On Sept. 30, the U.S. Army unceremoniously stood up a new headquarters—the 1st Special Forces Command—at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The division-level unit brings together more than 15,000 Green Berets and other special troops in a single new organization.

Previously, the Army’s Special Operations Command had directly controlled all of these troops plus others on a wide range of missions. The idea behind the new HQ is to assemble a force specifically tailored for dealing with what the Pentagon calls “hybrid warfare.”

Simply put, hybrid warfare is a blend of straight-up traditional combat—with infantry, tanks and artillery—and secretive insurgency. Probably the biggest practitioner of hybrid warfare is Russia.

Just look at what’s going on in Ukraine, where Russian-supplied separatist insurgents are fighting alongside disguised Russian troops in an attempt to seize territory from the government in Kiev and bring it under Moscow’s sway.

Among other tasks, the U.S. Army’s new 1st Special Forces Command could help the ground combat branch counter hybrid warfare—by sending Green Beret advisers to train, advise and lead native troops in embattled countries.

“This is … a real requirement based on Russia’s hybrid warfare approach, as well as the need for partners in places like Libya, Syria and Iraq, where we want to help stabilize the chaos,” Navy captain Robert Newson, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of the new Army HQ.

“This reorganization has been in the planning roughly a year,” the Army’s main Special Forces headquarters explained. “[The Command] will not be fully capable until July 2015.”

To be fair, training foreign fighters—“unconventional warfare,” the military calls it—has long been a main mission for Army Special Forces, albeit one that had fallen out of favor recently.

After 9/11, the Pentagon deployed Special Forces and Army Rangers, Navy SEALs and other Special Operations Forces all over the world to fight insurgents and hunt terrorists. They largely took “direct action”—hitting the bad guys on their own—rather than working through local forces.

But from the 1940s into the 1990s, the Special Forces mostly practiced unconventional warfare—indirect action, if you will, and the focus of the new 1st Special Forces Command. In that way, the new HQ brings Special Forces “back to its roots,” said Newson, a SEAL officer who served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.

This indirect method of warfare is ideal in situations where an American presence could be “too costly or be counter-productive,” Newson explained.