Blind Sided: A New Playbook for Information Operations

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.

Irregular Warfare Center 2023 Book Recommendations

In the spirit of the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s reading list and the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program, the leadership of the Irregular Warfare Center offers its irregular warfare reading recommendations for 2023. A host of scholars and practitioners have written innumerable books about irregular warfare (IW) and its constituent historical, cultural, economic, tactical, and diplomatic components.

Irregular Warfare Campaigning and the Irregular Warfare Center

The United States’ ability to conduct an effective irregular warfare campaign is hampered by political realities and Department of Defense cultural norms. While there are many overlapping deficiencies, this inaugural IWC Insights paper discusses three prominent barriers to success: 1) a quick-win culture that incentivizes short-term fixes; 2) the lack of adequate irregular warfare education throughout the interagency community; and 3) promotion and leadership selection processes that undervalue the development of necessary language, cultural, and regional expertise for irregular warfare application. Each of these problems often reinforces the others. The Irregular Warfare Center aims to empower and promote research, education, and engagement with a wide range of interagency professionals, global partners, and members of civil society to increase their awareness of irregular warfare threats, cross-fertilize often segregated activities, and develop holistic approaches to combat present and future irregular warfare challenges.