Special Operations 

Forces 

as Change Agents

by

Jessica Glicken Turnley, Ph.D.

General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime 

head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), ‘broke 

the rules’ during World War II, acting as an institutional 

entrepreneur and change agent.
On the cover: General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the wartime head of the Office of Strategic 

Services (OSS), ‘broke the rules’ during World War II to acquire air support for his agents and 

French Resistance fighters, acting as an institutional entrepreneur and change agent. Source: 

National Archives

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The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of the author and do not 

necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the United States Government, 

Department of Defense, United States Special Operations Command, or the Joint 

Special Operations University.

Authors are granted academic freedom provided their work does not disclose 

classified information, jeopardize operations security, or misrepresent official U.S. 

policy. Such academic freedom empowers authors to offer new and sometimes 

controversial perspectives in the interest of furthering debate on key issues.

Jessica Glicken Turnley, Ph.D.

Dr. Jessica Glicken Turnley is a senior fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, U.S. 

Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and principal investigator/past president of Galisteo 

Consulting Group, Inc., a consulting firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a cultural 

anthropologist, Dr. Turnley brings a unique perspective to her work in national security, policy 

analysis, business and organizational development and culture change, and economic 

development. Her technical work includes projects involving the development of computational 

social simulations, analyses of the development and use environments of national security 

technologies, explorations of the socio-cultural dimensions of security and policy questions, and 

analyses of military structures and research institutions. She has served as a consultant and an onstaff technical manager at Sandia National Laboratories, and worked directly with many elements 

of the Department of Energy and other members of the national security community. She has 

worked on various projects for USSOCOM, directly for various parts of the Department of Defense 

(DOD), and provided support for other DOD organizations such as the Defense Threat Reduction 

Agency. She works with the intelligence community, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 

advisory board. Dr. Turnley also works in technology-based and microeconomic development, 

marketing and public relations, and in risk communication and stakeholder involvement in public 

decision making, particularly in the environmental arena.

Dr. Turnley holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology with an emphasis in cultural linguistics 

from Cornell, a master’s in social anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 

and a bachelor’s in anthropology and English literature from the University of California, Santa 

Cruz. She was a Fulbright Scholar, an international educational exchange program created to 

foster understanding between different countries and cultures. Dr. Turnley spent her Fulbright time

in Indonesia.

1

The ability to leverage social networks to move individuals and communities to a set of new values,

and subsequently legitimate and institutionalize those changes, is a capability that Special 

Operations Forces (SOF) offer the military community. Well-positioned or particularly persuasive 

individuals from the SOF community have been able to use personal connections and social 

networks to catalyze and institutionalize change in a wide range of communities, stimulating 

individuals to coalesce around ideas presented through charismatic players. They have exercised 

this capability to act as change agents in the American military community writ large, creating 

new institutions and defining new players and their roles. At the tactical level, operators have used 

this capability to persuade local militias to switch sides, and create coalitions of friendly forces to 

execute strategic agendas in various theaters. Thus, this is a story of how SOF affect action both 

at the micro (mission) level that changes social engagement at local levels in mission-favorable 

ways, and at the macro (national institutional) level that can affect the structure of the military 

itself and the way a country engages in conflict.

Social movement theory and related ideas about institutional entrepreneurship can inform 

our understanding of these special operations capabilities, in both historical and recent contexts. 

Social movements are group-based engines of change that challenge existing power structures and 

produce new norms and solidarities around new (different) sets of social values through collective 

action.1Institutional entrepreneurs are actors who can mobilize resources from existing institutions 

to fill an identified, yet unserved need,

2 which often is defined around new values, such as those 

identified and highlighted by social movements. The institutional entrepreneurs thus create and 

establish legitimizing institutions and frameworks which operationalize the new values identified 

and developed through social movements. These two frames provide a better understanding of the 

ways in which a special operations capability to identify, guide, and succeed at institutionalizing 

norms new to a community will emerge at some specific place and time, whether that community 

is the U.S. military, a multinational counterterrorism effort in Africa, or a local capacity-building 

program in the Philippines.

Thinking about operators and other members of the SOF community as leaders of social 

movements may give them an unexpected identity. However, characterizing them as change agents 

gives us explanatory frames we can use to talk about how institutions and communities change. It 

also illustrates how members of the SOF community have shown that they often serve not just as 

 

1 Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, second edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell 

Publishing, 2006).

2 Raghu Garud, Cynthia Hardy, and Steve Maguire, “Institutional Entrepreneurship as Embedded Agency: An 

Introduction to the Special Issue,” Organization Studies 28, no. 7 (2007): 957.
2

catalysts for that change, but also, and just as importantly, as architects for the legitimating 

structures and communities that emerge after the change and help to ensure longevity for the new 

values and ideas.

The establishment of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II, and 

USSOCOM and the Pentagon (civilian) position of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special 

Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD [SO/LIC]) in 1986 stand as the two major 

institutional changes of the American special operations community. Both, arguably, could not 

have happened without the mobilization of social networks in critical places and in critical ways

by charismatic or persuasive individuals. Both were stimulated by what were seen as existential 

institutional or structural flaws in the U.S. military.

In the case of the OSS during World War II, it was the course of the war that highlighted 

the need for a force that could operate in parts of the theater and in ways that were not open to the 

conventional military. The Congressional activity 

leading to the establishment of USSOCOM and ASD

(SO/LIC) involved the Goldwater-Nichols Defense 

Reorganization Act of 1986 and the Nunn-Cohen 

Amendment to the National Defense Authorization 

Act of 1987 (which authorized other significant 

changes to the U.S. defense establishment, as well). 

The legislation was stimulated by the dramatic, very 

public, and high-consequence failure of Operation 

Eagle Claw in 1980—an operation designed to rescue 

American hostages in Iran. Instead, it led to the deaths 

of eight American servicemen and clearly illustrated 

the need for the U.S. military to change. These large 

institutional changes—the establishment of the OSS,

USSOCOM and ASD (SO/LIC)—were initiated and 

guided by individuals who were able to create 

networks and mobilize resources in response to a 

deeply felt need, leading to profound changes in the institutions with which they were associated.

That the military changed was not surprising. All organizations—even highly structured ones like 

the military or a community invested in a rule-based religious structure—are in a constant state of 

change. What was surprising, in both cases, was the extent and nature of the change.

How Organizations Change

There are three general ways in which organizations change, through: accretion of microinterpretations of rules, deliberate change efforts, and disruptive activities of members or nonWreckage from the collision of an RH-53 Sea 

Stallion helicopter and a C-130 airplane during 

Operation Eagle Claw litters the desert after an 

attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran on 

25 April 1980. Source: U.S. Air Force 1st SOW 

History Office.
3

members. The first two are incremental, while the third can be revolutionary. It is the third way

that is the focus of this discussion.

All organizations change because of the behavioral variations of their members. All rules 

and procedures are interpreted slightly differently every time they are referenced or performed. 

The accretion of these micro-interpretations can, over time, morph into new practices which then 

become codified through changes in rules and procedures. In addition, many organizations have 

deliberate, active ongoing change management processes of some sort. Formal institutions like the 

military have clearly described processes for rule change. These processes use various techniques 

to analyze organizational performance against benchmarks such as efficiency, cost, mission and 

performance. Some focus on policies, others on organizational structure, yet others on procedures. 

Religious and other types of communities also have formal procedures for change. Individuals or 

groups of individuals, such as rabbis in Judaism and ecumenical councils in the Catholic church, 

are designated as having interpretive authority, always considering the impact of such 

interpretations upon the foundational or chartering values and norms of the community.

In neither of these two mechanisms of change—the accretion of micro-interpretations of 

rules or deliberate change efforts—are the dominant organizational or social logic or values of the 

organization or the community called into question. In the case of micro-interpretations, 

individuals follow rules and interpret policies as they believe the institution would like them to. 

Ongoing, institutionally sanctioned change efforts look for incremental, rather than revolutionary 

change, deliberately working within the given institutional framework. The purpose of these 

formal change efforts is to ensure the continuity of the organization as it is defined through its 

existing values and norms, and as it seeks to function in an ever-changing environment. 

The third type of change mechanism is revolutionary. This type of change, by definition, 

challenges the fundamental social logic and values of the existing organization. It often manifests

through collective action—individuals coalescing around a 

cause and acting in concert to effect change. This is a very 

different mechanism than individual activity in support of 

existing rules, or individual participation in formal, 

institutionally-sponsored change efforts. Support for 

revolutionary change arises from reaction to an event 

perceived by some as morally reprehensible, a recognition 

by some participants that processes, procedures, and rules of 

the current system are based on flawed values, or a perceived existential threat to the system. The 

impetus for change thus, is moral and emotional, not cognitive or calculated, as it is with formal 

change efforts, or absent altogether as it is in the behavioral accretion model.

Support for revolutionary 

change arises from 

reaction to an event 

perceived by some as 

morally reprehensible.
4

Social Movements

Social movements have been defined in a variety of ways ranging from “fundamental oppositions 

to the direction of historical processes” to “sustained interactions between challengers and power 

holders.”3 Note that the language in these definitions is confrontational or oppositional. And, in 

fact, a very important function of social movements is to provide a common language in which 

opponents of the status quo may talk about events and actors in oppositional terms, where language 

is defined it its broadest sense as a system of words, images, metaphors, and the like, which imbue 

events with certain kinds of significance.4 Like the language around definitions of social 

movements, the language around the triggering or key events or constructs of those movements is 

often oppositional (what is bad about the current state of affairs).

For Operation Eagle Claw, for example, the language of (the absence of) integration 

provided the dominant conversational frame for descriptions of the event after the fact. Terms like 

the need for and the absence of interoperability, integration, inter-service communication, and the 

like are prevalent in accounts of the mission. These were framed in institutional terms as interservice rivalry, absence of trust among elements, and so on. At a tactical or operational level, 

efforts to shift allegiances in conflict or pre-conflict zones focus on ideologies, where language 

also is often oppositional. The language of groups like al-Qaeda, to take another example, focuses 

around the corruption of the current system, with much less formal, deliberate attention paid to the 

structure of the post-apocalyptic caliphate.

Social movements are a means to provide access to resources for those who subscribe to 

the oppositional statements and their associated value sets. They are born from and capitalize on 

discontent with an existing structure and the values expressed through that structure. The sense of 

moral outrage helps make the risk worth the cost. This is true for broad social movements, as 

evidenced by the energy U.S. President Donald Trump and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie 

Sanders stirred through their presidential campaigns, as well as (as we shall see later in this 

discussion) movements that arise within institutions to effect radical structural change.

Recent analyses of social movements have focused on structural questions of the conditions 

and processes that allow strong motives or grievances to be translated into collective action5—how 

social relationships allow grievances to be collectively recognized and acted upon—and have 

moved away from psycho-social interpretations of participants’ backgrounds as the critical 

operationalizing factor. Explorations of relationships and the dynamics of social networks thus 

 

3 Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, eds., Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action

(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6.

4 David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” International 

Social Movement Research 1, no. 1 (1988): 197–217, 613). “Rather, movement actors are viewed as signifying agents 

actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or 

observers.” 

5 Andrew G. Walder, “Political Sociology and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2009): 393-412.
5

have moved to center stage in discussions of social movements,6 with a focus on the power of 

networks to recruit and organize. For example, Douglas McAdam’s discussion of Freedom 

Summer, the project run in the summer of 1964 to register black voters in the American South, 

staffed by primarily white volunteers from the North, concluded that:

...the ties they [the Freedom Summer volunteers] established with other volunteers 

laid the groundwork for a nationwide activist network out of which the other major 

movements of the era—women’s, antiwar, student—were to emerge. In short, 

Freedom Summer served both as the organizational basis for much of the activism 

of the Sixties...7

The importance of social networks in social mobilization both within and outside of 

institutions provides opportunities for highly committed and/or highly skilled individuals to play 

a more central role than might otherwise be afforded by their organizational position.8 For 

example, Army General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who led the OSS, was described by those 

who worked with him in terms that painted him as far larger than life.

General Donovan himself was a mobile unit of the first magnitude. Space was no 

barrier to him—the Sahara Desert was a little strip of sand, the Himalayas were a 

bank of snow, the Pacific was a mere ditch. And, what is more, Time was no 

problem. Circling the globe, according to good evidence, he would catch up with 

Time and pass it. No one was at all surprised if he left one morning and returned 

the previous afternoon. But more elementary than this...was General Donovan’s 

power to visualize an oak when he saw an acorn. For him the day was never 

sufficient unto itself: it was always teeming with the seeds of a boundless future. 

Like Nature, he was prodigal, uncontainable, forelooking, and every completed 

project bred a host of new ones.9

By several accounts, James (Jim) Locher III’s role in developing the ideas and formalizing 

the Congressional language and amendments that ultimately resulted in the establishment of 

USSOCOM and ASD (SO/LIC) went far beyond what might be expected of someone in his 

Congressional staff role. He was the lead author on the defense reorganization report that laid 

 

6 Diani and McAdam, Social Movements and Networks.

7 Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5.

8 Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction.

9 OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services (St. Petersburg, 

FL: Hailer Publishing, 2006 [1948]), 10.
6

much of the foundation for Goldwater-Nichols,10 and the primary author of the actual legislation. 

He then continued to work to legitimate the institutions and processes he was instrumental in 

establishing through legislation by, for example, teaching courses at the military’s professional 

education institutions on joint doctrine, and later serving in the special operations civilian role the 

legislation created, the ASD (SO/LIC).

And, of course, T.E. Lawrence, the British Army officer who became the central figure in 

the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire and who is a larger-than-life figure today, served 

in a very personalized role. One biographer points out that, midway through his campaign on the 

Arabian Peninsula, Lawrence himself realized the locus of his power in his personality: “He had 

discovered that his name, his impatience with routine, his unorthodox opinions about war, and 

even his appearance were weapons more powerful than guns, swords, and high explosives.”11

Coalitions, Networks, and Bureaucracies

It is important to point out that networks of the type found in the groups engaged in collective 

action are not the same as the networks that are suggested by formal programs such as the Global 

SOF Network. The Global SOF Network, and other formal programs designed for crossinstitutional engagement, might be more usefully described as coalition-building rather than 

network-developing activities. Social networks are connections between individuals who connect 

because of some perceived similarity. The focus is on the connection. As a consequence, social 

networks require action on the part of participants—they only exist when a connection is alive. 

One ‘participates’ in networks, a verb requiring action; one does not ‘belong’ to networks, a much 

more passive verb that is associated with organizations.

Because of their requirement for action on the part of individuals, social networks are 

highly unstable. Any given individual may move in and out of a relationship over time. In coalition 

dynamics, on the other hand, the actors’ identities and loyalties remain with their home institution 

or organization, where membership is defined by the more passive and hence more stable 

‘belonging.’ In a coalition, organizations come together in contingent, instrumental alliances; that 

is, alliances for particular purposes with the actors acting not in terms of individual agendas but as 

representatives of the agendas of their organizations.12 A memorandum of understanding between 

organizations, for example, describing bounded areas and mechanisms for collaboration is a tool 

of coalitions, not social networks. Coalition-based alliances dissolve once the coalition’s goal is 

met (they are contingent) and individuals return to their home institutions, which continue to serve 

as their primary locus of identity. “Actors instrumentally share resources in order to achieve 

 

10 Defense Organization: The Need for Change Staff Report to the Committee on Armed Services, United States 

Senate, 99th Congress, 1st Session, 1985. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015011556266.

11 Michael Korda, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (London: Aurum Press, 2011), 295.

12 Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, 24.
7

specific goals, yet do not develop any particular sense of belonging and of a common future during 

the process [of coalition-building and engagement].”13

Clearly, organizations and individuals within organizations engage in multiple ways 

simultaneously. All organizations, whether they are formal like the U.S. military or informal like 

a village in Afghanistan, operate through rules and 

structures, and relationships.14 Individuals in the 

Global SOF Network, for example, engaged with 

others in the coalition as representatives of their 

organization, whether it was a SOF unit, or 

USSOCOM, or the military. In addition, they may have concurrently developed personal

relationships with their counterparts in other organizations. The two relationships, although they 

may have been between the same individuals, served different purposes and were instantiated in 

terms of different frameworks for interaction.

Organizations that focus more heavily on rules than relationships are known as 

bureaucracies. The U.S. military is often used as an example of a rule-based or bureaucratic 

organization.15 Organizations that focus more heavily on relationships are known as networkbased organizations. Many terrorist groups, from the Weather Underground in the 1970s to today’s 

fundamentalist religious groups, are network-based.

As mentioned earlier, networks are highly unstable, so consequently, network-based 

organizations are fluid and can change rapidly. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, were developed 

to control and standardize behavior in the name of efficiency. Thus, they tend to be highly resistant 

to change. For the purposes of this paper, it is useful to point out that bureaucracies also have 

consequences other than the efficiencies that they were initially developed to create. Through the 

standardization and regulation that they require, as well as their focus on function, bureaucracies 

erase the individual. They focus attention on organizations: brigades and battalions become the 

actors of consequence, not individual sailors or soldiers.

Creativity and SOF

So, where in a community that prizes standardization (the U.S. military) and sees organizations as 

its primary unit of action is there a role for the special operations community—which has been 

known for flouting the rules, and which focuses heavily on the individual operator, not the 

organization? Operators may grow beards, not wear uniforms, and often are casual, such as when 

they address superiors. Creativity, not standardization, is prized in the special operations 

 

13 Ibid.

14 Jessica G. Turnley, Retaining a Precarious Value as Special Operations Go Mainstream (Hurlburt Field, FL: JSOU 

Press, 2008).

15 James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York, NY: Basic Books, 

1989).

Organizations and individuals 

within organizations engage in 

multiple ways simultaneously.
8

community, and the individual operator, not the unit, is privileged.16 But, perhaps it is exactly 

these characteristics—creativity and the privileging of the individual—that allowed the 

emergence of special operations as we know it today, and which hold the seeds of future, major 

institutional changes.

Creative individuals are those who can put together seemingly unrelated ideas from 

different knowledge domains or domains of practice, whether in front of an easel, on the battlefield, 

or in a policy meeting. An entrepreneur is a creative individual able to exploit opportunities in the

business world. One who can do the same within an organization is an institutional entrepreneur;

he does not challenge the organization’s values, just its structure and processes.

General Donovan’s search for air support for European special operations during World 

War II, including parachuting guerilla warfare teams and intelligence agents behind German lines 

and dropping supplies and munitions to French resistance fighters, is a good example. The 

American Joint Chiefs of Staff 

approved his request to use air support 

if he could find it, but refused to direct 

resources for him. General Donovan 

thus affirmed that flying air cover was 

within the value set of the institution 

(the U.S. military); he just needed to 

find assets, which he did by working his 

personal networks. Through Air Force 

Brigadier General Edward Curtis, a 

good friend and the trusted Chief of 

Staff to Air Force Lieutenant General 

Carl Spaatz (commander of the 

Northwest African Air Forces), General 

Donovan was able to persuade 

Lieutenant General Spaatz to commit 

planes and crew. General Donovan ultimately was able to convert B-17s and their crews, formerly 

used for high-altitude formation bombing, to low-altitude, single-flying aircraft suitable for special 

operations infiltrate/exfiltrate missions.17

General Donovan ‘broke the rules’ to acquire what he needed. He was then able to establish 

a mechanism for the recognized need to continue to be served in the future. The group of re-

 

16 Some will argue that the basic operations units of SOF are the small teams—the ODAs and SEAL teams, for 

example. I mean here that the service identity lies in the operator, not the team or the unit. When one thinks of ‘special 

operations’ as a military force, it is the operator, not the ODA, that comes to mind.

17 Bernard Victor Moore II, “The Secret Air War Over France: USAAF Special Operations Units in the French 

Campaign of 1944” (Master’s thesis, Air University, Maxwell AFB, May 1982), 14-18.

OSS agents are dropped behind German lines from bases in 

England and North Africa after its leader, General Donovan,

‘broke the rules’ to acquire air support during World War II. 

Source: Central Intelligence Agency
9

purposed B-17s and their crews became the nucleus of the Special Flight Section attached to the 

12th Air Force’s Fifth Bombardment Wing,18 and arguably set the stage for today’s Air Force 

Special Operations Command.

SOF as Institutional Entrepreneurs

Exercising creativity in this way positioned General Donovan as an institutional entrepreneur. 

Institutional entrepreneurs are actors, often charismatic individuals, who act as champions for an 

idea or a process to fill a need current institutions are not designed to address. They are adept at

leveraging the resources of existing institutions, and often access and mobilize personnel through 

their own networks,19 as did General Donovan. They frequently work behind the scenes to 

accomplish their ends. They then socialize the new structures and processes in accepted and 

familiar language to confer legitimacy. Successful institutional entrepreneurs both break the rules 

associated with existing institutional logics, and create and subsequently institutionalize 

alternative rules and practices.

The ability of the special operations community to ‘get stuff done’ by developing social 

networks and then leveraging those personal relationships can translate into a valuable asset for 

institutional change and development, as well as an ability to succeed at positive engagement for 

specific missions or tactical activities. There are many historic examples of special operators who 

successfully worked ‘outside the institutional box.’ Well-known examples include General 

Donovan, as described earlier, and David Stirling of the British Special Air Service (SAS), both 

of whom created new organizations or units that later became ‘mainstreamed.’ John Arquilla, 

professor and chair of the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School,

suggested that it was through social networks that SOF were able to be effective in recent actions 

in places such as Djibouti and the Philippines.20

The case of T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ who is often held up as the 

prototypical innovator of this type, is an interesting one. He actually was a failed institutional 

entrepreneur. Although he broke the rules by using local militia in the service of the British agenda, 

he was unable to institutionalize the capability. His abrasive personality was counterproductive in 

any effort to mobilize others to adopt his approach. Recognition of his success by his 

contemporaries was grudging, and only in the face of incontrovertible tactical victories such as his 

taking of Aqaba, a coastal city in Jordan. And, Lawrence’s tight regional focus on the Arabian 

Peninsula did not provide him the vision necessary to effect large institutional change, nor even 

the ability to transfer his own skills to a different theater. His performance in a later posting to 

 

18 Ibid.

19 Steve Maguire, Cynthia Hardy, and Thomas B. Lawrence, “Institutional Entrepreneurship in Emerging Fields: 

HIV/AIDS Treatment Advocacy in Canada,” Academy of Management Journal 47, no. 5 (2004): 657–679.

20 John Arquilla, “To Build a Network,” Prism 5, no.1 (2014): 23–33.
10

India’s Northwest Frontier (today’s Pakistan) was abysmal.21 However, just as failures in the world 

of business may be the precursor for later successes, Lawrence’s failure laid the groundwork for 

what later became one of the hallmark capabilities of special operations: the ability to work ‘by, 

with and through’ local populations.

As Army Colonel Bill Coultrup put it while serving in the Philippines as part Joint Special 

Operations Task Force – Philippines (JSOTF-P), which operated from 2002 to 2014, long after the 

capability to work with local populations was institutionalized, “[We’re here to] help the 

Philippines security forces. It’s their 

fight.” Colonel Coultrup also attributed 

the success of JSOTF-P, which had 

an almost exclusively non-combat 

mission, as arising from “civil-military 

operations to change the conditions 

that allow those high-value targets to 

have a safe haven ... We do that 

through helping give a better life to the 

citizens ... that’s our network.”22

The story of the introduction of 

a special operations capability to the 

U.S. military during World War II 

championed by General Donovan, and 

its subsequent institutionalization in 

USSOCOM managed by Jim Locher in 1987, provide interesting cases of successful institutional 

entrepreneurship, stimulated by moral outrage and carried out in oppositional environments. Both 

cases were stimulated not by technocratic or cost/benefit analyses of organizational needs, but by 

moral imperatives.

In the case of the OSS, it was the absence of a special operations capability, seen by some 

as critical to success in the conflict in Europe as exemplified by the British SAS. Successful 

introduction of the special operations capability to the American military meant changing what it 

meant to prosecute a war. As a consequence, fully incorporating special operations into the U.S. 

military mindset was not easily or automatically accomplished once the tactical imperatives of 

World War II ended. As Army Colonel Aaron Bank, first commander of the U.S. Army Special 

Forces, put it:

 

21 Michael Korda, Hero.

22 Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda

(New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2011), 195–196.

The veterinarian for JSOTF-P, administers a deworming 

medication to a cow at a Veterinarian Civic Action Program held 

in collaboration with the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Source: 

USSOCOM Pacific photo by LTJG Theresa Donnelly.
11

UW [unconventional warfare] had proved itself during WWII as a companion of 

conventional warfare—a necessary supplement whenever the employment of 

conventional forces would not be feasible or would be embarrassing. I wondered 

when it would obtain full recognition by the military leaders of the great powers.23

In fact, it took until 1987 for UW to be fully institutionalized and legitimized in the U.S. 

military through the institutionalization of the special operator. The addition to the U.S. military 

community of a policy organization and a combatant command dedicated to special operations 

legitimated the special operator, adding new players to the military playbook. No longer ‘an Army 

guy who did additional things,’ the special operator now had status in his own right, and there were 

new actors with authority and agency in the Pentagon on both the military and civilian sides. It is 

important to realize that this change—the move to full legitimization for special operations (along 

with many other changes to the defense establishment)—was stimulated by an event that prompted 

moral outrage: Operation Eagle Claw, mentioned earlier.

Institutional Entrepreneurs as Social Activists

The ability to catalyze change gets particularly interesting when looking at institutional 

entrepreneurs in the light of social movements, another change mechanism. As described earlier, 

recent looks at social movements focus on the social relationships that allow discontent to be 

translated into collective action. This emphasizes the role of networks in recruiting and organizing 

people to share resources in pursuit of an idea or premise that stands in opposition to mainstream 

beliefs. The focus is on the ability to generate collective action around an oppositional idea.

This brings us full circle to the institutional entrepreneur, also an agent for change. Like 

the activist, the institutional entrepreneur engages in oppositional environments. For the 

institutional entrepreneur, arguments usually surround the appropriateness of the task and the 

ability of the given structure to accommodate it, while in the social activist arena, the arguments 

are based on the inherent (im)morality of particular 

ideas or courses of action. Thus, in social movements, 

arguments are at the level of cultural tropes or 

ideologies, not institutional structures, and the focus is 

on persuasion (‘hearts and minds’), not institutionbuilding. The institutional entrepreneur uses networks 

to recruit and organize individuals to accomplish tasks already perceived as important by an 

institutional subcommunity, but outside the structural capabilities of existing systems. The 

institutional entrepreneur does not challenge the value of the institution, only its ability to 

accomplish certain tasks. New structures are created to support new tasks, and to get those 

 

23 Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986), 188.

The institutional entrepreneur

does not challenge the value of 

the institution, just its ability to 

accomplish certain tasks.
12

structures legitimated and accepted by the very communities that may initially have resisted them. 

The activist, on the other hand, uses networks to recruit and organize individuals to create new 

value structures, and challenges the moral basis of the existing institution.

The institutional entrepreneur as social activist takes action one step further, capturing the 

oppositional activity of a social movement in language and cultural frames that are familiar enough 

to existing structures to be accepted. The failure of the Arab Spring activists in Egypt to 

institutionalize, and ensure continuity for their reforms is a good example at the country level of 

the pitfalls of using only part of the change paradigm. The activists were successful in getting 

Egyptians to hear a moral call and mobilizing the population to collective action against the 

government through the protests in Tahrir Square. However, they failed to institutionalize their 

revolution, and soon lost the government through an election to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group 

that was well organized from an institutional perspective, but which shared none of the

activists’ values.

Activists, Entrepreneurs, and SOF

Militaries are famous for being highly structured and regulated organizations. There are rules on 

what to wear, how to talk to people, how to stand, and how to fight. Such regimentation is 

necessary to ensure that the use of force is controlled, and that the friction generated by the 

uncertainty of the battlefield can be addressed. As large organizations, modern Western militaries 

find that the standardization provided by bureaucratic rules and structures contributes to efficient 

operation (although, of course, it also can lead to organizational pathologies): managing several 

hundred thousand of individuals through personality and persuasion would not be possible or 

effective.

The special operator, and, by extension, all the members of the special operations 

community in place to enable SOF, is now legitimated as a military player in Western militaries. 

SOF bring to the military the potential for change, realized through an ability to create, stimulate, 

and work through social networks and the power of individual personalities. That potential can be 

activated in the service of tactical operations, working ‘by, with and through’ local populations in 

pre-conflict and conflict areas to serve a national agenda. It also can be activated in the service of 

large institutional change: If SOF are given the freedom to act creatively and take advantage of 

connections and relationships, they can mobilize networks around both the crystallization of new 

values and associated institutional change. Leaders must take caution, however, to avoid 

formalizing and centralizing what works best through informal and locally developed mechanisms. 

Treating the global SOF network as policy or as a program, for example, may be the first step in 

diluting its effectiveness as a change mechanism, and eliminating the opportunity for SOF to 

contribute as fully as they might otherwise. Stepping aside and allowing members of the SOF 

community to individually create and activate relationships in the service of clear values-based 

agendas may yield unexpected innovation and creative results, leading to significant change at the 

mission/tactical level, and perhaps also at the level of the broader institution.