Since the Vietnam War, the United States has been involved in several major and minor conflicts where irregular warfare (IW) has been waged. And the success the US has had has paled in comparison to its failures.
It is a maddening track record for the country with the world’s most powerful and advanced military. Lieutenant General Charlie Cleveland correctly pointed out that the U.S. has not been successful beyond the tactical level, despite the expertise of our troops who excel at the tactical level.
LTG Cleveland added that the wars that the U.S. has conducted in the past 40 years revolved not around defeating a conventional army but defeating armed civilians or paramilitary forces. These combat operations are characterized not by seizing and holding territory but by success in winning populations (hearts and minds, if you will).
It is imperative that the U.S. wins the population-centric struggle. To do so, local partnerships and gaining the population’s trust, influence, and legitimacy.
What is irregular warfare and why does the US fail at it?
The United States’ joint doctrine defines irregular warfare (IW) as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” Irregular warfare includes the concepts of unconventional warfare and asymmetric warfare. It use to be called “low-intensity conflict.”
U.S. Naval War College professor Carnes Lloyd has characterized IW as “distinguished from other warfare by the extent to which politics dictates not merely strategy but military operations and even tactics.”
Many of the hostile actors that the U.S. has faced have used coercive policies and politics, subversion, propaganda, as well as assassination, terrorism, and the creation of proxy governments to achieve their aims. Continued use by the U.S. of massive military might alone wasn’t sufficient to defeat those actors.
The main issue is that the U.S. government was still using the Cold War scenario of trying to defeat a near-peer adversary on the conventional battlefield. That strategy was altered after the failure at Desert One in Iran, which resulted in the creation of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The second change came in 2004 when the government tasked the intelligence services to go after al-Qaeda.
Despite this, the U.S. still doesn’t have a lead agency for IW in its defense or intelligence apparatus.
About 15 years ago, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, ordered the Pentagon to “display a mastery of irregular warfare comparable to that which we possess in conventional combat.”
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Gates, who also served in the National Security Council and the CIA, later wrote that the generals in the Pentagon were “preoccupied with planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and all other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war.”
This is happening again now. The military is focused on a big conventional war against China. While new armaments are necessary deterrents, such a conventional war is unlikely to happen.
“Neither Beijing nor Washington would accept defeat in a limited engagement. Instead, the conflict probably would expand horizontally to other regions and vertically, perhaps even to include nuclear weapons threats — or their actual use. It literally could become the worst catastrophe in the history of warfare,” wrote Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon.
The U.S. military believes war and politics are separate entities. This misconception has become integrated into our strategies and needs to change.
According to retired Marine General Anthony Zinni irregular warfare requires cultural intelligence.
“What I need to understand is how these societies function. What makes them tick? Who makes the decisions? What is it about their society that is so remarkably different in their values, the way they think, compared to my values and the way I think?” Zinni said.
The U.S. tries to project our vision of a society onto other nations where it doesn’t fit.
Related: China conducted ‘influence operations’ through TikTok before US midterms, according to FBI director
Changes could be coming
But things are changing, hopefully for the better. In 2020, DoD published its Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy. The annex explains that “irregular warfare is to be institutionalized as a core competency with sufficient, enduring capabilities to advance national security objectives across the spectrum of competition and conflict.”
The annex added that DoD will: “(1) make permanent the mindset and capabilities necessary to succeed in its current irregular warfare mission sets; and (2) leverage all irregular capabilities in our arsenal, including the unique abilities of our interagency and foreign partners, to compete against revisionist powers and violent extremist organizations alike. This approach does not require significant new resources to meet our strategic vision; it requires new ideas and new means of employing existing capabilities.”
We must not repeat the boom-and-bust cycle that has left the United States underprepared for irregular warfare in both larger- and smaller-scale conflicts. Americans expect their military to do more than react to crises; they expect it to compete and maintain our advantages.
The U.S. must study and understand its history or history will repeat itself. On the other hand, the Chinese have “invested substantial resources in translating and exploring the contours of U.S. culture and politics,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
There is talk of incorporating the Congress-mandated Irregular Warfare Functional Center (IWFC) into a premier academic institution, something General Cleveland has advocated for. Research into the writings of Sun Tzu, Mao Tse-Tung, T.E. Lawrence, and a host of other very successful proponents of IW would help the next generation of senior officers gain a greater perspective.
As T.E. Lawrence wrote, guerrilla warfare “is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.”
Feature Image: U.S. and Iraqi soldiers in Iraq in 2009. (Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate)
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Every country must prepare its people and military to defend its country
You know the old saying…for a man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I believe that the military is the wrong tool for the IW job. As you noted in your article, IW is essentially a political contest. However, the military does only two things; it kills people and breaks things. How many people do you have to kill to make them change their minds? The answer is all of them. This is not a winning strategy.
Our failures are the result of bad policy formulated by ill informed policy makers. Two examples: Vietnam and Afghanistan. Vietnam was always a nationalist struggle against foreign domination, not a communist revolution. Afghanistan was a punitive expedition against the Taliban for their support of Al Queda. Bush and his team turned it into a crusade to rid the world of fundamentalist Islam.
Ignorance and hubris are our two biggest enemies.