After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the world watched as the United States began a punitive expedition to Afghanistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, oust the Taliban, and prevent the use...
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Irregular Warfare Initiative
How Not to Build a State
In the fall of 2001, just over a month after the first US troops arrived in the country, the United States and its allies seized control of Afghanistan, driving the Taliban from Kabul and out of...
How We Fell into the Terrorist Trap and Have Yet to Find Our Way Out
Editor’s Note: This piece draws heavily upon the author’s book, Avoiding the Terrorist Trap: Why Respect for Human Rights is the Key to Defeating Terrorism. In 2003 I was a special adviser in the...
Rapid and Radical Adaptation in Counterinsurgency: Task Force 714 in Iraq
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq after a month of major combat operations. Yet, instead of an end, this milestone marked only the beginning of a protracted campaign as...
Information Operations for the Information Age: IO in Irregular Warfare
When information can travel globally at the tap of a finger, irregular warfare professionals must contend with an ever-changing environment. How does strategic messaging tie into operations on...
Out of Africa: The Strategic Mistake of US Disengagement from Somalia
In December 1992, as an infantry platoon commander, I was among the first Marines to land in Mogadishu at the onset of Operation Restore Hope. It was a mission that made sense to me and my fellow...
Lessons from the Hardest Place: Twenty Years of War in Afghanistan
What lessons should the United States military take from twenty years of war in Afghanistan? Episode 35 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast focuses on US efforts in the Pech valley, where the United...
Jihadism is Spreading to the Gulf of Guinea Littoral States, and a New Approach to Countering It is Needed
The jihadist insurgency in the Sahel, despite years of Western-backed efforts to counter it, is nonetheless expanding. Threats that were primarily concentrated in states such as Mali are now...
Cyber Threats and Choke Points: How Adversaries are Leveraging Maritime Cyber Vulnerabilities for Advantage in Irregular Warfare
The grounding of the container ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal in March 2021 caused a complete blockage of the maritime passageway for more than six days delaying an estimated $9.6 billion in...
The Appeal of Covert Action: Psychology and the Future of Irregular Warfare
Meddling in foreign countries is a risky business. This is especially true when the meddling is overt. If a covert operation goes wrong, plausible deniability can protect leaders from the most...
What’s In a Name? The Disaggregation Problem that Undermines Counterterrorism Strategy
In June, reports emerged that the leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, killed himself via a suicide bomb when confronted by members of another jihadist group, the Islamic State’s West Africa...
An Unforced Error: How US Attempts to Suppress the Opium Trade Strengthened the Taliban
As the Taliban consolidates control in Kabul, the stunning fall of the Afghan government has prompted a torrent of questions about what went wrong. So far, much of this discussion has focused on the...
China’s Strategically Irregular Approach: The Art of the Gray Zone
How does China operate in the space between war and peace to gain strategic advantage in Asia and globally? What do these gray zone activities look like, and how do they facilitate China’s influence...
All Rapport, No Results: What Afghanistan’s Collapse Reveals About the Flaws in US Security Force Assistance
The swift collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces—despite receiving more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment, and training from the United States over the better part of two decades—has...
Story Telling and Strategy: How Narrative is Central to Gray Zone Warfare
Gray zone warfare can take the form of something as uneventful as building infrastructure. Since 2015, China has built three new villages in an area it claims is in Tibet, but is actually in Bhutan....
An Un-American Way of War: Why the United States Fails at Irregular Warfare
The United States and other nations have spent billions of dollars and invested untold effort, not to mention lives, in a global campaign against Islamist terrorism—and yet the threat landscape is...
What’s the Buzz About Drones? Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary
Warning: Some links in this article lead to websites affiliated with US-designated terrorist groups. One of the improvised bombs blocks the middle of the screen, but the video is remarkable. An...
The Long Game of Partner Warfare: Colombia and Operation Jaque
On February 13, 2003, US Southern Command contractors were flying a routine counternarcotics aerial surveillance mission over the Colombian jungle when the single engine on their Cessna Grand...
Untying the Gordian Knot: Why the Taliban is Unlikely to Break Ties with Al-Qaeda
When the political officer of the US embassy in Islamabad met with top Taliban official Jalaluddin Haqqani in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in May 1999, neither the US government nor Haqqani knew...
How to Integrate Competition and Irregular Warfare
Ever since the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the watchword for the US military has been competition. “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism,” the NDS declares, “is now the primary...
Land Forces, Irregular Warfare, and a New Strategic Landscape
The US military and its allies are faced with the challenges of shifting focus toward great power competition while still maintaining the ability to counter threats on the fringes. Where does...
Not Your Grandfather’s Counterinsurgency: The United States Must Prepare for Radically New Forms of Nonstate Violence
Twenty years of costly counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have left many national security experts—and the American public—ready to move on. However, while the United States...
Closing the Chapter: Ending Afghanistan for US Army Special Forces
US Army Special Forces units continued to quietly operate in Afghanistan when conventional troops withdrew around 2015. These soldiers have worked closely with Afghan commandos and government...
Access Denied: The Costs of Keeping the Afghan War out of the Media Spotlight
It is easier these days for journalists in Afghanistan to embed with the Taliban than with the US military. While the media and the military have long had a conflicted relationship, the effort to...
Back to the Future: Resetting Special Operations Forces for Great Power Competition
Special operations forces have been a favorite national security tool in the post-9/11 era; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have consumed their attention and kept the special operations community...
More than Just Friends: The Strategic Advantage of Enduring Relationships
“When can my unit receive more training from the Americans? I was taught in the ‘80s by American Special Forces about infantry tactics. I’ve taught [FM] 7-8 to my soldiers from platoon to regiment...
It Was the Best of COIN, It Was the Worst of COIN: A Tale of Two Surges
As twenty years of counterinsurgent wars come to a close with the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States is still trying to make sense of why American efforts failed to reduce...
Old Habits Die Hard: Special Operations Forces, Twenty Years of Counterterrorism, and the New Era of Great Power Competition
Before Sana’a fell to the Houthis in September 2014, the passengers on flights to the Yemeni capital largely comprised Yemeni businesspeople, members of the Yemeni diaspora, diplomats, oil and aid...
American Decline: Losing the Campaign for Influence
The United States appears to have reached an inflection point in its relationship with the rest of the world. On the one hand, a new administration is eager to reengage with both allies and...
The Daughters of Kobani: How a Group of Women Brought the Fight to the Islamic State
How did the United States leverage local partners in the fight against the Islamic State? What were the unique dynamics of partnering with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, particularly the...
Irregular Warfare in the Next World War
What would a conflict with China look like? How will irregular warfare fit into a conflict before and during large-scale combat operations? Retired Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman join...
Irregular Versus Conventional Warfare: A Dichotomous Misconception
The 2018 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) signals a major shift for the US military from irregular warfare toward developing capabilities for conventional wars against near-peer and peer...
Will Culture Defeat Strategy? The British Military and Irregular Warfare after Afghanistan and Iraq
In their recent introduction to the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Jacob Shapiro and Patrick Howell propose that a combination of Russian revanchism and China’s increasingly muscular global ambitions...
The Harsh Lessons of Anbar: Insurgency, the Awakening, and the rise of ISIS
In episode 26 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, we discuss US counterinsurgency efforts in Anbar province, Iraq from the 2006 surge through the rise of the Islamic State in 2013–2014 with two guests...
Failing to Train: Conventional Forces in Irregular Warfare
March 5, 2023 A recent election saw a nationalist Estonian party take control of the government. Frustrated by the election outcome and lack of citizenship, the ethnic Russian minority, 20 percent...
Wargaming for the New Great Game
In the opening days of the Iraq invasion in 2003, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld infamously quipped, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at...
China’s Irregular Approach to War: The Myth of a Purely Conventional Future Fight
Since early March, up to 220 boats from China’s maritime militia have been moored near Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea. The Philippine government has asked the Chinese government to direct the...
From SAR to GFA: The ABCs of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization
How can the military and civilians work together to prevent or manage conflict? Two seminal policy initiatives, the Stabilization Assistance Review (SAR) and the Global Fragility Act (GFA), provide...
Not Just for SOF Anymore: Envisioning Irregular Warfare as a Joint Force Priority
The recent buildup of Russian troops near Ukraine and Chinese naval exercises to the east and west of Taiwan may be seen as evidence that great power competition will require a return to focusing on...
Seven Pillars Revisited: The Myths and Misreadings of T.E. Lawrence
Robert Johnson, Lawrence of Arabia on War: The Campaign in the Desert, 1916–18 (Osprey Publishing, 2020) The iconic figure of T.E. Lawrence remains draped in myth. He appears to modern observers as...
American Vulnerabilities in an Age of Great Power Competition: The Case for Understanding Domestic Extremism through an Irregular Warfare Lens
In the United States, we often analyze distant armed conflicts and counterterrorism efforts as if watching from a remote observation tower. We keep an eye on expeditionary initiatives abroad,...
Armed Overwatch: Airpower in Irregular Warfare—Past, Present and Future
Aviation has played an important role in irregular warfare, from its use by the British against rebellious tribesmen in Iraq and Transjordan in the interwar period to the era of the unblinking eye...
Imperial Policing Redux: The Folly of Staying the Course in Afghanistan
The US military is not an imperial police force. And yet, US policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere over the last two decades has normalized exactly this role. A change seemed possible just last year,...
Pulling Levers, Not Triggers: Beyond Direct and Indirect Approaches to Irregular Warfare
In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.— Sun Tzu, The Art of War The plan on paper was that the indirect...
The United Kingdom Doubles Down on Covert Operations
Two weeks ago, the British government published its most significant review of defense, security, and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. It will likely usher in a new era of British...
Learning to Fly: How the US Military can Fix the Problems Plaguing Aviation Advising Missions
In 2017, Afghan Mi-17 helicopters flown by crews from the elite Afghan 777 Special Mission Wing saved the day. Shortly after notification of an ISIS-Khorasan attack on a hospital in Kabul, they...
The Shape of Things to Come: Why the Pentagon Must Embrace Soft Power to Compete with China
Last March, the same week that the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, three thousand Chinese and Cambodian troops began Exercise Golden Dragon, a series of military...
Countering Terrorism While Competing with Great Power Rivals: Mutually Reinforcing, Not Mutually Exclusive
Since the first American boots hit the ground in Afghanistan in October 2001, countering jihadist terrorism served as the central focus of US national security until the reemergence of great power...
How Small Wars Fit into Big Ones: Lessons from the Masters of Irregular Warfare
Irregular warfare practitioners have played a major role in nearly every war over the past 250 years, according to the guests on this episode. The masters of irregular warfare carry distinct...
Gray is Here to Stay: Principles from the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance on Competing in the Gray Zone
Earlier this month, the White House released its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, the foreign policy blueprint that will inform the Biden administration’s national security strategy....
Introducing the Irregular Warfare Initiative
Can satire predict reality? Sometimes it definitely seems to. On May 18, 2016, the satirical Duffel Blog reported with tongue firmly in cheek that “the Pentagon's top spokesperson said he was...
The View from Washington: Sen. Joni Ernst and Former Asst. Sec. of Defense Owen West on Civilian Oversight of SOF
Special Operations Forces (SOF) have played a critical role in US counterterrorism operations. But now, as policymakers’ focus shifts from counterterrorism to great power competition, the...
MWI Podcast: The British Army in Iraq and Afghanistan
In this episode of the Modern War Institute Podcast, John Amble is joined by Simon Akam. He is a journalist and the author of a new book, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11. The...
War Entrepreneurs: Economic Drivers of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Crime
What drives illicit violence by substate groups such as terrorists, insurgents, and criminals—and how can states counter these threats? Our two guests argue that social science provides tools to...
Pacific Gambit: The Role of Irregular Warfare in Australia’s Great Strategic Shift
Australia is undergoing the most fundamental strategic realignment since the Second World War, toward a focus on threats closer to home without reliance on the United States. In that context, what...
A Super-Max Failure and the Case for Going Irregular: Recalibrating US Policy Toward Iran
Over the past four years, the United States has taken a more aggressive approach with Iran through the “super-maximum pressure” economic campaign, overt military action, and confrontational...
Institution Building as a Counterinsurgency Tool: The Case of Colombia
In 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a peace deal, which ended over five decades of guerrilla war. Having provided the Colombian government...
When It’s Over: An American Withdrawal Plan for the Middle East
Is it too early to begin planning for the United States to leave the Middle East? There’s a strong argument to be made it’s not. Over the past few years discussion of the United States decamping...
Competing for Influence: Operations in the Information Environment
Information in its many forms has become a significant component of national power—the primary medium of competition between the United States and its adversaries. Our guests today are both experts...
Artificial Intelligence in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency, with Retired Gen. Stan McChrystal and Dr. Anshu Roy
What role do information and intelligence play in counterinsurgency? How can artificial intelligence assist in tracking and identifying insurgent or terrorist activity? What are some of the...