With job cuts and drug tests, the Pentagon hopes to prepare its special-ops forces for a new era of warfare

The US military is reorienting to great-power competition after 20 years of counterterrorism.

This shift means a change in how US special-operations forces are used.

To make that change, Pentagon leaders think those forces need to shape up and slim down.

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After more than two decades of combat against terrorist and insurgent groups in the Middle East, the US military is reorienting for a different kind of fight.

As the US military has waged those campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, strategic challenges have only bigger and more complicated.

While the Russian military is suffering heavy losses in Ukraine, US officials continue to see it as a credible and unpredictable near-peer threat that poses an "acute" challenge. China's military is also growing more capable and more confident as Beijing pursues supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Special-operations forces are still the tip of the US military spear, but Pentagon leaders believe that to be competitive in an era of intense competition with Russia and China, those forces need to shape up and slim down.

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Drug tests and force reductions

SEAL Qualification Training Class 336 at their graduation ceremony in Coronado, California in April 2020.US Navy/MCS 1st Class Anthony W. Walker

Naval Special Warfare Command announced in September that it would start testing its personnel, including Navy SEALs and Naval Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, for performance-enhancing drugs.

The initiative comes after several drug-related incidents in the Naval ..

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