Romania is one of America's key allies in the fight for Eastern Europe. Romanian Special Forces are critical to the success of that mission, and the partnership between United States Special Operations and our Romanian counterparts sits at the center of that strategy. From the Global Special Operations Symposium in Athens, Greece, I sat down with Major General Claudio Dobikon, commander of the Romanian Special Operations Forces, to discuss how Romanian special operations are combating Russian aggression and holding the line in Europe. General Dobikin shared his perspective on strengthening soft partnerships, advancing interoperability, and building modern capabilities that allow allied forces to operate seamlessly together. He spoke about Romania's place within NATO, the importance of trust and shared mission across borders, and the need for special operations units to remain agile and prepared for the full spectrum of emerging threats. from combating hybrid threats to maintaining readiness alongside allied soft elements general dobakon emphasized that success today depends on relationships shared understanding and the willingness to stand together in the face of uncertainty special thanks to the global special operations foundation for hosting us in athens all the jedberg podcast and the green beret foundation on social media listen on your favorite podcast platform read on our website and watch the full video version on youtube as we show you why america must continue to lead from the front no matter the challenge General Dovacan, welcome to the Jetbird Podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I actually go by CD in the community because a long time ago when I used to attend some course in the States, they would mess up my name so badly. So I said, OK, let's stick to the CD. And later on, Admiral McRaven, he said, you're not a CD, you're high speed. So we'll call you Blu-ray. But I still go by city for the friends. I'm actually used to having the last name Ricciopi. It gets wrong about 90% of the time. So people say, what's your name? I say Fran. It's very similar. Fran Ricciopi. That's it. Not that bad. Yeah, my Italian brothers are running around here behind us. We're here at GSoft Europe in Athens. A really great opportunity to bring the Global Special Forces community together and have some really important conversations about interoperability and how do we build relationships across each of our nation's soft leadership, but then also get an inside look and lessons learned as to what's happening today in the various regions of the world. You command the Romanian Special Forces. Longtime ally of the United States. And it's an honor to sit with you because we have spent on this show close to 300 episodes now, five years where we have covered special operations community from the American perspective. And being an American, we always tend to put ourselves first. That's the most important perspective. But what SOF teaches you is that that is actually not the most important perspective because that perspective of our partners and our allies is actually oftentimes the most important perspective. And so to be able to come here, sit down with yourself, and we've been able to sit down with a few other leaders from our allies as well is truly an honor because we haven't had that opportunity to cover the perspective of what's going on in the world from your angle. So I appreciate you very much spending some time with me. Thank you very much for the question, but it's very open and let's hope we can focus it a little bit. So in terms of U.S. being not important, I will contradict you because U.S. is very important, especially in the soft domain. We were created by the cooperation between Romanian Ministry of Defense and the U.S. SoCure. We had a lot of advisors in the beginning. I myself am a graduate of the Q course conducted in Romania with the instructors from the U.S. Special Forces School. So later on, I attended other courses in the States and so on and so forth. So, education, training, and material provided by the U.S. in the beginning of our formation were critical for the inception. So, with that said, I'm going to move into the main question you had, interoperability, and how that defines the situation in our neighbor. So Romania is situated in the Southeast Europe. So it's flesh in the middle of the former Balkans problem set and the Ukrainian problem set. And also to add the complexity of the region, you get the Transnistrian frozen conflict, the Black Sea harassment and so on and so forth. So Romania is in a very peculiar position and it had to develop partners. It had to develop capabilities to be able to create solutions for itself and then contribute to larger NATO plans or NATO security approach. So your loaded question about the interoperability is actually a very tricky one. But thank you very much for giving this question to the floor. interoperability nobody really talks about it what that really means if you look at the baseline what you mean by interoperability first of all is language so in reality there are no problems if you talk about u.s and romanian special forces on the language side of the interoperability but it's not the same between u.s forces and some middle eastern partners you can go down the list but I don't want to name any countries that are doing their best to catch up with the language concerned. The second problem set that interoperability entails, but nobody talks about it, is TTPs. If you went to the same courses, the same schools, you kind of have the same understanding of move left, cover right, or something like that. The baseline would be understood. But if you are to operate with somebody you did not work before and does not have the same baseline in TTPs, then you're in trouble. The third level is material. Is my rifle shooting the same ammunition as yours? Is the bandwidth of my radio similar to yours so the two stations can connect to one another? Maybe yes, maybe no. So now we get into the complexities of the NATO formats. The fourth level of interoperability, we have to talk about our concepts. So if what I understand by deterrence is not the same that you understand by deterrence, then we have a problem. For example, when people say Russian Federation has to be deterred in Ukraine, I don't think the word is correct because if the occupation already started, you have to use the word coercion. And the coercion means military instrument of state power and so on and so forth. So concepts are very important because words carry value, carry meaning, carry symbol. So, and the fifth one is technology. So if you talk about interoperability on technology arena, then you realize we are starting to run in a lot of troubles. And I'm going to explain why. The present is affected by our recent past. Afghanistan, Iraq were the great unifiers. Okay. the future doesn't look as bright. Why? Because industry defines the speed of technological development in many areas. And because most of the technology develops with the state money, that information would be proprietary and the technology will be restricted to a few nations, like Five Eyes or something like that. So it is in my opinion that today we're good because we work together but the future doesn look as bright because of the political industrial barriers to our sharing of technology When faced with a challenge, Green Berets adapt, overcome, and keep moving forward. Now's your chance to stand with them. Join the 1952 Society with a monthly gift of just $19.52 to provide critical medical devices for wounded, ill, and injured Green Berets. Your support fuels their recovery, helping them return to duty or continue serving their communities. A Green Beret's mission never stops. Neither should our support. Join the 1952 Society Today and stand with those who stand for us. You brought up 10 more questions in my head. I kind of want to dig into a couple of them because I think they're really important. So first, when you talk about technology, we've seen rapid technological advancement in your area over the last couple of years. With the Russian invasion into Ukraine, with the broader aggression across the region, as you outlined, and where Romania sits in the center of many of the regional conflicts, you've seen firsthand some of these technological advancements in terms of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles and how effective they have been both in targeting not only formations, but targeting down to the individual. When you look at technology and you look at the, and we can walk the floors through here and see, there's everything, you land, sea, and air here. What is the technology that you think is critical for the Romanian special forces to be able to use to work with other nations in the countering of the aggression within the area? Well, the question is, for today, I do not see a very critical technology that I'm missing today, but I cannot speak about the future that way. For example, in the last three years, the budget dedicated to the soft has increased significantly, and we've made conscious decisions into how to leverage the acquisition process into covering the gaps and potential requirements for the force for the future. but the technology moves in a pace or at a speed that no one can predict but i will try and give you some of the predictions we think the technology will address so if you think about the second world war and the immediately post-second world war we we were talking about the maneuverist approach to warfare that was built on industrial superiority we are at that time of course the The maneuver and amassing of forces were the key tactics. Today, we are moving toward a swarming concept where the drones seem to be important. It is my estimation that the drones will be relevant, but not critical for the future, because they are mostly like an ammunition or another platform that carries a sensor. It does not do battle for you. it can disrupt or it can delay, but mostly as a tactic, not as a strategic game changer. But the strategic game changer, which we have to understand, is generative AI. When the AI makes its own decision and using the capabilities given by the autonomous drones, it will affect significantly the world landscape. So the term that we've heard time and time again is human in the loop and the need with the integration of AI to keep a human in the loop for decision-making processes. So do you think that there's a world in which AI is making decisions and removing humans from that decision-making process? I heard it a couple of weeks ago in a conference, human in the loop, human on the loop, meaning you're there to stop a decision that's on the brink of being made by AI or you stop the cycle of AI and you have to have a human moving a decision from one step to the other one. So they are totally different because if it's the smaller influence of the person, you might have a tired person or a drowsy person or somebody that will just not look into what that means and will say, agree. But if that person has to move the decision from one position to another position in an AI cycle that will mean that person consciously decided to give the green light to AI. So we're doing this for many, many years in targeting. We have like five people that can press a button. Yes, the conditions are met. Yes, the plate is in the air. Yes, yes, yes. So that's kind of the primitive AI, if you remember, in targeting we have. In terms of the future where the generative AI will make their own decision, that kind of scares me a little bit. If it has access to all the equipment armaments and whatnot, because then whoever gets into the back door or the inner cycle of the AI, that person or that entity will have the control of the warfare. So I'm scared of the moment when everything is passed to the AI. Yeah. Me being in the soft, we say humans are more important than software or more important than AI. So I do believe that. You brought up the concept of massing forces in the context of World War II, and really that concept of massing forces permeated through the Gulf War into even Iraq, Afghanistan to an extent, a little bit more expeditionary, especially in the early days. When we look at what we're terming large-scale combat operations against near-peer enemies, nation-state on nation-state at the superpower level, our job in SOF is to prevent and push that day down the road. How long can we prevent that is really what we're out there to do. But when we look at massing forces, historically, allied nations have been able to mass forces on borders to be able to then conduct some sort of defense or invasion. When we look at the implementation in AI, we look at large-scale combat operations and the ability to deep sensor through aviation platforms, the integration of space and long-range precision fires, do you think future conflict will see the ability of nations to mass forces pre-conflict, or do you think it becomes more expeditionary in nature? So in the history of the mankind, I kind of studied about 2,000 years of history of tactics because I was passionate about something else. So I discovered that the tactics are only four and they are used in cyclical format and they change maybe every two, three hundred years as soon as the new technologies or some edge comes up. And I'm going to recap. In the beginning, the tribes used to fight wars in swarming formation. They would attack from all the directions by surprise at night or something like that. So when the tribe that received too many losses, they got smarter. What did they do? They moved to a line warfare. They did not came two or three guys. They came 15 lined up. So they would not be surprised from all the direction. And of course, then the, let's say the previous tribe found out that's the new tactic and they said, okay, let's group a mass and break the fronts. And then the next iteration was okay if we cannot bring too many people to a mass forces what we will do we will envelop them So let recap So the first tactic was swarming the line warfare the mass warfare the maneuvers warfare and then you get into the next cycle so the next cycle was armed cavalry so like swarming and then what you do you build ramparts to block them line warfare and a mess then you bring the tank to a mass force to break through the lines and so So the history is cyclical, not in terms of the tactics repeating. The tactics are repeating, but the equipment, the weapon system changes. So if you look at the drone warfare, everyone thinks is the future. Think about the drones as the ammunition or the platform through which you will conduct your swarming. So yes, the swarming is the next step in the evolution of warfare. but I think the development of the counter weapons will show that we will be moving very soon into a line type of warfare because the stand of distance you'll see it will increase as much as I can hit you from 50 kilometers you will move all your forces 50 kilometers back and you will try and find a weapon that shoots from 70 kilometers away So the standoff distance will increase, but I don't think the swarming is going to be the next way of doing battle, maybe at the periphery. I want to ask you about specifically the Romanian special forces. Okay. Romania has been, as we mentioned, the longtime ally of the United States, instrumental in both Iraq and in Afghanistan. From your perspective as the commander of the formation, what is the mission of the Romanian Special Forces? Very, very interesting question. So the mission is not what we do, but what we do for what purpose. So we are legislated, we are written into the defense organization law. So the Romanian SOCOM is part of the strategic assets in the defense formations. So that said, we are a strategic element, but we also build and develop capabilities to be used by the operational level commanders. But we do have strategic assets. In terms of what we do conceptually, special reconnaissance, military assistance, direct action, and commercial warfare. The reality is the mission types do not define our mission, so to speak. Our mission is to be a strategic level instrument that helps with the reaction to crisis and building partnerships and capabilities in the region. So if we're in a conflict or something like that, we have the regional partners around us that can help solve any crisis. So that would be a short definition of what we do. Sure. We all have a choice to make when we decide to become a soldier. I made the decision in the post 9-11 world. So 9-11 was my junior year in college. And I had to decide, do I want to go be a reporter in the middle of nowhere in America? Or do I want to go follow these guys with beards and long hair riding horses through the desert of Afghanistan? And so that's what my calling was. Why did you join the Romanian army and then ultimately want to serve in special forces? Actually joined a long, long time ago in 91. So I signed up for the army academy, like your West Point. So I became an airborne, an infantry graduate. I signed up for airborne school and I served my first three years of the career in a special mission unit, but it was mostly focused on sabotage and reconnaissance type unit. Later on- Like the LURS unit, like the LURS units. Yes. So later on, I moved into an airborne battalion and then I signed up for special forces and so on and so forth. So in reality, I think the 2001, the 9-11 accelerated my transition toward the Green Berets because before that, we did not really understood that model. We didn't have the reference. But after 2001, the 10th group and the 20th group, they came around and they showed us what the right looks like. So I signed up. What is the value in your perspective of the NATO alliance? We've heard a lot about defense spending from various countries and meeting certain minimum thresholds. But at the end of the day, to the warfighter, that doesn't really matter. What matters is the alliance that's built from the relationships that we build as leaders. But how important is the NATO alliance to regional stability? NATO alliance, if you think about the foundational documents and the role, it was initially and later on, it built on collective defense. But in the recent years, you've heard deter aggression and collective defense. So it's a tool that kind of prevents conflict. But NATO also has one of the missions. It has crisis management, meaning you're trying to deter, you're trying to do something. But if there are crises outside of your region or outside of area of responsibility, you have to go and support. And the third mission is cooperative security. This is the one I like best because it allows you to reinvent yourself as the alliance. So if it's peace, then at the periphery, you build new capabilities, new friends. If the friends are in trouble, you activate more toward the crisis management and so on and so forth. So nowadays, you hear collective defense is important. My opinion, all three missions are important in NATO. And now why NATO is important to me, I'll say the soft perspective. I served in NATO Soft Coordination Center in 2008-2011. So at that time, we had no common standards. We had no reference book. But NATO helped us all talk to one another. At that time, we were 27 nations. Now we're over 30. And we kind of got to a level playing field. We were happy to exchange tactics, techniques and procedures. And you have to realize that SOF doesn't really share unless they have the authority to do so. So NATO is the umbrella under which we share a lot of things that otherwise we cannot discuss about. So you mentioned commonality, that NATO has been able to establish some commonality. And earlier in the conversation, you talked about interoperability and the lens of communication, material, TTPs. NATO has done a lot of work, and we're going to sit down tomorrow with the folks from NATO, Diana, to talk about innovation. But what are some of the areas where NATO has really done some great work in creating that interoperability and bringing us from interoperability in terms of can you and I talk to each other and share information to here's my platform, go ahead and use it and give it back to me when we're done? Because those are two different levels of interoperability. Correct. When you talk about the good work NATO has done, you have to talk about the standards. meaning there is a volume, it's called Allied Command Operations of 4C Standards for Special Operations It has 11 chapters if I not wrong but seven of them talk about the standards applicable in all the joint functions meaning command and control What is the minimum you have to have for command and control? Intelligence. What is the minimum you do and you have to have to be able to exchange? So in reality, the first, I apologize, The first Bible of the soft community was written by the NSCC under Admiral McRaven's leadership and Stubradian's one. So in reality, to be able to have a reference book, what is it that you have to have and to do to be able to be interoperable? And later on in 2011, early 2012, the checklist was published, which is volume 11 of the same Allied Command Operation Forces Standards. So in reality, the foundational documents were done by the NATO Self-Coordination Center, NSCC. And I think without them, the successes in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, could have not happened. So because NSCC standardized the things, then the industry was brought along to start building some of the systems that will enhance the standards. And then NATO changed the standards again by elevating some of them, the qualitative one, or including new requirements like directed energy or something like that. So that's the first part of the question. The second part was? No, I think you got it all. Okay. I got one more question for you because then we got to get you to your next event. Certainly we've spent a lot of time throughout this entire conference talking about the situation in Ukraine. You border Ukraine. It's front and center to you. It's front and center to the troops that serve under your command. Culture is a big conversation that we're having right now in the U.S. military. And where are we today? Where have we come from? Where do we want to be tomorrow? And you're seeing all levels of leadership within the U.S. military front. You're really putting that in the forefront. When you look at your formation, kind of a two-part question. Here's the two-part question. When you look at your formation, what do you see in terms of the Romanian culture within the special operations units? And what's your vision and what's your guidance to your teams as you face a very real threat in your region that has the possibility at any moment to go from status quo to creating a broader global conflict? Okay, so I'll go back to 2014, actually to 2013, when Romanian SOF had a study in which the students of a planning course said that Crimea will be taken over, attacked, or, I don't know, subverted by the Russian interest, because Russia cannot afford to lose the warm water port of Sevastopol and the capacity to fix or refurbish submarines and so on and so forth. So when you hear in 2014 that nobody had predicted the occupation of Crimea, I disagree with that because I heard similar topics being discussed in Lithuania, Poland, and everybody's in agreement. Yes, we notify the right people that this will happen because the analysis was one thing and the intelligence was a different thing. So Romania, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries were all privy of how Russia has fought for three, four hundred years. And we are always fearful of the repeating aftermath of the Second World War. So we are, let's say, conscious that we have to be deterred on our part, but capable to move from military resistant type of mission into very kinetic one. And of course, I cannot share with you details of the endowment, but yes, we are looking at the full spectrum of ammunition equipment to be able to operate kinetically at the maximum level. And what's your guidance? What's your vision to your unit? What do you want them to look like in five years? Well, if I'm being honest, the things the formation is doing today, I'm very proud of them. I would not want them to change, but to add special tactics capability and to be able to embrace the new technologies that appear and be able to maybe have a better connectivity with the industry to be able to leverage what industry is offering. but offering on our terms not on the industrial term i think we are in the whole nato we are subverting the requirements process which is very good hey these are my guests my needs and then you publish a tender then some people compete or companies compete to fix that and i don't like when we move to the discussion this let's say company comes this is the technology buy it from me because it's the best. No. The military instruments has to dictate the requirements and we're hoping the financial incentives or the cooperation will create the trust of the industry. Yes, you should talk to the SOF because they will give you the best feedback. Sometimes you will lose some money because you invest in a project and nobody buys it, but SOF will be the first one to tell you, please don't do that because you're wasting time and money. And they'll give you honest feedback. They'll give you honest feedback. If it could be broken, find a soft guy. They'll break it. Yeah. So, well, sir, I appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk to us. It's really getting a firsthand look at what's going on in these various conflict regions of the world is really important to the stories that we're telling. Romania has been really a strategic ally of the United States. I personally have never been to Romania or server them. Hopefully one day I'll get to go, but I have a lot of friends from 10th Group who have been, and everybody I've ever met speaks very, very highly of the organization that you run and the partnership that they have with you. And as I came into here over the last couple of days, I will tell you that every single one of our American leaders came to me and asked me if I was going to be sitting down with you. So that's a testament to your leadership, the friendship and the partnership that you've built with our nation's leaders. And I thank you so much. Thank you very much for the opportunity. And I look forward to inviting you to Romania. And hopefully you get to see Bucharest, but not only Bucharest. You should come to the countryside because we're a very diverse country. So looking forward to having you there. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, friend. American Jedbergs went on to form the foundation of the United States Special Forces and the Special Activities Directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jedberg Podcast, an official program of the Green Beret Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Richoven. Join us next week for a new episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jedberg Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, or Threads. Send your comments and inquiries to fran at jedbergpodcast.com. As former members of Special Operations Forces, the Jedberg Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations of U.S. Army Special Forces and their families. Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepare today determines success tomorrow.
