Voices of ARSOF
“What is Irregular Warfare to you?”
Article published: on April 1st, in the spring 2024 issue of the Special Warfare Journal
Read Time:
< 3 mins
This edition of Special Warfare Magazine focuses on Irregular Warfare and Large-Scale Combat Operations as part
of the overall theme for 2024 How ARSOF Fights. Irregular Warfare, a new proponent under the special warfare
center and school footprint, is part of the SWCS 2030 Strategy initiative. We asked members from the academic
and SOF communities what Irregular Warfare means to them, and this is what they said.
"If we accept ‘warfare’ as a set of methods employed during confict to achieve desired outcomes,
then ‘regular warfare’ is comprised of methods that actors employ with generally identifable formations and
weapons against other actors also with recognizable formations. Tere, one can usually distinguish the good
guys from the bad guys. Irregular warfare is diferent. Actors employ methods to operate among populations to
mask their activities, or actors use methods to identify and separate opponents from those populations. IW
methods could be used in the physical, informational, or digital domains.”
Col. Ian Rice, Retired
U.S.Army Special Forces
"Irregular Warfare is a strategic tool that presents unique options for policymakers to defend and
advance national interests. It involves a combination of lethal and non-lethal actions to exert infuence in
a broader politico-military campaign. The specifc objectives of irregular warfare are not strictly military
but vary between classical military ones, gaining political infuence, protecting economic interests, and
neutralizing specifc threats. Thus, irregular warfare is an instrument that policymakers can employ to
achieve grand strategic objectives in competition, crisis, and confict.”
Lt. Col. Ben Gans, PhD
Visiting Faculty, The Netherlands
Defense Analysis Department, U.S.
Naval Postgraduate School
"Irregular warfare deals more with the art of war than the science of it. Individuals can be
educated on irregular warfare and they can take training courses in various important techniques, but
mastery of it can only be achieved over time by interacting with partners, competitors, and enemies.
Irregular warfare is a thinking-person’s game frst and foremost. It is the realm in which the weak can
defeat the strong, and the moral dethrone the immoral.”
Douglas A. Borer, PhD
Executive Director, Global ECCO Project
Associate Professor, Department
of Defense Analysis,
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
"Irregular warfare are activities short of conventional war that directly target a country’s
population with the goal of exploiting divisions within a population, undermining trust between the
population and the government, and weakening a country’s ability to project power internally and
internationally. Tese activities are often difcult to detect and even more difcult to attribute to an actor,
making a response difcult. Irregular warfare is the principal means of strategic competition today because
it ofsets U.S. conventional capabilities and exploits our conventional ways of preparing for and fghting
wars.”
Dr. Heather Gregg, PhD
Professor of Irregular Warfare and Hybrid Threats,
George C. Marshall
European Center for Security Studies
"Irregular warfare is all about the indirect approach. Where I can apply the least amount of combat
power to impose the damaging cost on my adversary? Oftentimes, it’s not through the military lens, its
through another instrument of national power such as economic or information.”
Maj. Kris Levy,
Commander Fox Company, 91st Civil Affairs Battalion
(Special Operations)
(Airborne)
"To me, Irregular Warfare is the intersection of at least two out of the following: One, special or
non-conventional units, working in; Two, non-kinetic domains (human, informational, fnancial, virtual,
etc.), against; or three, asymmetric threats.”
Michael Freeman, Professor, Associate Chair for Instruction, Defense Analysis Department, U.S. Naval
Postgraduate School