A force built to exploit tactical asymmetry now operates within legal and informational systems capable of generating different, but equally consequential, asymmetries of power.
I write as a neutral observer, from a philosopher’s perspective. The desert origins of the British Special Air Service provide a practical starting point because the SAS was built around a discovery about power: a small force could produce effects vastly disproportionate to its size by organising relationships with a much larger environment of geography, intelligence, mobility, logistics, concealment and enemy response. The National Army Museum records the SAS emerging in North Africa in 1941, with the Long Range Desert Group subsequently providing essential mobility and support (National Army Museum, n.d.-a; n.d.-b). The effective SAS was larger than the SAS. More than eighty years later, the reversal is striking. A force built to exploit tactical asymmetry now operates within legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric consequences upon it. The relationships that extended its operational power beyond its organisational boundaries can also extend its exposure.
This reversal has acquired contemporary significance. At the 2026 Hereford Military History Festival, the Stirling Memorial Series included The SAS: Past, Present and Future, featuring former 22 SAS commander Ed Butler, long-serving SAS and intelligence veteran Bob Parr, and George Simm, whose service included operations during the conflict with the IRA in Northern Ireland (Hereford Military History Festival, 2026a; 2026b). Contemporary debate about British special operations also involves the legal and institutional consequences of military activity. Military service involves obligations, risks and decisions whose circumstances are seldom fully visible to those who have not experienced them. Respect for those who serve is compatible with rigorous accountability, including accountability to those harmed by unlawful conduct. The purpose here is neither to diminish military service nor prejudge individuals, but to examine the wider organisation of power within which soldiers, institutions and legal processes operate.
The word lawfare requires precision. It describes the strategic use of law or legal processes to achieve objectives, particularly in conflict. Dunlap’s influential formulation concerns law employed as a means of accomplishing military objectives, while his later work examines lawfare as asymmetric warfare without assuming every such use is illegitimate (Dunlap, 2001; 2017). The term also appears in a looser, polemical sense, describing proceedings perceived by their targets as hostile or politically motivated. These meanings are not equivalent. An investigation, prosecution or adverse judgment does not become lawfare merely because it produces severe consequences. Deliberate legal strategy requires identifiable actors, purposes and conduct. Legal accountability must remain distinguishable from its strategic exploitation.
Legal institutions organise asymmetric capacities through jurisdiction, evidentiary standards, procedural obligations and safeguards intended to protect rights and constrain arbitrary power. A complaint, referral or piece of evidence can initiate processes involving investigators, courts, lawyers and governments. Evidentiary thresholds, disclosure requirements, financial resources and procedural delays influence their development. Some consequences are deliberately designed; others emerge through interactions extending beyond their original purposes. Strategic actors exploit these differences, but legitimate accountability operates through them as well. The early SAS deliberately exploited mobility, surprise, intelligence and force, while legal institutions organise authority through rules, evidence and obligation. Their purposes and ethical constraints differ fundamentally. What connects them is the capacity for small interventions to produce disproportionate consequences through organised dependencies. Effective power depends upon the relationships through which action becomes consequential, not simply the resources of whoever initiates it.
Law is one expression of a wider asymmetry in contemporary communication systems. A statement can activate journalists, investigators, courts, governments, markets and digital networks. Transmission can take seconds while verification takes years. An allegation can circulate internationally at negligible cost while reconstructing the events it describes requires substantial resources. Political actors amplify allegations, lawyers pursue objectives, media organisations benefit commercially from attention, and institutions manage legal and reputational exposure. These activities involve human intention, material interests and unequal resources, but their cumulative consequences extend beyond any participant’s control. Truth concerns the evidential status of information. Asymmetry concerns the organisation through which information becomes consequential.
The deeper difficulty appears when those consequences return. A claim prompts institutional response; response becomes news; news changes political attention; attention influences institutional decisions; those decisions produce documents and events that generate further information. Particular people act according to their intentions and constraints, but the resulting organisation is not exhausted by those intentions. Recursive, probabilistic and spectral dynamics organise differences, dependencies, rhythms and delays into persistent patterns of response. Archives preserve descriptions, procedures establish precedents, and expectations influence subsequent decisions. Through recurrence, these relationships acquire directionality, selectivity and capacities to sustain their own reproduction. Individual intention and emergent systemic agency are differentiated expressions of these deeper dynamics. Agency is neither confined to conscious intention nor adequately dismissed as mechanical feedback. The signal does not merely circulate. Its circulation reorganises the conditions of its return (Wallace, 2025; 2026). Holland’s (1992) account of complex adaptive systems provides a relevant foundation for understanding collective behaviour arising through interacting adaptive components, while the spectral dynamics developed here explain how recurrent differences, temporal dependencies and organised delays sustain coherent systemic behaviour.
The effective organisational boundary is consequently not identical to the formal boundary of an institution. It extends through the relationships sustaining its capacities, dependencies, expectations and responses. The institution is not simply an object acting upon an external environment. Its effective identity persists through those relationships. This becomes especially consequential when the responses generated by an allegation are mistaken for independent confirmation. An investigation establishes that an investigation exists. Publicity establishes circulation. Political concern establishes political concern. None independently establishes the originating allegation. Investigations can uncover evidence, witnesses can provide independent testimony, and courts can evaluate findings according to explicit standards. Without these distinctions, multiple reports derived from one source acquire the appearance of independent corroboration. Recursive organisation can generate apparent confirmation through its own activity. Deliberate manipulation can exploit this vulnerability, but conscious deception is not required for the pattern to persist.
Structural explanation does not eliminate identifiable actors. Governments, political organisations, litigants, lawyers, advocacy groups and media organisations select objectives, allocate resources, initiate proceedings and influence public narratives. A well-resourced institution can prolong litigation or impose disproportionate costs upon an opponent. A less powerful actor can use legitimate legal protections to challenge an otherwise inaccessible authority. Neither configuration establishes lawfare by itself. Strategic intent, procedural conduct, evidential merit and institutional context must be examined separately. Human agency operates within systemic dynamics that it simultaneously reproduces and transforms. The relationship is recursive, not a choice between individual intention and impersonal structure.
The practical intervention is to distinguish consequences generated by recurrence from conclusions warranted by evidence. Preserve provenance through transmission, independence through aggregation, and uncertainty through amplification. Reports must distinguish new evidence from repeated reporting, allegation from investigation, investigation from finding, and institutional response from independent corroboration. Legal proceedings require procedural fairness and evidentiary scrutiny. Corrections must propagate through the relationships that gave the original information its force. Otherwise the record can be corrected while reputational, administrative and political consequences continue. The practical test is whether the larger organisation of relationships can change direction when its evidentiary conditions change.
This is why the SAS example reaches beyond either special forces or lawfare. Contemporary institutions extend their capacities through law, finance, media, technology and information. Those extensions establish dependencies through which they become vulnerable to external action. Scale produces capability and exposure simultaneously. Connection extends reach in both directions. Responsiveness provides both control and susceptibility. The same arrangements can expose genuine wrongdoing, protect vulnerable people, coordinate societies, propagate error or become instruments of deliberate exploitation. These outcomes are not morally equivalent. Asymmetry has no inherent moral direction, and power increasingly generates its own exposure.
There is some sense in which this reversal belongs to the zeitgeist. The underdog principle has not disappeared into a world dominated by enormous states, corporations and institutions. It has acquired new expressions through the dependencies connecting them. A comparatively small actor can initiate consequences extending through organisations possessing vastly greater resources, while those resources can equally be mobilised against smaller actors. The SAS makes the reversal unusually visible because its history demonstrates how a small organisation extended its effective capacity through relationships with a larger environment. Contemporary institutional life demonstrates how those extensions also create exposure, obligation and vulnerability. The safeguard is not to suppress allegations, weaken accountability or privilege institutions over individuals. It is to preserve the distinction between evidence about an event, the intentions of those acting upon it, and consequences generated through institutional response. We have built a civilisation whose recursive dynamics continually reorganise the conditions of their own persistence. The task is not to prevent that recursion. It is to understand its directionality without mistaking recurrence for truth.
Companion pieces
Crime and Punishment: The Generative Structure of Law and Disorder
Examines how law, enforcement and disorder recursively produce the conditions to which they subsequently respond.
The Open System: Technology, Security, and the Management of Permanent Exposure
Explores how extending a system’s capabilities simultaneously extends the relations through which it becomes vulnerable.
Examines information environments in which recurrence and replicability can acquire consequence independently of evidential quality.
References
Dunlap, C.J. Jr (2001) ‘Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Conflicts’, paper presented at the Humanitarian Challenges in Military Interventions Conference, 29 November. Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3500/
Dunlap, C.J. Jr (2017) ‘Lawfare 101: A Primer’, Military Review, May–June, pp. 8–17. Available at: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/May-June-2017/Dunlap-Lawfare-101/
Hereford Military History Festival (2026a) ‘The SAS – Past, Present and Future’, Stirling Memorial Series, Hereford Cathedral, 26 September. Available at: https://www.herefordmilitaryhistoryfestival.com/events-26
Hereford Military History Festival (2026b) ‘Our Speakers for 2026’. Available at: https://www.herefordmilitaryhistoryfestival.com/speakers-26
Holland, J.H. (1992) ‘Complex Adaptive Systems’, Daedalus, 121(1), pp. 17–30. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025416
National Army Museum (n.d.-a) ‘David Stirling: The Phantom Major’. Available at: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/david-stirling
National Army Museum (n.d.-b) ‘Origins of the Special Forces’. Available at: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/special-forces-origins
Wallace, G. (2025) ‘The Logic that Lives’, Daedelus Kite, 29 October. Available at: https://daedeluskite.com/2026/10/11/the-logic-that-lives/
Wallace, G. (2026) ‘Semantics Follows Frequency: Why Meaning Repeats and History Rhymes’, Daedelus Kite, 8 August. Available at: https://daedeluskite.com/2026/08/08/semantics-follows-frequency-language-in-the-spectral-domain/
