Strategic Sabotage: U.S. Special Operations Against Adversary Systems

This volume brings together two United States military graduate theses written during the return of strategic competition to the center of American defense planning. Daniel Meegan examines sabotage as a strategic instrument against systems and infrastructure on which technologically sophisticated competitors depend. James G. Hall and William T.

Pitt examine irregular warfare as a way both to disrupt a competitor's objectives and to strengthen partners' capacity for resistance and resilience. The conjunction matters. Sabotage is often discussed as a tactical act: damage a bridge, disable a facility, interrupt a network. These studies ask the harder operational and strategic questions.

What larger objective does disruption serve? Can costs be imposed without producing uncontrolled escalation? When does tactical success fail to yield strategic effect? How can an indirect campaign shape the choices available to a stronger adversary? Meegan's thesis is the more explicitly destructive of the two.

It treats specific critical infrastructure as a potential vulnerability and studies whether sabotage can impose costs, limit escalation, or shorten conflict. Hall and Pitt supply the broader campaign frame. Their case studies lead them to distinguish disruption of a competitor from efforts that improve a partner's ability to withstand coercion or aggression.

Read together, the theses place destructive means inside a wider theory of political purpose, access, partners, and endurance. The term below armed conflict is deliberately not used as the controlling frame of this edition.

Some proposed activities may occur during competition, but sabotage can be violent, clandestine, preparatory to hostilities, or integrated with open war. Strategic disruption and strategic sabotage are therefore treated as related mission concepts spanning a competition-to-conflict continuum, not as harmless substitutes for war.

This paired Nimble Ultra documentary edition reproduces two complete Naval Pos