transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] There was simply no agreement. It appeared amongst a whole range of otherwise very qualified individuals on what Irregular Warfare was, what it meant, how it should be understood, how it should be thought about.

Speaker 2:
[00:17] Irregular warfare is always defined by what it's not. It's not regular, it's not traditional. That's not a very useful, motivating function.

Speaker 3:
[00:24] So long as we can't settle on a definition of the term, the likelihood we're gonna make this a useful instrument for national security purposes, frankly for any other purpose, is pretty low.

Speaker 4:
[00:37] Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Alisa Laufer. Today's episode grapples with the many definitions of irregular warfare used across the community of interest. Our discussion today is anchored in Professor Chris Tripodi's article, Fragmented Frontiers, Three Approaches to Understanding Irregular Warfare. In today's episode, we discuss why the concept of irregular warfare has resisted a stable definition across decades of changing doctrine, and what that persistent confusion has cost operationally and strategically. We walk through three competing definitional approaches, the maximal, the traditional, and the competition disruption model, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each, and we close by asking what irregular warfare actually is at its core, and why getting that answer right matters not just for writers of doctrine, but for practitioners. Dr. Chris Tripodi is a Reader in Irregular Warfare at the Defence Studies Department of King's College London. His research focuses on the forms of knowledge Western militaries use to understand their operational environments and the complex relationship between counterinsurgency theory and practice. Eric Robinson is an Associate Director of the Data Science and Technology Group at the RAND Corporation, where his research focuses on special operations and irregular warfare. He is the lead author of RAND's 2023 report, Strategic Disruption by Special Operations Forces, which we touch on in today's episode. Lieutenant General retired Mike Nagata served for 38 years in the US Army, with 34 years in special operations. Among his many positions of leadership, he served as the Commander of US Special Operations Command-Central from 2013 to 2015, and was heavily involved in combat operations against the Islamic State. You're listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Dr. Chris Tripodi, Eric Robinson, and Lieutenant General retired Mike Nagata. All right. Eric, Mike, and Chris, thank you so much for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

Speaker 2:
[02:51] Thanks for having me, Alisa, excited to be here.

Speaker 1:
[02:53] Great to be here.

Speaker 4:
[02:55] So Chris, before we get into the substance of your article, I would love to hear a little bit more about your initial motivations and thinking behind why this article needs to be written.

Speaker 1:
[03:08] Yeah, sure. So a couple of years ago, I was asked to partake in a special issue of a journal on the future of counterinsurgency. So obviously, I sort of went back into the doctrine to reacquaint myself with British coin, just to see if it had been updated, to find that it had essentially vanished from the archives and it had been replaced with a new doctrine on Irregular Warfare, which I read with interest, to find that it was essentially, as far as I could tell, the old coin doctrine to the extent that even the 10 principles of Irregular Warfare were the same as the 10 principles of counterinsurgency in the old doctrine. That sparked my curiosity, so I began reading around the subject and came across an IWI podcast with David Kulkullin and John Nagel, and in which the two of them were wrestling over definitions of Irregular Warfare, both completely poles apart. So David Kulkullin very much in the traditional mold of, this is a violent competition against non-state actors and John pushing back quite hard and saying, no, no, no, it's all about strategic competition and potentially non-violent avenues of approach. And then that pushed me to other writings. And then that led me on to Eric and the RAND teams, very, very good publication on strategic disruption. Then I sort of engaged with the DOD's endlessly changing definitions of the subject over time in rapid succession. And then Michael Kaufman framing the sort of what you would call rupture and shaping actions prior to the the invasion of 22 as Irregular Warfare. And it all sort of culminated in me acknowledging that there was simply no agreement. It appeared amongst a whole range of otherwise very qualified individuals on what Irregular Warfare was, what it meant, how it should be understood, how it should be thought about. And so I wanted to write about that and sort of lay out the state of play regarding the thinking around the subject. And what I wasn't trying to do was provide my own answer. It was a commentary essentially on what was being said within the community of scholars and practitioners and policymakers who have to think about this sort of thing. And then at the end, although not come up with my own definition, at least try and argue which of the understandings made the most sense to me, which ultimately was that written by Eric and the team at RAND.

Speaker 4:
[05:34] Great, that's helpful. Mike, I want to turn to you quickly and ask, Chris's article references a shift as he was just kind of speaking of, in the definition of irregular warfare as it was understood across the community of interest, from this more limited view of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations to something more suited for strategic competition. From a practitioner's perspective, I'm curious when you started to notice a shift in how people understood and talked about what irregular warfare was.

Speaker 3:
[06:08] You've asked a very important question. I'll start by reflecting on the fact that, as I was trying to get ready for this call, I tried to remember how many times I've seen the US government redefine irregular warfare. I can remember at least three moments in my career. I think there were more than that, where we kept changing how we defined irregular warfare, which tells me, so long as we can't settle on a definition of the term, the likelihood we're going to make this a useful instrument for national security purposes or frankly for any other purpose is pretty low. I realize that's a rather dismal way to start my interaction on this particular conversation, but I cannot overemphasize how debilitating this constant churn over what we mean when we say irregular warfare has actually been operationally and strategically for the United States government and frankly for some international partners that I've watched have this very same problem. I'll finish my answer to your question by simply offering a conclusion that I came to as I watched this constant churn over what do we mean when we say irregular warfare. It has in a way fueled and amplified a tendency, certainly in the United States government, I've seen this in other governments too, to dismiss the importance of irregular warfare and instead refer to things that are easier to understand, like the use of kinetic power.

Speaker 4:
[07:47] The last point is a really important one, Mike, and I hope you can get more into that later in the conversation. But first, Chris, I want to get to the three approaches to understanding irregular warfare that you define in your article. The first is this traditional model where the focus is mainly on counterinsurgency, stabilization and counterterrorism missions where state and non-state actors are violently contesting one another in the context of intrastate dysfunction. You then identify the maximal model, which dramatically expands to encompass almost any instrument of national power, both violent and non-military, employed to influence populations and to erode the power of the state or the non-state adversary. And then lastly, you identify the competition disruption model, which, per Eric's work at RAND, envisages military power employed to generate effects across the diplomatic, informational, military and economic realms to create opportunities for other instruments of power to achieve strategic advantage. And you say, and I think this comes from Eric's work originally, but this can be thought of a sort of campaign short of war approach, where shaping activities suppress the adversary's will or their ability to gain an advantage. So could you tell us a bit more about how these different approaches emerged and their various strengths and shortcomings as you see them?

Speaker 1:
[09:22] Sure. So at the outset, I named these models just as a way of sort of trying to understand it myself. So the terminology I use is not an effort to be doctrinally pure or theoretically pure. So the maximal, I think, to me, it represented the overcorrection in thinking as policymakers and some academics after the broader counterinsurgency era, as they sought to reframe what irregular warfare might mean within this era of strategic competition. You began to see a trend away from understanding it primarily as a role undertaken by military actors, and it became understood as a much broader suite of activities. To some extent, I would argue, it almost cutting the military out of the picture. And so it became understood as a form of activity in which nearly every aspect or instrument of the state's power, if used in a coercive fashion, could count as irregular warfare. And to me, that just seemed extremely unhelpful. To my mind, it just simply risked mixing what I would call normal, if slightly sharp elbowed, political behaviors with warfare. And so it encouraged what you would call normal competitive behavior within the international system as a form of warfare, which is just using economics, using oil companies, media organizations, universities, anything like that, that can be used as an instrument of irregular warfare. To me, it simply doesn't make much sense. And it is inherently, to my mind, problematic because if one understands all of those potential activities as warfare, then that is inherently escalatory. If the normal business of interrupting the international system counts as warfare, then you have a fundamental problem escalation. So there was that, but it also just, to me, what was being described was far more regalent of George Kennan's concept of political warfare rather than irregular warfare. And I didn't see the need for irregular warfare to be subsumed into this sort of new much, much, much broader vision of political action. So that was my problem with the Maxmore model. The traditional model conversely was just too narrow. It zeroed in still on the old-fashioned model of violent competition between states and non-state actors. And sort of locked in around the traditional missions and tasks of counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, which still do matter, okay? So what I wasn't trying to say was that aspects of understanding irregular warfare in this fashion still don't have relevance. But what I was trying to say was that you do miss the peer-adversary dimension of this in the form of strategic competition, which is how irregular warfare, I think, does need to be framed. And so you understand irregular warfare from the perspective of, you know, fixating on violent non-state actors or violent extremist organizations. But you miss peer-adversary information operations targeted at your own society. You missed subversion and sabotage against your allies. You miss, you know, Russian hydronauts hovering over your data cables under the North Sea. These are all the sorts of things you miss. So the traditional model matters in the sense of a lot of what was done in the era of counter-desertion and counter-terrorism, I think, does still have applicability to modern concepts of regular warfare, particularly around understanding local clients, understanding local political conditions, local actors, achieving influence. All the things that you need to understand if you're trying to operate in testable spaces in difficult parts of the world. But unless you begin relating these things more specifically to the context of broader strategic competition, rather than just insurgency or counter-terrorism or so on and so forth, then you miss the strategic relevance of irregular warfare in the broader sense. You miss notions of shaping and generating an advantage in relation to peer adversaries. This is where I think coming on to the final model, which the competition disruption model, which was largely focused around Eric and his team's work. I think what it does is it takes the best of what SOF in particular had gained over the preceding decades in irregular warfare, in the realm of influence building and breedness' key strategic interests. It took that and I knew and I understood that this wasn't meant to be a vision for irregular warfare. I got that completely. This is the new mission for SOF in a near strategic competition. But it was just a far more coherent vision of how we might potentially understand irregular warfare. Not too broad, not too narrow. It gave a frame of reference for the military to engage purposefully and meaningfully with the concept and it offered them a route to having strategic relevance. The five pillar model that Eric and his team used in the report just provided real clarity in how military activity could play out. It was this notion of the objective being the generation of comparative advantage. It's not about decisive victory. It's about advantage, about building the conditions to achieve a state of relevant advantage and to disrupt, delay, deny the enemy. These all seemed eminently the feasible realistic real-world language around the subject of regular warfare that I could buy into conceptually. To me, it was the most, particularly the effort to intertwine military activity with other government departments, the DIN approach in particular. I know it's practically very tricky, but intellectually, absolutely the correct response. So there was that. But what I would add is as a Brit, for me, it was less about the soft angle specifically, and I know that is obviously what the report was about. But US soft capabilities are vast in comparison to those of the UK and other European allies. So what I actually saw when I read Eric's report was a way of thinking that could actually apply to the whole force more broadly. It was something that a smaller European Armed Forces, a high-quality professional army in particular, could buy into more broadly as a vision for irregular warfare. So that, it made central regular warfare for the military role in the sub-threshold environment, and it gave to me and the UK military a generally sort of actionable way of thinking about things.

Speaker 4:
[15:58] Thanks for running us through those three approaches, Chris. I should say for our listeners, if you haven't already, I highly recommend you go and check out episode number 102 of the podcast, where we actually brought on Eric and former ASD Solik Chris Mayer to go in-depth on the strategic disruption concept and its five pillars of capabilities, under which SOF can execute strategic disruption campaigns. And just to recap for those who haven't listened, those pillars are resist, support, influence, understand, and target. So Eric, with that said, I would love if you could shed some light onto the conversations you were having with policymakers that led you to doing this study and to formulating this competition disruption concept. I imagine this was happening during this pivot from the GWOT era type operations towards strategic competition as policymakers were grappling with how to shape existing capabilities for a new age. So what were those conversations like?

Speaker 2:
[17:11] So for me, thinking back to the origins of this work, I really started building off of the efforts post 2018 National Defense Strategy and writing the Irregular Warfare Annex to that National Defense Strategy, which really began from the core conception that conventional deterrence alone is insufficient to address the full range of threats that nation state actors are opposing to the United States. At the time and still use of terms like hybrid warfare and gray zone threats to describe, all of these things are abundant. But at the end of the day, what that effort was an attempt to in essence frame a more holistic conceptual approach to what the US government and the Department of Defense specifically could do to address those specific challenges. But coming out of that discussion, coming out of that effort, which really just tried to establish a plank hold for regular warfare as a concept through which progress could be made against those sorts of challenges, and then leading up to the time that we actually began to execute this research, at least I realized, and I think many others would hopefully share the sentiment that building the conceptual basis upon which efforts can be made to address them was insufficient on its own. What we actually lacked was a clear concept through which the US military could be used to actually address these sorts of challenges head on. There was not consensus that the military was the right instrument of power to actually achieve these effects. There was not consensus that the risk of such proactive disruptive efforts was even worth the potential gain. Particularly for the special operations community, I think there was and remains the belief founded in historical evidence certainly, that small elements of national power can deliver strategic gains. But the the each is of how we should go about doing those things, and when it's worth it to do it, and realistically how you take that sort of general concept, and turn it into a campaign that actually delivers those effects. At least I as a former policymaker and a researcher had no real ability to say this is the method, this is the way. And so, that was the premise of this research, and what ultimately formed the Strategic Disruption concept. To Chris' point, it did not start as an effort to define Irregular Warfare. It started as an effort to figure out the just the basic conceptual logic of how US military forces can go about delivering broader strategic gains against nation-state competitors, particularly focused on those threats, where being really strong militarily was insufficient to actually do something about it. So, we took a very inductive approach that just identified historical cases where we focused on SOF, Special Operations, specifically, and similar other units had delivered sort of big, broad strategic effects. And I think really what we found is that they themselves don't deliver it. It's actually the effect of the military instrument of power can be used to disrupt an adversary such that it creates openings for other friendly instruments of national power to actually achieve those bigger effects down the line.

Speaker 4:
[20:12] So Eric, do you think that the Strategic Disruption concept and the five pillars that you identify within it should serve as the basis for a definition of regular warfare, or is this something completely different?

Speaker 2:
[20:26] So I'll confess, when I first read Chris' article, I was very surprised to see reference to this concept in the sort of broader framing of irregular warfare, primarily because we had very deliberately avoided the use of the term irregular warfare in the study. For all of the same reasons of just definitional fratricide and challenges that we go about here, we went in with a very narrow and deliberate focus to define the sort of the causal logic through which these sorts of effects could be achieved. But I will say, having sort of worked through the evolution of these definitions, both in my own career, but then particularly in the context of how Chris has framed this in his article, I think that there is broader room here to view irregular warfare in a competition construct as an inherently asymmetric and disruptive effort. To me, I think the part that I've always struggled with, with the definition of irregular warfare having been responsible, or in part, for at least one of those three redefinitions that Mike mentioned. I think the challenge that always faces here, and Chris references this too, is that irregular warfare is always defined by what it's not. It's not regular, it's not traditional. That's not a very useful motivating function. But I think what, if you look at it through the disruptive lens, I think you actually begin to understand, be able to take that one common denominator that always will define irregular warfare and actually put it to use, which is it is a tool for when military domination of an adversary is insufficient, infeasible, impractical. It is a tool used by weaker states or non-state actors to coerce or influence or shape a stronger adversary. It is a tool used by weaker states that may have conventional ability to try to get what they want without having to fight a big war. But I think, at least in the US and Western context, it's a tool perhaps insufficiently used to overcome and defeat the strong efforts used by our competitors in this space to get what they want. Knowing that, we also don't want to fight a big war.

Speaker 4:
[22:24] So, you're thinking about it as a tool for reacting to or getting ahead of adversaries' use of irregular warfare. Do you think that we should be defining our own irregular warfare concept in reference to what our adversaries are doing? Or does that preclude our own kind of creative thinking about what kinds of tools and capabilities the US has, perhaps a comparative advantage in that our adversaries haven't even thought of, preclude that kind of thinking? Is there something out there that we haven't even considered that we could be doing that falls under this umbrella because we've defined this to be so in reaction to what adversaries were doing well before us?

Speaker 2:
[23:05] So I would actually say that I think disruption is inherently a reactive construct in the sense that you are trying to disrupt something that your adversary or competitor is doing. But I will say that when we defined this concept, it was meant to be deliberately proactive. I think that there's two sides of that coin. There's one side that the US does really well, and there's one side that we generally don't do very well. The side we do really well from a disruption perspective is the long-burn statecraft, diplomacy, economic integration, trade, soft power influence that has really dominated the post-World War II international system, in which we were advantaged. That's the stuff that I think when the Russians talk about our own efforts to foment color revolutions and our own hybrid threats that they perceive we post to them. That's the long-burn stuff that we do really well, but we just kind of do it as a matter of course, because we're a large, strong, and generally influential country. The stuff that we don't do well is what I think from a military instrument of power is actually trying to proactively disrupt where our adversaries and competitors are shaving us back. And so I think it's both of those.

Speaker 3:
[24:16] For me, I agree with everything that was just said. But for me, I think this can be distilled down into what some people may consider an over-simplification. I find this very useful. And that is to basically harken back to that famous quote from the famous Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, who said, the acme of skill is to win without fighting. Now, sometimes you have to fight. And that's why we maintain, at least in the United States, a robust military capability to wage kinetic conflict. And we certainly should have that. We should continue to invest in that. But here's what we don't invest in. We don't invest in ways to strategically, operationally, or tactically triumph without using violence, without using kinetic power. Even though we have all the necessary resources to do so, when it comes to the use of kinetic power, US policy makers, if the justification is adequate, they're generally very enthusiastic about supporting the use of kinetic power. But when a proposal to win without fighting enters the arena, the amount of debate, the amount of confusion, the amount of reluctance that one encounters is pulls apart from the general enthusiasm and rapid acceptance that the employment of violence generates. I'm painting with a very broad brush here, so just bear with me. I'll close by saying this. What this has led to is abundant skill, enthusiasm, and resourcing, and frankly, career rewards for being exquisite at the use of violence, but being relatively incompetent, under-resourced, and unrewarded for attempting irregular warfare.

Speaker 4:
[26:04] Mike, I'm curious if you have an explanation in your head as to why that's the case, why this preference for violence, it seems like perhaps that's just what we've been doing forever. It's what we're good at. It's more measurable maybe than the non-kinetic forms of power and influence. I'm not sure. These are my theories, but why do you think there's such a strong negative reaction, as you see it, to the non-kinetic forms of power and influence?

Speaker 3:
[26:34] Yes. Hopefully, there's some graduate student out there who's someday going to write the really compelling dissertation about this. But to answer your question, I think there are several reasons why the situation I described a moment ago exists. I need to stipulate, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist, I don't necessarily understand how the human psyche works, but here's what I've seen. First of all, policymakers, not just in the United States, but around the world, they are very accustomed and very familiar, and frankly, quite comfortable with the idea of using physical power, assuming they have adequate amounts of physical power, to achieve their strategic goals. Usually the debate is not about whether we should do it, it's just a debate about can we do it? Do we have the ability? Do we have the skill? Do we have the weaponry, et cetera? But so long as the answer to those things are yes, the road to winning policy approval to go do it is well understood, and people are generally enthusiastic about doing it if the cause is deemed necessary, just appropriate, et cetera. But what I've seen over my career is when a proposal to do something that in a battlefield that is generally not a physical battlefield, it's the battlefield of ideas, it's the battlefield of beliefs, it's the battlefield of traditions, it's the battlefield of perceptions. Getting those kinds of things resourced, getting really talented people assigned to do it, and generating the kind of risk tolerance, because inevitably some things go wrong, is exponentially harder to achieve than it is to win approval for a kinetic strike. The last thing I'll say about this, this is a pet theory, unscientific, but I can't resist inflicting it on you. I think in some ways many leaders, many policymakers are victims of the TVs and movies they watch, where the happy ending is almost always the imprisonment or death of the evil actor, achieved by the heroic figure who uses some form of physical effect or violence to achieve the happy ending. Everyone in the world is familiar with this. You can see it on Netflix every single day. Here's what you almost never see, is Irregular Warfare, because it's complicated, it's hard to understand, takes sometimes years, sometimes it takes generations to achieve your strategic goal. That's not a very compelling movie or TV show.

Speaker 4:
[29:09] Well, and sometimes successful irregular warfare might result in the lack of an action by an adversary, as opposed to a big bomb going off, which can be portrayed very theatrically in film and TV. And also, it's an image, to your point, in policy makers' minds, that unfortunately is associated with success, or at least with a measure of effectiveness.

Speaker 3:
[29:35] When was the last time anybody ever saw a senior official or military leader publicly promoted, praised, rewarded, and held up as a model of how to do things correctly in the public sphere? When was the last time anybody has seen that? In my own career, I saw it maybe twice. How many times do I see someone publicly rewarded and praised for a successful kinetic strike? Hundreds of times. So, a rational actor, particularly a young person, seeking to choose what part of the national security arena they want to enter, the last thing they're going to choose as a career in irregular warfare, because they know the rewards and the praise and the promotions probably do not lie in that arena.

Speaker 4:
[30:21] Certainly. You're starting to hit on some bureaucratic incentives and structures that drive decision-making, and you're an example on a very individual level for someone thinking about their career, but this provides a nice segue into my next question that thinks about bureaucratic incentives and constraints, frankly, at a higher level, going back to this discussion about definitions. So as Chris's article describes, we have in this all-encompassing definition of irregular warfare, it's everything that regular warfare is not. You have lumped together these counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency style capabilities and objectives, lumped together with those non-kinetic capabilities that you were just talking about, Mike. And to someone completely new to the subject, it might be really surprising and frankly confusing as to why those two kinds of capabilities are pushed together under the same definitional umbrella. And so I'm curious, Eric and Mike, people who have been in the US government yourself or been very close to it and in discussions with high-level policymakers, why do you think this happened? Why do you think we have these two components of Irregular Warfare lumped under the same definition instead of them being their own separate, perhaps related concepts?

Speaker 3:
[31:46] Well, I'll take a whack at this first. All of this is very reminiscent to me. When I was a very young army officer, an infantry officer, this was during the time when the debate erupted about whether or not there was going to be what we now call today the US Special Operations Command. Because at the end of the Vietnam War, the United States military had basically almost completely disbanded the special forces, special operations capabilities that are employed in Vietnam. And because of the perceived failures in military activities thereafter, particularly the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue attempt many years ago now, Congress, over the objections of the Secretary of Defense and the opposition of President Reagan at the time, ultimately passed a portion of the Nunn-Cohen Amendment that mandated the creation of US Special Operations Command and a cascading set of career fields that we now call the Navy Seal, Green Beret, Army Ranger community, that all fall under the US SOCOM umbrella. And it was then you saw something that nobody had never seen before. Young officers joining the world of special operations actually started to get promoted. And once they started getting promoted, that encouraged other like-minded people to volunteer for special forces. Until today, we have this enormously capable, world-class special operations capability. But the important point here is it had to be compelled by congressional legislation that virtually the entire executive branch opposed.

Speaker 2:
[33:33] So, in my own thinking on the lumping of all of these things, different elements of IWU under one banner, I think similarly, I would say that there's probably the bureaucratic answer. And then there's at least, I would say, a potential theoretical or idealistic answer as to how they all come together. But the bureaucratic, cynical answer is exactly what Mike just said, that it's really hard to create new things in a large bureaucracy. And my understanding of the sort of the origins of early IWW doctrine in the mid-2000s is that there was a belief and a massive appreciation that we had no doctrinal understanding of the wars that we were fighting. We acknowledged that they were similar to the Vietnam Era counterinsurgency campaigns and other things that we had done, but DOD had nothing on the books for how to field forces, organize and prepare them in a systematic way. It was doing a vessel on the way, but the 2006 IWW doctrine came out of in essence being forced by an adversary to have to wrap our heads around this issue. Now from the sort of 2018 shift to great power competition perspective, the effort to kind of to merge in the legacy CT and COIN missions with this more nation state focused irregular warfare mission set, in many ways you can view it as trying to hold on to something that the department really felt that it needed to retain in some capacity, while also making space for a new problem set that we were arguably under invested in to grow over time. I think that's the bureaucratic answer. I think the more theoretical and scholarly answer, which I'm sure Chris could expound upon here, and he certainly does in his article, is that you can make the case that these are two sides of the same coin, that they are the same methods being applied by weaker actors, or in some cases by strong actors, to try to indirectly shape an adversary's behavior without having to fight and defeat an adversary's military on the battlefield. They take many different forms because that's a complex phenomena to describe. There are a million and one different ways to fight irregular warfare. They all are irregular when you're comparing them to our modern sort of Westphalian understanding of how nation states are supposed to fight each other. And so I think both of those are probably the real reason why we are where we are today.

Speaker 4:
[35:59] So I have a question that I hope provides our listeners with a more clear picture of what success could look like in terms of this idealistic version, Eric, that you just described of what irregular warfare could look like. Although I'm going to put us unfortunately in the shoes of an adversary for this question. And that's because the article opens with a quote from Michael Kaufman, which Chris, I think was a really fantastic way to frame the article. And the quote kind of puts forward the idea that the real failure in Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine wasn't actually in its conventional campaign, as a lot of people assumed it was, but in the irregular side of its operations. And really the lack of preparation on the irregular side of its operations. So I'm interested to hear what the counterfactual looks like, where Russia did plan and successfully implement irregular warfare strategies and tactics in the lead up to its invasion in accordance with this strategic disruption concept and the more idealistic definition of irregular warfare that Eric just put forward and how that may have led to different outcomes.

Speaker 1:
[37:08] So I think the counterfactual is what people were planning for, realistically. So in the sense that those were in the circle of trust who knew that the Russians are going to invade, so those who had access to that privileged intelligence, were I think acting on the presumption that the Ukrainian government and its armed forces wouldn't be able to resist the Russian onslaught. And so what you see, I think, would have been the capitalization of the effort in the preceding years, under what I think what the British called OPP Orbital, I don't know what the Americans called it in terms of the basically the FID, Foreign Internal Defense efforts on the parts of Western powers, UK in particular, which was a presumption that if Russia would succeed in destabilizing and then invading Ukraine, that the Russian Armed Forces would invest Ukraine and succeed to control it politically and militarily. And therefore, the effort should be to effectively create an insurgency and bolster resistance movements in order to drag Russia into a quagmire. So I think that ultimately, if you had seen the fruition of Russia regular warfare in terms of doing everything it was meant to do in effectively destabilizing, and I think destroying the Ukrainian ability to resist the armed invasion by effectively hollowing out its military, governmental and intelligence operators and demoralizing the population. Had that worked as the Russians intended and had Russian military then invaded and sought to control Ukraine politically, what you would have seen would have been an irregular warfare campaign effectively by Ukraine sponsored by the West in order to pull the Russians in and keep them there and bleed them. I think that is my reading of the situation. So the counterfactual is the Russians succeed, but it pulls them potentially into an even more problematic place in terms of trying to control 43 million Ukrainians and with the West having an active role in helping sort of dispute that control.

Speaker 4:
[39:23] So as you're saying, the competition disruption definition of irregular warfare doesn't just speak to the military realm. It speaks to using military activities, perhaps in addition to others, to generate effects across the DIME spectrum. DIME being diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. Chris's article notes, this is actually quite similar to counterinsurgency doctrine, where military activities were meant to compliment social, political, and development goals and lines of effort. But in practice, if we look back on military counterinsurgency operations in the global war on terror era, the military side was often siloed actually from the political efforts, from efforts in these other spaces, which became a big, big problem. So Chris, you make an argument in your article that this approach of military activities driving effects across the dime spectrum might work better in the context of strategic disruption. Can you explain to us how and why that might be the case?

Speaker 1:
[40:29] Yeah, I think it comes down to the difference between what is feasible and what is desirable. And I think in those big ambitious coin campaigns in which you have these theoretically multi-faceted approaches in which military power complements developmental activities and political action, nevertheless the goals sought were effectively unrealistic. I think with the disruption model offers more modest goals to be sought. The language is far more restricted. You're talking disruption, you're not talking complete transformation. So for me, it was about if you can, and I know obviously the focus here was on SOF, but what you have really is if you have small numbers of military forces that are purposefully integrated into a time approach and culturally weaned off the tactical approach, culturally weaned away from the all-action door-kicking approach that you have in the GWAT. So they are fully cognisant of what the ultimate objective is in a strategic sense and the language of things like disruption, denial, delay. Then I think you sidestep the problem of an overbearing military machine, which takes effective control of the campaign at the expense of every other line of approach that's meant to be taken. So I think strategic disruption for me, conceptually, it engineered a much clearer relationship between military resources and strategic effect than the counter-insurgency campaigns of old did. So I go back to the point, the generation of relative advantage, vice-appear adversary, through, you know, disruption or delay is just more feasible than the use of counter-insurgency to generate democracy, right? It, to my mind, that is simply what it means. And the problem for Afghanistan was even if you could, Iraq was the same, even if you could engineer this highly symbiotic, well, you know, finely-checking relationship between the military aspect of the dime constructs and the rest, because the objectives sought effectively are unrealistic, it fails regardless. So I think it is about a more purposeful and integrated, and dare I say, subtle use of military power, military effect, purposefully tied into the diamond approach and subordinated to it in pursuit of feasible and relatable actions. So that was where, to my mind, it was a different prospect from coin.

Speaker 4:
[43:03] So with that in mind, some would argue, and I think some have argued in this very conversation, that a lot of the activities described under Eric's Strategic Disruption Model don't necessarily need to be carried out by military organizations. And in fact, in some cases probably shouldn't. So I'm wondering if you all can walk me through the arguments that you believe in and arguments that you've heard both for and against having a defense department or ministry as the lead agency for coordinating irregular warfare activities.

Speaker 2:
[43:39] I can start Alisa, but I trust that there will be a multitude of opinions on this. So I think in at least our team's original thinking about this concept, and honestly, I think based upon just the relative size and budgetary heft of the US military, and particularly relative to other instruments of national power. Our assumption here was in many cases that the Department of Defense would not necessarily be in the lead but could play a role out in front in creating opportunities for others, as well as in potentially convening the interagency, something that it's proven over the 20 years of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency is hyper successful at doing to, in essence, create opportunities for other elements of national power to achieve. I think when we looked at the historical examples of this concept playing out, it was very rare that the military instrument of power was used up front to enable one specific actor to do one specific action, a sequence in time and space. These actual actions, as they've played out historically, look more like creating an opening that other elements of national power, be it diplomatic, treasury, financial, law enforcement, etc., just by the matter of doing what they're already doing, will be able to take advantage of. In that sense, the level of interagency coordination required to execute the level of who's in the lead and who isn't, becomes a little less relevant, and it's more about being aware of the opportunities as they emerge and being, I think, most critically, aware of the larger whole government strategy to disrupt an adversary. And I say aware, and I actually should say, actually having a larger whole government strategy to disrupt an adversary in specific ways, which I think is the weakness of actually implementing this concept in many cases.

Speaker 3:
[45:29] I'll jump in on this. I think, personally, the question of who should be in charge of irregular warfare is a bit of a red herring. And I think you can see this by just examining the various counter-terrorism campaigns we've been involved in over the last couple of decades, where you had military, law enforcement, USAID, all the intelligence agencies, you can think of finding ways. It took a while because at the very beginning of the war, as probably a lot of practitioners will remember, all of these entities tried to exist in their own silo. They just had their own thing going on, they didn't want to share information, they didn't want to collaborate with other people. But we were getting such disappointing results from taking such a siloed approach. Gradually, we began abandoning the silos and investing in greater and greater collaboration and integration. In my view, we should do that from the outset in the irregular warfare arena. Because I can't think of an agency of certainly the United States government that doesn't have some kind of a stake in irregular warfare. Again, whether you're law enforcement or commerce or really any other arm, you're either affected either directly or indirectly by how well or how poorly the United States engages in irregular warfare. Again, most people don't use that term. But these contests over influence, contests over access, contests over information, these are all various elements of irregular warfare. What we should instead, instead of appointing an irregular warfare czar, whom everybody will attack, frankly, he'll be an attack magnet for everybody who doesn't like the idea that they're not in charge of irregular warfare. Instead of an irregular warfare czar, what we need is incentives for collaboration, incentives for integrated action. In other words, all the people that demonstrate enthusiasm across multiple different agencies, including to some degree to the private sector. These are the people who get promoted. These are the people who get rewarded. These are the people who get publicly praised. These are the people who get books written about them. If you want to see a revolution in effective irregular warfare in the United States government, promote everybody who tries, reward everybody who tries, publicly praise everybody who tries. And suddenly, an entirely new generation of young people who want to enter government service will be saying, I want to go do that. Look at how prosperous the people who have chosen to do this are. I want to be like them. It's human nature.

Speaker 4:
[48:16] So I want to ask a question that speaks to what I imagine some of the listeners who are sitting there wondering, isn't this all a bit pendantic? Why are we talking about definitions? Why do they matter to the work that I do in the field? Why do they matter to policymakers? So what would you say to those folks who are listening to this conversation with those kinds of questions in mind? Any of you?

Speaker 3:
[48:41] Well, I'll take a first whack at it since I've been blathering anyways. I think there are two things. One is, as I've already alluded to, what we should want is people entering the national security arena or frankly any part of government. Because even the non-national security parts of government are affected by how effectively many of our adversaries are waging irregular warfare against us. As I've already indicated, what we should want them to see is that this is a place where you can have incredibly successful and both emotionally and practically rewarding career. That's one thing we want to see. The other thing we want to see, at least I think we should want to see, is that not only are we going to fix ourselves, but we're going to collaborate and integrate with our allies and partners around the world in ways that we've never done before. Thereby, making the whole more than just the sum of its parts.

Speaker 2:
[49:43] So I would, to pile on, I would say that I think in any discussion of the definition of a regular warfare is inherently panantic. I think the effort to define something as complex and transient and hard to wrap your head around is always going to invite a discussion of what's in and what's out. That is, at the end of the day, almost useless in its utility for policymaking and for actual operational use. But I will say, I think that the piece that matters is about the direction that the conversation is headed and the actions and incentives and momentum that can be created as a result. I will say, when I first started working on a regular warfare policy issues post 2018 National Defense Strategy, anyone and everyone, if you ask them the term a regular warfare, would associate it solely with what Chris has described as the traditional definition of focus on counter-terrorism and counter-incertitude. And the efforts to redefine and reshape irregular warfare since have been wildly successful at broadening its aperture to include a range of uses in the nation-state competition and honestly even large-scale combat operation space. I think where this discussion in general, not here today, but the broader discussion of irregular warfare since has gone off the rails, is that we have taken an ever-expanding view that adds things into the IW bucket, that explores excursions of irregular warfare in this application and that application, which are certainly relevant and useful. But instead, I think we need a kind of a community-wide collective change in our priorities to focus more on building consensus on the parts of irregular warfare that matter and the parts of irregular warfare that we should be moving out on and doing. Because at the end of the day, irregular warfare in DoD doctrine, at least when I first encountered it, is treated as a co-equal form of warfare with only one other kind, traditional warfare. Those are two massive buckets. They're useful in bureaucracies to martial resources and investments in people and time and energy, but they're only as useful as people can understand what they are. Traditional warfare is super easy to understand. It's tanks and planes and bombs and it's my military stronger than yours. So we need much more simplicity and we need much more effort within, I think, the broader community to not worry about the left and right limits of this, but more to focus on its central core, which is honestly, I think, the part that I take the most from Chris' analysis here is that, where we stand in this era of nation-state competition, but where we're still fighting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency battles all over the world, or at least supporting allies and partners to do so, that there is potentially a more coherent version of this, that we should be thinking more about how to actually operationalize. I'm obviously biased. He liked my article, so I'll stop there.

Speaker 1:
[52:47] Yeah, I genuinely did like the article. I mean, why do definitions matter? I mean, you'll notice I didn't try and offer my own definition in the article. I didn't want to play that game. I understand how problematic they are. But at the same time, in principle, nothing good comes from people talking past each other. In practice, you need to try and avoid unnecessary and time-consuming frictions with people talking completely different languages, policymakers and military having radically different understandings of the same terms. So I think, as Eric said, you want to try and zero in on the central core, the central idea, don't worry too much about a precise language, just the basic understanding of what this thing should be about. And so if you can have a common understanding roughly, then policymakers can better understand what the military can offer. And I make no apologies, my general thrust is that the irregular warfare be seen primarily as a military-centric offering, but tailored towards a different set of objectives, that we're revolving around this issue of disruption as Eric proposed. So it's better understanding what the military has to offer in the subthreshold space. The military better explaining to policymakers what it can offer in that space, but perhaps most importantly, from my point of view, is the military being able to explain to itself why certain things it does matter in this respect. And so, you know, to have a common theory of action, a theory of success, so why does a security force assistance effort in East or West Africa, which looks at first glance to be minor or unimportant, but this might be part of a bigger strategic effort, nominally about assistance in relation to CT, but actually can be framed as part of a much bigger influence piece, which in turn is part of a much bigger irregular warfare effort against an adversary, so for example, in this case, Russia and its activities in the Sahel. So if the, and the army in particular, because it's that of the three services which most closely engage with this problem, if it can better explain these things to itself and to its people, then it provides genuine direction and purpose to itself as an organization. So I think that matters. And then it matters in relation to Alliance politics as well. If you've got one Alliance member thinking about irregular warfare as coin and CT, and the other one thinking about it as broader non-military, non-kinetic influence operations, I think you have problems there. So you want complementary efforts within an Alliance. You want people speaking off the same sort of hymn sheet effectively. So they're all tailoring their efforts in a common fashion for the greater good, rather than sort of splintering, diverging and pursuing their own sort of methods.

Speaker 4:
[55:42] Yeah, Chris, thanks for that reflection on why the definition matters, not just for the organization itself, but for people looking at the organization from the outside. You brought up allies. I also think definitions matter to adversaries. It's a signal, right, of what's important and what an organization intends to do. To something you said, Chris, I did notice that you shied away from offering your own definition of irregular warfare in your article. I've also noticed that all of us in this conversation have shied away from offering a clear articulation of what it really is. And so I do want to end the episode with a hard question for the three of you. Reminiscent of the title of this episode, I want to ask you what the hell is irregular warfare anyway? And I'm not expecting here a clean, doctrinally coherent definition, as you all have said, isn't always useful. But if you can even just describe for me what is the essence of this core of regular warfare, as Eric was alluding to, how should we be thinking about that? In one sentence, or maybe two.

Speaker 1:
[56:52] I did try and scribble out a sort of saying the definitions don't matter. I then went away and tried to write a definition. So again, I think I differ from Eric and Mike in the sense of, I think I offer quite a conservative vision. I'm trying to paint a picture for military actors to understand essentially what this thing means of regular warfare, particularly in the context of strategic competition. I sort of make no apologies about I completely understand and recognize competing points of view that it should be more than just the military. But in my mind, the military fits in to a suite of other activities, but the military is core to this. So I suppose, what the hell is irregular warfare? So to me, it is the use of military power through indirect and often deniable means to generate strategic advantage. Also primarily by undermining an adversary's legitimacy, influence or resilience during periods of competition and confrontation, whilst also shaping, enabling and amplifying the effectiveness of conventional operations.

Speaker 4:
[58:01] Okay. Anyone else want to jump in here?

Speaker 3:
[58:04] I'll give it a whack. My answer to your question is it should be defined as the ability, skill, and human talent necessary to win without physically fighting in both physical and digital arena.

Speaker 4:
[58:19] Eric, what wisdom are you going to leave us with?

Speaker 2:
[58:24] I've wrapped my head around about a million different versions of this over the years. I will say, I think where I always come back is that if Irregular Warfare is something that's defined by what it's not, then we need to be really clear about the why you employ Irregular Warfare when traditional warfare doesn't work or isn't going to work. And so to me, the definition of Irregular Warfare is a form of warfare. It needs to say why you use it and why this form of conflict and the objectives that you achieve. So to me then, Irregular Warfare would be the indirect use of military power to generate strategic advantage when military domination of an adversary is infeasible, ill-advised, or likely to be ineffective. I think we all kind of came on a similar version of that. And I think echoing my previous comment about sort of trying to build towards consensus and clarity. To me, the challenge of defining Irregular Warfare is being clear on when you do it and what it is. But the challenge of implementing it is getting specific below that and getting specific on the circumstances and objectives and the processes that you used to go about doing it. But that is at least where I would wrap my head around the definition at this stage. I'm sure I'll change my mind and I'll be numb.

Speaker 4:
[59:41] Well, we'll stay tuned for that, Eric. And I think we have ended this episode now with not just three approaches to understanding Irregular Warfare, but it sounds like three tentatively converging approaches to understanding Irregular Warfare, which sounds like progress based on how you all described how messy it can be. So Eric, Mike and Chris, thank you again so much for your time and for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

Speaker 2:
[60:07] Well, my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks, Alisa. And thanks, Mike and Chris. Thank you, guys.

Speaker 4:
[60:15] Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We're a team of all-volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and a positive rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point or any agency of the US government. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.