Paper focuses on ‘cooperative security’
‘IRREGULAR WARFARE’ TERM STIRS DEBATE AS DOD PREPARES FOR QDR
In the run-up to the Quadrennial Defense Review, there are increasing signs the Pentagon will shake up its bipolar distinction between conventional and “irregular” warfare, a framework criticized publicly by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and privately by other defense officials advocating for certain missions now deemed “irregular.”
A QDR issue paper developed late last month at U.S. Southern Command argues that security cooperation efforts and so-called phase zero missions aimed at preventing conflict should not be described as irregular warfare (IW) because key “interagency and multinational partners” shun the term.
This point should be emphasized in QDR discussions, according to the issue paper, which argues that using the term is counterproductive given the need to work with and through interagency and multinational partners. Instead, the paper advocates referring to “cooperative security” to counter irregular threats. Adm. James Stavridis, who leads SOUTHCOM and was tapped last month to lead U.S. European Command, has publicly stressed the importance of the security cooperation mission.
“Our job at U.S. Southern Command is simply to build cooperative security relationships and to promote U.S. military-to-military interests in the region,” Stavridis noted in his March 17 prepared testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Though the issue paper pushes for a change in language for certain missions, it defends the ideas and concepts of irregular warfare as “fundamentally sound.” Inside the Pentagon reviewed a copy of the document.
Gates has publicly signaled the Defense Department will move away from simply describing missions as conventional or irregular. During an April 7 conference call with online security writers he noted “this black-and-white division of conventional and irregular warfare is something of a fiction that does not reflect the real world.” In fact, there is a “spectrum of conflict,” Gates added.
“In an insurgency you have a guy who’s carrying an AK-47, but he may also be planting an [explosively formed penetrator] that can take out a million dollar-tank or [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle],” he said. “And you’re going to have cyber involved in all of this in a way that hasn’t been before, and that could happen at any place along that spectrum.” Gates has embraced the term “hybrid warfare,” which includes low-end and high-end asymmetric attacks.
A service official tracking the issue said there is “a very good chance” that a broader continuum spanning security cooperation, contested stability operations, irregular warfare, hybrid warfare and major conventional operations will displace the overly simplistic, bipolar framework that has been in vogue.
As ITP reported last month, one of five Pentagon issue teams that will play a key role in the QDR will focus on irregular warfare. InsideDefense.com reported this week that the IW capabilities team will include Garry Reid from the DOD policy shop, Timothy Bright from the program analysis and evaluation shop and Maj. Gen. Bill Troy from the Joint Staff. Cmdr. Jerry Hendrix will be the group’s executive secretary.
The SOUTHCOM paper notes the 2006 QDR called for DOD to do a better job addressing irregular, catastrophic and disruptive challenges. That QDR also identified the need to wage protracted IW on a global scale to defeat non-state irregular threats, which led DOD to prepare a roadmap, directive and joint operating concept.
The December 2008 directive defines IW as a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population. It also states that IW favors indirect approaches by working with and through others. Further, the directive says IW is as strategically important as traditional warfare and inclusive of steady-state operations. The joint operating concept, approved by Gates and penned by U.S. Special Operations Command and the Marine Corps, stresses the need to work with interagency and multinational partners.
“The ideas and concepts articulated in the series of IW related documents are fundamentally sound,” according to the issue paper. “They recognize that whole of government solutions and partnerships are essential to countering irregular threats.” But terms such as “irregular warfare and the indirect approach” should be dropped, the paper argues.
“In numerous venues, interagency and multinational partners have expressed their distaste for the term ‘irregular warfare,’” according to the paper. “Steady-State or Phase Zero operations -- before a violent struggle begins -- should not be categorized as IW. Law enforcement activities and transnational crime are also incorrectly categorized as IW activities.”
Multinational partners also dislike the term “indirect approach” because it implies manipulation, the paper continues, noting at a recent IW conference, a large group of multinational officers advocated for using the term “cooperative security” vice “indirect approach.”
The term “irregular warfare” has been criticized for some time. In a 2007 monograph titled “The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” Frank Hoffman wrote, “What we ironically and perhaps erroneously call ‘irregular’ warfare will become normal, but with greater velocity and lethality than ever before.” Foes will eschew rules and use unexpected, ruthless modes of attack, predicted Hoffman, a research fellow at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. In his recent Foreign Affairs essay, Gates cited Hoffman’s contention that hyrbid warfare merges “the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare.”
Barak Salmoni, now a senior political scientist with RAND, skewered the term “irregular warfare” in a 2007 essay for RUSI called “The Fallacy of ‘Irregular’ Warfare.” The term is “fallacious” because “those functions, operations and environments that are dubbed ‘irregular’ are in fact so regular -- in fact the dominant mode -- in the reality of what conventional militaries do and have done, that one should not think of them as irregular,” Salmoni wrote. The fallacy of “irregularity” risks conceptually blinding military professionals, policymakers and others to “the realities of military endeavor,” he argued. -- Christopher J. Castelli
PENTAGON-25-15-6