Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Irregular Warfare
Mark Grdovic’s analysis, “Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Irregular Warfare,” argues that irregular warfare keeps cycling through predictable “boom-and-bust” phases inside the U.S. military. The problem isn’t that IW is unimportant. It’s that the Department repeatedly tries to solve a foundational question—what IW is and why it matters—with strongly worded documents, shifting labels, and catch-all activity lists. None of it translates into durable professional knowledge.
Grdovic highlights how even recent guidance, including DODI 3000.07, can’t compensate for muddled definitions across Joint and Army communities. He warns that reducing IW to a laundry list of tasks encourages practitioners to focus on tactics (the how), while ignoring the adversary’s strategy (the what and why).
His recommended course-correction is simple…reframe IW as a form of warfare designed to mitigate an opponent’s conventional superiority over time. And stop conflating conducting IW with countering it. As he puts it, “the solution to IW is not more IW.”
A Proposed Model of Irregular Warfare, its Associated Operations and Activities
If the goal is to finally “break the glass ceiling” and make IW a standard part of warfighting literacy, what should change first? The definition itself? The way PME teaches adversary IW strategy? Or the institutional incentives that keep pushing IW back to the margins until the next high-end conflict occurs?
