A New Playbook for Irregular Warfare: How the United States Can Win Without Fighting
by Christian Trotti
05.28.2025 at 06:00am
A New Playbook for Irregular Warfare: How the United States Can Win Without Fighting Image
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of the Irregular Warfare Initiative as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 21 January 2025 and is available here.
During the final stretch of the 2024 American presidential election, the Department of Justice seized 32 web domains linked to ‘Doppelganger,’ an aggressive Russian disinformation campaign to influence American voters. Meanwhile, China has continued to exploit the US sanctions regime to promote its own currency, the renminbi, as a viable alternative to the dollar. And while wildfires and winter storms ravage expansive regions of the country—not long after Hurricanes Helene and Milton had exposed glaring deficiencies in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) planning and budget—forecasters and politicians alike grapple with an increasingly grim future defined by extreme weather and climate change.
What do these challenges have in common? According to the siloed US national security enterprise, perhaps not much. But that assumption betrays a critical lack of vision. In reality, Americans are under siege every day, often by forces that they neither perceive nor understand. The United States is at war—not kinetically, but instead on the intangible battlefields of internet chat groups, currency exchanges, security cooperation agreements, and natural disaster responses. As the 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) warns, the contemporary security environment is best described as an era of strategic competition and transnational crises. And the simultaneity of these challenges will be a defining feature of American foreign and domestic policy in the 21st century.
How should the US government conceive of this new “Great Game” in which it is uncomfortably enmeshed? How does one measure a state’s relative position in the ongoing geopolitical clash? And what does ‘winning’ mean in this environment? These questions serve as the primary impetus for Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century—a new book by Rebecca Patterson, Susan Bryant, Ken Gleiman, and Mark Troutman which establishes a holistic vocabulary and strategic framework for outcompeting America’s adversaries. In a modern era of ‘irregular’ challenges that often fall below the traditional threshold of armed conflict, the United States must employ a more expansive toolset of non-kinetic and cost-effective means, drawing upon American advantages and undermining enemy weaknesses.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/28/winning-without-fighting-irregular-warfare-strategy/
