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.
Resilience and Resistance in NATO
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.