Army Irregular Warfare Center Prepares to Stand Down
Army Irregular Warfare Center Prepares to Stand Down
By Bill Ackerly, Leavenworth Lamp
Since its beginning in 2006, the Army Irregular Warfare Center, originally the Counterinsurgency Center, has prepared more than 40 brigade combat teams, as well division and corps headquarters, for COIN operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. AIWC also conducted more than 50 irregular warfare webcasts for the community of interest and deploying soldiers.
Beginning Oct. 1, AIWC’s critical tasks and responsibilities will transition to other Army organizations as resources and priorities are realigned.
In recognizing AIWC’s numerous accomplishments during the last eight years, Maj. Gen. Thomas S. James Jr., director of the Mission Command Center of Excellence, said, “AIWC was the driving force that led to the analysis, development and integration of irregular warfare-related concepts, doctrine, training, leadership and education, ensuring the lessons we’ve learned permeate across the Army now through 2025 and beyond.”
The COIN Center was established in July 2006 by then-Commanding General of the Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, in conjunction with Marine Corps Deputy Commandant Lt. Gen. James Mattis. The COIN Center was designated in September 2010 as the Army’s focal point for irregular warfare and transitioned to its current organization as the AIWC.
AIWC was established with an initial heavy emphasis on providing first-rate, near real-time support to units preparing for combat. It quickly developed a flexible five-day COIN seminar for BCTs deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, AIWC leveraged the experience and insights of combat veterans to ensure relevancy of seminar content for deploying war-fighting units. The result was an interactive seminar model that was so successful it was requested by III Corps, V Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps, as well as non-deploying units.
AIWC’s primary responsibilities included developing doctrine; coordinating, analyzing and integrating irregular warfare doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities solutions across the Army; advising training centers and other programs; integrating COIN doctrine into training and education; and conducting outreach to the COIN community of interest.
In addition to its seminars and webcasts, other AIWC significant contributions since 2006 included facilitating the re-write of Field Manual 3-24, “Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies,” writing six Army techniques publications, and collaborating irregular warfare issues with military partners, such as France, Iraq, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore, Afghanistan and India.
AIWC has provided irregular warfare support and expertise through guest lecturers/facilitators at civilian and academic seminars, conferences and workshops, including the Center for the Study of Interagency Cooperation, Global Center for Security Cooperation, U.S. Institute of Peace and International Development, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Kansas State University, University of Kansas, the National Defense University and Massey University, New Zealand.
AIWC Director Col. Gus Benton II said, “As a SOF (special operations force) practitioner, it’s readily clear that the value of AIWC to the Army goes far beyond the number of events supported; the value is truly drawn from the numerous enlightening anecdotes offered by individual Army leaders up to corps commanders as to how their forces were shaped and prepared to operate successfully within complex COIN environments.”
As the COIN Center’s first director in 2006, retired Col. Pete Mansoor, said, the mission of the COIN Center was “to think about how we can change our organization (the Army); integrate new technologies; come up with better tactics, techniques and procedures; how to better train our doctrine; and understand the culture, languages and skills that we need to counter insurgency.”
And that is precisely what today’s AIWC has been doing ever since.
