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BLUF: The Department of Defense’s fixation on large-scale combat operations (LSCO) threatens to sideline Special Forces, who are often viewed by outsiders as bespoke capabilities unsuited for wars in the future. Yet adversaries are already waging irregular warfare (IW) as their strategy of choice, an arena for which the Special Forces are uniquely organized and trained. Unless Special Forces can clearly articulate and demonstrate how they bridge IW and LSCO, the Army risks losing its most effective instrument for competition below the threshold of war and for shaping conditions before high-end conflict.
Innovations in five areas are transforming the character and nature of irregular warfare (IW). Described herein as “vehicles,” these enablers are influencing outcomes from Ukraine to Taiwan and the Middle East. The vehicles are space, drones, artificial intelligence (AI), unconventional maritime operations, and global supply chains.
IW is about people, cognition, incentives, coercion, assurance, and legitimacy. The five vehicles don’t change any of that. Instead, these vehicles should be thought of as the most important tools used to promote or “deliver” Irregular Warfare. They are deeply interconnected, with their interdependencies amplifying their collective impact, necessitating new approaches for strategists and policymakers. Each section of this article outlines how one vehicle relies on one or more of the others.
A dangerous illusion in Washington persists, believing capability shortfalls in irregular warfare are solvable before the bullets and drove fly during conflict. The lack of urgency in the procurement cycle, fractured modernization, and interagency stovepipes are just part of the process. But in the Indo-Pacific littorals, the process is the problem eroding readiness and lethality. Senate Armed Services Committee Testimony.
By Manish
The recent Defense Committee report, Defense in the Grey Zone, brings renewed focus to the challenge of hostile activity below the threshold of conventional war. The term ‘Grey Zone’ suggests a novel ambiguity, a modern strategic dilemma born of new technologies; this ambiguous ...
The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC), published by the United States Special Operations Command Joint Special Operations University (USSOCOM JSOU) and the Swedish Defense University in 2020, advanced resistance planning discourse. However, its conceptualization of building resilience as primarily a preparatory activity presents critical limitations. While the ROC provides essential frameworks for understanding how societies can prepare for and carry out resistance operations when conventional deterrence and defense measures fail, it offers an incomplete picture for assessing and preparing the operational environment through network development.
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East offer many lessons for better understanding, conducting, and countering irregular warfare.1 On October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack on Israel combined attacks on Israeli military bases near Gaza, border security infrastructure, and military communications equipment with atrocities against Israeli civilians and the taking of civilian hostages. Russia, for its part, accompanied its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine with cyberattacks, attempts to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky, and a deepfake in March 2022 to try to encourage Ukraine’s surrender. Ukraine has used guerrilla attacks, sabotage, and leadership assassinations to fight Moscow. Some combination of these and other forms of irregular warfare is likely in future conflicts.
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