Coffee With the IWI Fellows | Lessons from the Post-9/11 Wars
“In this debut episode of Coffee With the Fellows, we sit down with IWI Fellows John Pennell and Nicole Winget to work through a single big question: what lessons learned should the U.S. take away from wars of the GWOT/COIN era? Coffee With the Fellows is a conversation series from the Irregular Warfare Initiative, bringing a small group of Fellows together for a focused, informal discussion grounded in their experience across academia, research, practice, and policy.
Learn more about the IWI Fellowship and the people behind these conversations.”
This discussion explores the transition from long-term nation-building toward high-skill, low-footprint operations that utilize specialized forces and rapidly evolving technologies. Among the topics discussed, Dr. John Pennell highlights how the conflict in Ukraine serves as a laboratory for testing autonomous weapons and AI-enabled systems in a persistent state of hybrid warfare. Dr. Nicole Winget emphasizes the critical importance of messaging and warns against underestimating adversaries, noting that even small actors can leverage information environments to achieve significant effects. They both discuss the necessity of intertwining strategy with tactics to meet specific political objectives while integrating all instruments of national power across the full spectrum of competition.
The fellows further examine the complexities of interagency cooperation. They note that while organizational structures exist to develop policy, practical challenges involving resources and information sharing remain prevalent. Today’s “victory” is described as a continuous state of competition occurring mostly below the threshold of conventional military response. Success depends on maintaining a clear understanding of the information environment and effectively countering disinformation to ensure decision-makers and the public have valid information. The episode concludes by reinforcing that the power of messaging is at a historically unprecedented level due to the variety of communication methods available to both state and non-state actors.
