Four Years of Growth and Impact: The Irregular Warfare Initiative
May 21, 2024 by Tobias Bernard Switzer Leave a Comment
Editor’s Note: Today marks four years since the launch of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. What started as a small project by three military graduate students has grown into the Irregular Warfare Initiative, an influential platform for scholars and practitioners to share ideas on topics ranging from information warfare and counterterrorism to security assistance and cyber operations. While conventional and nuclear threats from China and Russia dominate attention, the initiative highlights the continued relevance of irregular warfare globally. Our team’s history remains largely unknown despite its success in bringing together scholars and practitioners. This article tells the story of the Irregular Warfare Initiative and its impact.
The Idea
I wish I had known this when I was downrange.
During a break from their “International Policy Responses to State Fragility” graduate class at Princeton in the Fall of 2019, Kyle Atwell and Nick Lopez picked back up a conversation they’d had all semester. As US Army Special Forces officers at the university’s School of Public and International Affairs, Kyle and Nick found themselves repeating the same thing over and over to each other, “I wish I had known this when I was downrange.”
For Nick and Kyle, downrange meant training and advising foreign military forces in countries with weak governance, conducting intelligence and counter-terrorism operations, and engaging in other activities known as irregular warfare. Blown away by their Princeton courses, Nick and Kyle found many ideas and models that would have helped them during their deployments to Latin America, Africa, and Afghanistan.
Determined to find a way to bring these lessons to other soldiers, one of them—neither can remember who—suggested a podcast. This seemed like an odd choice; neither listened to podcasts much then. “We landed on a podcast because I like having a beer and talking to people, so I thought maybe we can do that,” Nick recalled, “But we didn’t want to be the center of attention, so it had to be focused on the guests.”
https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/four-years-of-growth-and-impact-the-irregular-warfare-initiative/
