The newly established Irregular Warfare Center is scheduled to host its first IW-themed event, the IW Medical Resiliency Workgroup, from Feb. 22-24, 2023, in Bethesda, Md.
This event is the Center’s initial working group for Irregular Warfare Medicine curriculum development. The event will bring together U.S. and allied and partner nation surgeons to discuss medical capabilities in contested or non-permissive environments.
An IWC team, led by Dr. Kevin Stringer, Chair for Education, Dr. Rick Newton, Chair of Futures, and Kathryn Newton, Chief of Curriculum Design and Development, recently served as visiting faculty and academic support specialists during the George C. Marshall Center’s seminar on Irregular Warfare and Hybrid Threats in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, from Jan. 19 – Feb. 10.
Last summer, a coordinated campaign by users on Facebook and Twitter targeted the Australian company Lynas. In 2021, Lynas—the largest rare earths mining and processing company outside China—finalized a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to build a processing facility for rare earth elements in Texas. A year later, numerous concerned Texas residents began to criticize the deal on social media, claiming that Lynas’s facility would create pollution, lead to toxic waste dumping, and harm the local population’s health. Their posts also denigrated Lynas’s environmental record and called for protests against the construction of this facility and a boycott of the company.
The Irregular Warfare Annex to the United States’ National Defense Strategy prescribes the requirement to institutionalize irregular warfare (IW) as a core competency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Per the Annex, one of the necessary conditions of successful IW campaigning is sustained unified action with interagency partners, key allies, and partners. The first step to achieving such unified action is to ensure all stakeholders understand the fundamental concepts associated with IW and other related non-military aspects of irregular competition.