The Future Faces of Irregular Warfare: Great Power Competition in the 21st Century
The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) is the Department of Defense–funded “battle lab” for irregular
warfare (IW) created in 2021. It is focused on supporting warfighters facing challenges in any aspect of modern conflict other than conventional warfare. IWC conducts training, produces publications, and holds conferences. In the case of this book, IWC assembled a set of papers
focusing on geostrategic issues related to irregular warfare. It is worth noting here that there is no consensus in the US government on the definition of irregular warfare, nor is there a consensus on what agency in the US government should lead in addressing this challenge.
Even a brief review of this topic demonstrates that the US military and the Department of Defense remain challenged in describing the nature of modern warfare where US conventional force-on-force operations are rare and our strategic adversaries (often described in the same documents as “strategic competitors”) have an entirely different view of warfare. In the 1990s, IW was described
in DOD doctrine as “military operations other than war.”