The Pentagon Just Issued New Guidance on Irregular Warfare: What Does It Say and Why Should You Care?
by Jonathan Schroden
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12.10.2025 at 06:00am
The Pentagon Just Issued New Guidance on Irregular Warfare: What Does It Say and Why Should You Care? Image
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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 November 10, 2025 and is available here.
On September 29, 2025, the Pentagon released a new Department of Defense Instruction (DODI), numbered 3000.07 and titled “Irregular Warfare.”1 Clocking in at 32 pages and consisting of 80 to 90 percent highly technical or moderate jargon (according to a ChatGPT analysis of its text), the new DODI nonetheless made a splash across the irregular warfare community of interest. Why is that? What does the new DODI say (in plain English), what does it mean, and what is its likely impact? I’ll answer those questions in turn.
Why is this news?
Let’s start with an obvious and reasonable question: Why should anyone outside of some deeply wonky offices in the Pentagon care about a new DOD instruction? To answer that, it’s worth briefly explaining what came before. The U.S. military’s understanding of irregular warfare has a long history of change, but the term was defined in 2008 as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s).”
While that definition suited the U.S. military’s experiences with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, in the years that followed, the definition became less and less satisfying. Scholars of irregular warfare have advanced numerous criticisms of this definition, not least of which is its emphasis on violence, since it seemed to omit non-violent activities such as information operations. In the wake of the Pentagon’s issuance of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and its emphasis on competition between the U.S. and its peer or near-peer states, the definition’s limitation to state versus non-state actors seemed to preclude irregular warfare as a tool of competition—an implication that even cursory scholarship of the Cold War would render ridiculous. The Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2018 strategy tried to update the definition and improve its relevance for competition, but that document was rendered irrelevant when DOD superseded the 2018 NDS with a new version in 2022 that did not have such an annex and made only three minor mentions of irregular warfare.
The new DODI is news, therefore, primarily because it formally updates the U.S. military’s definition of irregular warfare (IW), as follows:
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/10/the-pentagon-just-issued/
