible and always striving to improve. They have been doing the work — the quiet, relentless, unglamorous … work — and they train not until they get the mission correct, but they train until they cannot get it wrong,” Krogman said of the SOF operators he and other Socom senior leaders have interacted with since joining the command, while adding it’s those operators and their families who are the most important weapon system.
Along the lines of rapid technological advancements on the battlefield, Bradley explained that the operator of today needs to not only be a physically superior warrior but also an intellectually superior one.
“This environment demands exactly what [American soldier and diplomat William J.] ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan said 80 years ago: ‘We need Ph.D.s who can win a bar fight,'” Bradley told the audience, adding that he believes many of today’s operators fit that bill.
“Plenty of you out there [are] operators who are both lethal but are also technically fluent, who can employ cutting-edge tools and the software running [them] and understand how they interweave,” Bradley said, adding that it is important to remain humble in such a rapidly evolving technological battlespace.
The Socom commander then addressed members of industry, explaining that interoperability between SOF capabilities is essential.
“I want to be absolutely clear about the standard that we have to attend to going forward; every censor must be able to talk to every effector on every battlefield, and every effector must be able to draw from every censor, because capability that can’t be shared is not capability at all,” Bradley said.
“We’re not asking you to take a leap of faith; we’re asking you to look at what you’re already doing and find ways to amplify it and make it better, because the industry challenge is ultimately a deterrence challenge,” he added.
Bradley concluded by circling back to the theme of peace through strength.
“Peace through strength is deterrence. That is the work that we do every day in partnerships that we build, the capabilities we field and standards that we refuse to compromise,” he said. “As I reflect on the power of all of you in this in this room, in this network — here together this week — I am incredibly optimistic about our nation’s future, about our alliances’ future [and] the strength of what that can bring.”
By Matthew Olay
Pentagon News