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.

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.