Ramping Up to Face the Challenge of Irregular Warfare

Ramping Up to Face the Challenge of Irregular Warfare – Lieutenant Colonel Mark Grdovic, Special Warfare.

In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, the U.S. military experienced a revival of interest in irregular warfare, or IW, similar to the one that is occurring today. In both of the previous periods, the topic enjoyed a celebrity-like popularity in professional military forums until such time that circumstances allowed it to be relegated back to the margins in favor of a return to “proper soldiering.”

Both previous revivals produced high-quality doctrine and curriculum in professional-education courses. So why, then, did IW fail to become ingrained as part of the military mainstream? The manner in which a topic is framed can significantly influence the opinion of the target audience. Suggesting that IW is the graduate level of warfare, while clearly expressing the topic’s difficulty, fails to recognize the considerable effort that the Army has invested in mastering major combat operations, or MCO. Given the imbalance between the Army’s investment in MCO and in IW, it’s not surprising that, by comparison, IW appears more difficult and complex. Over the last several decades, old IW concepts have often been reintroduced or reinvented under new names, such as “low-intensity conflict” and “military operations other than war.” While there is no question that those concepts are complex, presenting them as new byproducts of emerging and changing world conditions, such as globalization, urbanization and radicalization, brings into question not only the enduring nature of the IW requirement but also whether these conflicts are, in fact, merely anomalies to be weathered. While labels and marketing techniques may be helpful in reconciling our collective discomfort with the topic, they undermine the overall integration of the topic by further entrenching skeptics…

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