UNTANGLING THE GORDIAN KNOT THAT IS IRREGULAR WARFARE
Articles
Thu, 02/09/2023 - 8:50am
Untangling the Gordian Knot that is Irregular Warfare
By Mark Grdovic
"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!”
T.E. Lawrence
As 2023 begins, the U.S. military finds itself addressing how it will institutionalize the topic of Irregular Warfare (IW). There is no shortage of speeches, articles and documents that extol the importance of the topic to the National Defense Strategy and its related concepts. While this sounds completely appropriate, there is a problem. The U.S. military has been in this position before, multiple times. In 2009, I wrote an article as part of an introduction for an IW conference at Ft Bragg in which I said, “In the 1960s and again in the 1980s, the U.S. military experienced a revival of interest in irregular warfare, or IW, similar to the one that is occurring today. In both of the previous periods, the topic enjoyed a celebrity-like popularity in professional military forums until such time that circumstances allowed it to be relegated back to the margins in favor of a return to proper soldiering. Both previous revivals produced high-quality doctrine and curriculum in professional-education courses. So why, then, did IW fail to become ingrained as part of the military mainstream?’[1] It feels like little has changed since that time other than to add one more period of interest.
This raises the logical question, why did the three previous periods of enthusiasm fail to take root?[2] How a topic is framed is critical to its clarity and subsequent acceptance within an organizational culture. Without clarity, the topic is immediately susceptible to misinterpretation, competitive bias and inaccurate categorization. For example, during the height of the Global War on Terror (circa 2010), IW became a polarizing topic, dividing skeptics and advocates. Skeptics clung to the flawed notion that training for high intensity conflict by default prepares you for all lesser forms of combat or how this niche discipline was pulling scant resources from the more important endeavors, thereby degrading the overall capability of the force. Conversely, advocates condescendingly spoke of IW as the “advanced” or “graduate” form of warfare, routinely implying that its complexity was beyond the comprehension of “regular soldiers”. Both positions were then and are still, self-defeating arguments.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/untangling-gordian-knot-irregular-warfare
