IWC Launches Foundational Course on Future Threats: Irregular Warfare 120
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) launched a new online course on emerging technologies and gray-zone threats to homeland security.
The self-paced class, Irregular Warfare 120: The Future of Conflict, Irregular Warfare, and Homeland Defense, is open to defense practitioners, interagency partners, and national security professionals. It serves as the prerequisite to the center’s eight-part Future Threats Certificate series.
IW 120 explores the methods that state and non-state adversaries use below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. Course modules examine how competitors use artificial intelligence, cyber operations, contested space domains, autonomous systems, and proxy forces to compromise infrastructure and challenge U.S. interests without provoking direct military confrontation.
A primary focus centers on cognitive warfare and analyzing how adversaries employ targeted information operations and psychological manipulation to deepen societal divides and erode domestic cohesion.
“With our foundational and specialized offerings having already surpassed 6,000 enrollments, IW-120 provides Department of War practitioners, and even college students, with the essential information to identify and anticipate future asymmetric threat vectors while we still have time to adapt to what is coming just beyond the horizon,” said Jeff Gardner, the IWC’s chief of curriculum.
Students need roughly 90 minutes to finish the coursework and its capstone assessment. Subsequent courses in the certificate program will project adversary tactics five to ten years out. The course is hosted online in partnership with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security. It is available at no cost to users with a CHDS Self Study account. Registration and access details are available through the Irregular Warfare Center course page and the CHDS Self Study portal.
The Irregular Warfare Center operates under 10 U.S.C. 345 as the department’s primary hub for irregular warfare doctrine, education, and interagency collaboration.