2026 – Irregular Warfare Center

Added on October 16, 2026 Perspectives

The Defender’s Dilemma: Past Its Expiration Date

The “defender’s dilemma” is alive and well. The defender’s dilemma is the belief that “attackers can fail repeatedly at no cost, while defense must hold “everywhere, always” is nothing if not controversial. Many have taken issue with this maxim—and developed compelling cases against the need for a 100 percent success rate in defense. Nonetheless, the dilemma continues to be invoked. The oversimplification of offense and defense, over-crediting attackers with asymmetric advantage, and all-or-nothing tone pit the futility of defense against the fatalism of victimhood.

Added on October 13, 2026 Perspectives

The Cyber War Is Going Autonomous: Can Human Control Keep Up?

The cyber threat environment has shifted dramatically in the past two years. Due to rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), attacks that previously necessitated months of highly specialised effort by experienced hackers can now be undertaken in a matter of minutes. AI is a more influential actor in cybersecurity; research shows it can act as a hacker rather than just assist human hackers through partial automation tasks. The main concern is that AI can conduct cyberattacks with minimal human intervention, potentially escalating beyond human control and ultimately compressing the attack-response.

Added on September 23, 2026 Insights

America Needs a National Irregular Warfare Stress Test

The United States regularly tests its ability to respond to disasters, cyber incidents, terrorist attacks, financial shocks, and military crises. The Department of War exercises combat forces, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) works with critical infrastructure operators, states rehearse emergency response, and financial regulators stress-test banks. These efforts often involve multiple agencies, regional partners, and pre-positioned resources. Yet they rarely test, on a national scale and over sustained time, how simultaneous disruptions across military, civilian, economic, and information systems could combine into a single adversary campaign. That integration gap is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Added on September 21, 2026 Insights

Irregular Threats in Africa: Building Resilience in an Evolving Security Landscape

The security environment across Africa has undergone profound changes over the past two decades. While conventional interstate warfare remains relatively rare, African countries increasingly face a broad spectrum of irregular threats that challenge state authority, undermine economic development, and threaten regional stability. These threats extend beyond traditional military concerns, encompassing violent extremism, organized crime, cybercrime, piracy, human trafficking, disinformation, climate-related insecurity, and transnational insurgencies. The threats exploit weak governance, porous borders, rapid urbanization, technological advances, and socioeconomic inequalities.

Added on September 17, 2026 Perspectives

The Blind Spot in Defense: Inside Counterterrorism’s Black Box

On July 10 2026, a Cambridge University researcher published a report that mapped the use of frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini and Meta AI, by terrorist groups in Western Africa. Based on the post-hoc testimonies by the demobilized members of the Boko Haram faction, the terrorist organization [with the assistance of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)] employed iterative prompting to obtain incremental assistance on innovating improvised explosive devices (IEDs), improving surveillance, building weaponized drones and assisting with troubleshooting.

Added on September 15, 2026 Insights

Bridging the Convergence Gap

A “convergent” process is one built to narrow a range of possibilities down to a single answer. The joint doctrine of the United States military is one such convergent process. However, the act of attempting to reduce a complex problem set down to a single “right” answer is a fool’s errand, a gap that joint doctrine actually admits. Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, dated 01 July 2025, states plainly that “the phasing construct may not be practical for a [Combatant Command Campaign Plan] CCP or [Global Campaign Plan] GCP, because campaigning is usually continuous, and that a CCP is indefinite, without expectations for conclusion” (Ch. III, pp. III-38–III-39).

Added on September 15, 2026 Insights

Frontier AI Rewrites the Future of Irregular Warfare

In 2005, in The Singularity Is Near, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil re-iterated his prediction that we would reach human level Artificial Intelligence (AI) by 2029. That prediction may yet come to pass, as current trends suggest that frontier AI models being built by U.S. private industry today are at least approaching human-level intelligence. Here, frontier AI models are defined as “highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models.”

Added on September 14, 2026 Perspectives

Can Europe Defend Itself?

The decisive battlespace of the twenty-first century will ever more entail the cognitive domain, wherein strategic advantage is achieved through the shaping of perception, informing judgment, influencing decisions, and governing the informational architectures that define operational understanding, emotion and actions. In this milieu, artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly function as an active participant to identify patterns beyond human perception, illuminate adversary behavior before it unfolds, synthesize operational knowledge, defend and contest digital terrain, and generate recommendations at operational tempos that exceed, and thus expand human capacity.

Added on September 10, 2026 Insights

Regime Change, Major Powers, and the Prospects for Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran Part II:

This is Part II of a two-part article. Part I provides a very brief history of post-World War II regime change operations and identifies the four factors that make U.S.-sponsored regime change most likely to succeed in the long term. Three of these factors concern the means and motives for sponsors of the old regime and spoilers of the new regime: pre-existing access and relationships, geography, and loss aversion. When sponsors and spoilers have the advantage over the U.S. in these three areas, the U.S. will struggle to achieve long-term success. The fourth factor concerns U.S. ambitions and recognizes that smaller changes are easier to achieve and sustain than larger ones.