Insights – Irregular Warfare Center

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 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 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.

Added on September 8, 2026 Insights

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

In recent months the media has been full of talk about regime change in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, but very few attempts to understand the post-World War II history of regime change operations, when regime change works, when it does not work, and why. This two-part article starts to correct the mistake. Part I (this Part) provides a very brief history of regime change operations and identifies the four factors that make regime change most likely to succeed in the long term. Part II uses the four factors to assess the prospects of successful U.S.-sponsored regime change in Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. For the purposes of both parts, regime change operations are defined as operations by a major outside power to change the personnel and/or structure of a foreign regime.

Added on August 31, 2026 Insights

China’s Irregular Warfare Strategy and Actions in the Bahamas

Chinese investment across the Caribbean over the past two decades, has been framed as development assistance, commercial expansion, or participation in global infrastructure initiatives. Ports, resorts, highways, telecommunications networks, and logistics hubs funded or constructed by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often presented as mutually beneficial economic partnerships for small island states with limited domestic capital. This approach is very visible in the Bahamas, just 50 miles from the coast of Florida, where Chinese-backed projects have reshaped portions of the country’s economic and physical landscape.

Added on July 23, 2026 Insights

Solving the Wrong Problem? A Practitioners’ Method for Campaigning in Irregular Warfare

Among the five of us who teach the Irregular Warfare Center’s (IWC) advanced campaigning course (IW401), we have spent a long time watching capable people lose slowly. Not only on the battlefield, where American units almost always prevailed, but in the space above it, where campaigns are designed and where conflicts are so often lost prematurely.

Added on July 15, 2026 Insights

Same Spelling Different Story: Comparing the Conceptualization of Irregular Warfare Across the Globe

Irregular Warfare (IW) goes by many names and definitions across the world. While some differences are only minor semantic variances reflecting the history of specific countries or the local culture of a particular state’s defense sector, other differences show widely divergent understandings based on who perpetuates and who are targeted by IW. Caught in the middle of these diverging views are U.S. warfighters, diplomats, and security cooperation professionals tasked with securing the United States from a myriad of IW threats that emanate far from America’s shores.

Added on July 6, 2026 Insights

Ignacio Zaragoza and the Irregular Logic of Resistance

The popular memory of Ignacio Zaragoza is often compressed into a single date: May 5, 1862. In much of the United States, Cinco de Mayo has become a cultural celebration detached from the military and political context that produced it.