TEACHING FOR IRREGULAR WARFARE COMPETENCIES
Todd Greentree , Craig Whiteside October 25, 2024
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fourth installment in a multi-part series that examines how professional military education should be designed. This and subsequent articles will look through the lens of the competencies required of officers as the global security environment changes once again. The collection of articles can be found in a collection here once they have been published.
In a strategic environment that rightly emphasizes preparing for great power war, what use is education for irregular warfare?
The purpose of professional military education (PME) is to prepare military leaders for an unknown future, to imbue them with intellectual tools for solving problems we can’t imagine today. Education must be broad enough to apply to the entirety of possibilities and can be thought of as the flip side of training—the exercising of specific skills to execute commonly known tasks at high levels of competence. In PME we do both, despite debates arguing in favor of one or the other, but our narrow focus here is on education. In a strategic environment that rightly emphasizes preparing for great power war, what use is education for irregular warfare (IW)?
We offer three reasons why we should educate officers in irregular warfare in this “decisive decade” of strategic competition. First, the U.S. military has fought more irregular conflicts than conventional ones in the past, with a rich history to draw from that fits our strategic and national culture and not others. In more recent times, the military has forsaken lessons observed in these irregular conflicts to privilege training in conventional style warfare only to be forced by adversaries to fight another way. Second, the advent of nuclear weapons has not stopped wars, but certainly limited conflict between nuclear powers. Hostile great powers find ways to inhibit the others’ national interests and through acts below the threshold of war, but also by fueling proxy conflicts against the other. Third, the rise of capable non-state actors in the age of globalization will require all great powers to fight in multiple directions, and asymmetric conflict between non-states and states (or small states and large states) usually takes the form of irregular warfare. In short, irregular warfare is ever-present, exists along the entire spectrum of conflict, and allied militaries will continue to be called on to achieve political objectives in this environment.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/competencies-4/
