Nobody Puts IW in an Annex: It’s Time to Embrace Irregular Warfare as a Strategic Priority
David H. Ucko | October 14, 2020
Two years after the release of the National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon has issued a declassified summary of its Irregular Warfare Annex. The seven-page text details how the Department of Defense seeks to institutionalize and operationalize this form of warfare amid the ongoing recalibration of DoD’s focus on peer and near-peer adversaries. As this is the document’s only annex, advocates of irregular warfare are hopeful that it will generate momentum similar to the defense strategy itself, which since 2018 has made headlines by shifting US strategic priorities away from counterterrorism and toward great power competition.
The focus on irregular warfare is certainly overdue. It is not just that the United States has struggled to understand the “indirect and asymmetric approaches†of irregular adversaries, both state and nonstate, but that it has paid insufficient attention to the related problems of “influence and legitimacyâ€â€”the defining concerns of irregular warfare. The right to lead is the central prize in irregular competitions; it was fundamental to the confrontations in Iraq and Afghanistan and has since returned, with a vengeance, to threaten America’s position globally.
https://mwi.usma.edu/nobody-puts-iw-in-an-annex-its-time-to-embrace-irregular-warfare-as-a-strategic-priority/
