Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare? (Congressional Research Service)
Access the updated 3 page report HERE.
A concise and useful overview of irregular warfare. The author ties in the importance of influence in irregular warfare which is important because as we all know we must learn to lead with influence to effectively conduct irregular warfare in support of political warfare in the gray zone of strategic competition short of traditional armed conflict.
Also note the author includes the Unconventional Warfare definition that is found in the 2016 NDAA which has a one word difference than the DOD definition found in JP 1-02 and JP 30-05. Will the Joint Staff and DOD update the definition to match the one Congress put into law?
Defense Primer: What Is Irregular Warfare?
Introduction U.S. military doctrine distinguishes between two types of warfare: traditional warfare and irregular warfare. In Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Publication (JP) 1 Joint Warfighting, conventional warfare is characterized as “a violent struggle for domination between nation-states or coalitions and alliances of nation-states, fought with conventional forces.” The publication differentiates between that and irregular warfare (IW), which is defined as “a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.” IW is a joint activity not limited to special operations forces (SOF); the IW operating environment includes all domains and the information environment (IE). According to JP 3-04 Information in Joint Operations, the IE is “the aggregate of social, cultural, linguistic, psychological, technical, and physical factors that affect how humans and automated systems derive meaning from, act upon, and are impacted by information, including the individuals, “organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or use information.”
Previous DOD doctrine characterized IW as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).” IW actors may use nontraditional methods such as guerrilla warfare, terrorism, sabotage, subversion, criminal activities, and insurgency in their efforts to control the target population. In IW, a less powerful adversary seeks to disrupt or negate the military capabilities and advantages of a more powerful military force, which usually serves that nation’s established government. Because of its emphasis on influencing populations, actions to control the IE, to include actions in cyberspace, play a prominent role in IW.
Unconventional Warfare. P.L. 114-92, Section 1097, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2016, defines UW as “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in a denied area.” UW is a core component of IW.
