IW Weekly - 12 July 2026

Drones and coercion converge this week. Cartels weaponize them for coercion in Ecuador and against Mexican rivals; Russia and Ukraine iterate machine-speed adaptive tactics; SOCOM, the Army, and Hegseth's new autonomy czar chase the same tempo problem institutionally.

Critical infrastructure is the second thread — energy, minerals, GNSS — as leverage: Iran/Ukraine energy strikes, Russian minerals diplomacy, GNSS/quantum PNT vulnerabilities. Coercion-by-infrastructure, not maneuver, is this week's dominant logic.

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How Do Cartels Break and What Explains Differences in Their Violence? — July 15; Virtual

Global Information Summit 2026 — July 21; Adelaide, Australia

Strategic Resources in Competition: Rare Earths & Critical Minerals — July 21-22; Reston, VA

African Logistics and Communications Symposium — July 26-31; Ethiopia

Irregular Warfare in the Homeland, IWC Symposium — August 4-6; Arlington, VA

Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium — August 18-20; Honolulu

Introducing APEX 2026 - IPA — September 8-9; Reston, VA

NATO Annual CIMIC Foresight Conference — September 14-18; The Hague

SAVE THE DATE: 25 Years After, Lessons From America’s Post-9/11 War — September 15; DC

SAVE THE DATE: Inaugural Narrative Strategy Symposium — September 30; DC

Global SOF in Europe Conference — October 6-8; Rome

Future of War Conference — October 26-28; Netherlands

Tactical Trauma 2026 — November 2-4; Sweden

Int’l Conference of the Society for Terrorism Research — December 9-11; Sydney, Australia

Medicine In the Mediterranean 2027 — January 29-31, 2027; Malta

Phoenix Challenge London 2027 — March 9-11, 2027; London

Have an event to highlight? Send details to mick@stratagemconsultingllc.com.

Part IX Geoeconomics of Irregular Warfare Iran and the Global Ripple Effects Series

Narrative Warfare

Urban Warfare Project Podcast: Underground Warfare Reimagined

Capability is Not Enough: Authority & Maritime Special Operations

Maritime Autonomous Systems Featuring Ukraine's SBU

U.S.-India Alliance

Why Should We Care About Rising Dissent in China

Resistance and Resilience

Information Operations in Liberal Democracies Today

Fighting Without Friends

GNSS Vulnerabilities, Quantum PNT, and the Future of Small Wars

The Black Box Problem in Cognitive Warfare

Beyond Blue Water: Gray Zone Lessons from Small Island Nations

Space-SOF-Cyber Designs in Trans-Regional, Multi-Domain, Dynamic Security Contests

Marine Corps drafting new strategic vision for its information warfare arm

The Afghanistan Reckoning

CIWAG 2026 Maritime Symposium

Redundancy and Resilience: Measures of Network Robustness

The Age of Energy Warfare: Lessons from the Ukraine and Iran Wars

Irregular Logic of Resistance

War Has Changed. How It’s Being Waged Has Reached a Technological Inflection Point

Winning Before the First Shot: The New Era of Logistics

U.S. Marines Use Commercial Ferries to Haul Anti-ship Missiles Across the Philippines

Transcom seeks partners to study autonomous, cargo-moving drone boats for future ops

Joint Trauma System

101st soldiers use drones to drop grappling hooks, breach razor wire

Unmanned Systems and Army Special Forces

SOCOM interested in developing long-range kamikaze drones

Army looking toward autonomous robots to recover its downed vehicles from combat zones

US Army Looking to Drone Boats to Help Pacific Watercraft Problems

Hegseth creates autonomy czar to manage almost all drone efforts

Joint Interagency Task Force 401 Publishes Counter-Drone Handbook

Anti-Drone Warfare: The Missing Tier in Maritime Defence Architecture

The Drone Revolution That Isn’t

Cartel Drones as Tools of Coercion

Mexican cartels in Europe, Canada, Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America

Venezuela: A Study in Coercion

Drug cartels adapt as US boat strikes fail to curb cocaine, fentanyl

Ecuador Bets on Drones to Beat the Cartels — At What Cost?

The Lessons of Mali

Who Is Winning Africa’s Drone Wars?

Mexican Cartels Expand Drug Operations in Africa

Jihadism in the Sahel

Digital Scramble for Africa: A Geopolitical Analysis

New Chapter, Same Stalemate: Somalia’s War with Al-Shabaab

Victory for al-Qaeda’s Affiliate in Mali Would be a Catastrophe

Mapping the Armed Actors in the Sudan Conflict

Russia’s New Frontier in Africa

Coercive Signaling and Critical Infrastructure

Go big or go home: Washington’s assistance to the Lebanese army

Beyond the Battlefield: Fallout from the Iran Conflict

A misguided war, a flawed deal, and a dangerous future. Here’s what to do next on Iran

Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Gulf’s Irregular Tomorrow

Iran WMD Raid: Inside JSOC's Most Challenging Mission Yet

The Integrated Combat Performance of Iraqi Militias During Operation Epic Fury

The Houthis and the Evolution of State-Enabled Irregular Warfare: Lessons from the Red Sea

The Royal Marines in the High North: Shaping the Maritime Battle

Denmark Takes Over NATO's Regional Special Operations HQ

Russian Attitudes Are Shifting as the War’s Effects Come Home

Belarus is quietly preparing to play a larger role in Russia’s Ukraine war

The underground saboteurs who are wrecking Putin's plans

How Russia Learned To Adapt To Drone Warfare

Russian drones and the shadow fleet

Russian fuel frustration rises as crisis bites

Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War

Moscow Aims to Treat Critical Minerals as Diplomatic Instruments

Ukraine’s blockade of Crimea puts Putin’s greatest victory under threat

NATO's Critical Minerals Security Runs Through the Eastern Flank

Ghosts at Anchor

The case for an overarching US Indo-Pacific strategy

South China Sea: If you can’t beat them, build islands

Occupational Risk? Chinese Presence Surges at Scarborough Shoal

Tuned to perfection: China’s irregular warfare at sea

China's Gray Zone Pressure Around Taiwan Is Becoming Permanent

China turns Russia’s drone war into a warning for U.S.

Taiwan needs to become a ‘hornet’s nest’ of drones

Bolstering Pacific resilience: A new paradigm for engagement by US allies and partners

Readiness not provocation, senior security official says

Military Review May-June 2026

June 2026 - Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

Journal on Baltic Security

The Sea Denial Trap: Why the Age of Unrestricted Sea Power Is Ending

Terrorist Exploitation of Armed Conflicts for Digital Content

Review – Those Who Face Death

Review - Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Mission to Infiltrate the West

Review – Cárteles Inc.: La "nueva generación" que controla las redes criminales

NATO DIANA | Challenges

2026 Special Operations Research Topics: Academic Year 2027 Addendum

Call for Papers - Information Professionals Association (due July 31)

Papers: “Civil Affairs: Securing the Victory in New Environments” (due September 11)

Ed - Irregular Warfare 101 (IW Basics)

Ed - Irregular Warfare 201 (IW Advanced)

Ed - Irregular Warfare 301 (IW Campaigning)

Ed - Irregular Warfare 110 (IW approaches for Homeland Security and Homeland Defense)

Ed - Center for Homeland and Defense Studies Self-Study Courses

Job - Senior Analyst on China - Hybrid CoE (August 5)

The Harding Fellowship: A Leadership Opportunity for Army Professionals

The IW Weekly is made possible through the generous support of Stratagem Consulting. We're especially grateful to Mick Crnkovich, Founder and CEO of Stratagem, for championing thoughtful, practitioner-oriented resources in the national security space.