As daylight broke on January 24, 2023, more than 123 million Iranians reached for their smartphones and scrolled through their social media platforms. Checking Instagram, they began watching a video posted that morning by NXTanimal, a social media creative agency.
Elisabeth Braw’s central thesis in The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression is that gray-zone aggression has become an increasingly more pervasive and complex challenge for nations than traditional war and that defense strategies are often inadequate to address gray-zone aggression. Braw pointedly argues that gray-zone aggression, which refers to acts of aggression that fall between the traditional definitions of peace and war, has emerged as the preferred mode of modern conflict as states seek to assail Western institutions and values through non-traditional means, such as cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, and economic coercion.
The key to minimizing the risk of being surprised and of suffering catastrophic failure is not to ignore risks in the hope of muddling through but rather to take uncertainty into account to identify areas of potential risk, and to employ planning tools, like scenarios, to narrow the range of uncertainty where possible.
This report is the first in a series of volumes in which the Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) explores the commonalities and differences of the conceptualization of irregular warfare across U.S. allies and partners. This initial volume compares and contrasts this conceptualization among five European academic institutions: the Netherlands Defence Academy, the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, the Swedish Defence University, the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, and the Military Academy of Lithuania. Each of these institutions replied to surveys the IWC designed, assessing how these institutions individually conceptualize and teach irregular warfare and related concepts.
In June 2022, Facebook and Twitter accounts suddenly focused their wrath on Australian company Lynas. The previous year, Lynas—the largest rare earths mining and processing company outside China—had inked a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to build a processing facility for rare earth elements in Texas. Over a year after the deal was signed, concerned Texas residents began taking to social media to loudly voice opposition to the deal. They claimed the facility would create pollution and toxic waste, endangering the local population. Residents disparaged Lynas’s environmental record, and called for protests against the construction of the processing facility and a boycott of the company.
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.
Wicked problems litter the security environment. They are opaque challenges, caused by multiple factors, and constantly evolving. These problems can be conceptualized through a myriad of lenses, each of which produces different possible solutions, and any intervention to address the range of solutions becomes part of the ecosystem itself and any negative impact cannot be undone, only mitigated. Such problems can take years to understand and take decades of effort to bring about progress.
What do an assassination in Berlin, illegal trafficking by trans-national criminal organizations, cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, drone attacks against critical infrastructure, and private military companies serving as government proxies all have in common? They may seem like random and unconnected events. But they are all components of comprehensive adversarial strategies whose ultimate goal is subverting the European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and partner states by undermining government legitimacy, destabilizing their societies, and weakening their populations’ and their governments’ resolve.
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.