The Future of War Part III: Strategic Sabotage in an Era of Great-Power
Episode 144 of theIrregular Warfare Podcast continues our four-part Future of War series with a focused examination of strategic sabotage, indirect action, and deterrence below the threshold of armed conflict. This episode centers on “Special Delivery,” a near-future short story by author and futurist August Cole, set in
Q & A: Karl Marlantes on Vietnam, Leadership, and the Lessons America Still Hasn’t Learned
✉️ Email header below is auto-generated from this post’s author tag. It only appears in the newsletter — please don’t edit or delete it. Editor’s Note: This article is presented in a question-and-answer format, with the Irregular Warfare Initiative interviewing Karl Marlantes. This piece has been
Angle of Attack: Apache Attack Helicopters in Unmanned Skies
United States Army Aviation, at a crossroads of equipment and identity as aerial warfare increasingly emphasizes unmanned systems, faces a difficult reckoning akin to a historical quote by General (Ret.) Eric Shinseki, “if you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” To maintain utility in modernizing skies,
Choke Points: Critical Minerals and Irregular Warfare in the Gray Zone
Introduction In the situation rooms of Washington and the chancelleries of Europe, the future of warfare is often visualized as a contest of high-velocity hardware: the silent glide of a hypersonic vehicle, the swarm logic of autonomous drones, or the cryptographic shield of quantum computing. Yet, this fixation on
CFIUS: Thinking Creatively About National Security
A solar farm. A pork facility. A hotel. A dating app. These things might not seem like they are connected, but they have more to do with national security than one might think. Foreign entities have been steadily acquiring American land and intellectual property for decades, quietly building leverage that
The Silk Road of Crime: Chinese Criminal Networks
Chinese criminal networks have built a global illicit infrastructure and the Western Hemisphere is now a key battlespace. Economic and Legal Warfare Project hosted a fireside chat to discuss how Chinese criminal groups connect chemical suppliers, Mexican cartels, Latin American corruption, diaspora associations, digital scam syndicates, and sophisticated money-laundering
Assessing “Cognitive Warfare”
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of Small Wars Journal as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on 11.14.2025 and is available here. Despite its introduction over a decade ago by the People’s Liberation
The Cyber Wars That Weren’t
✉️ Email header below is auto-generated from this post’s author tag. It only appears in the newsletter — please don’t edit or delete it. At the onset of the Israel-Iran conflict, news websites warned the public of the possible collateral damage the Israel-Iran fight could generate in
Understanding Hybrid Threats: Insights from the Belgian Cyber Force Commander
This IWI Project Europe Fireside Chat examines Belgium’s perspectives on hybrid warfare, with a particular focus on cyber-attacks and information warfare. To do so, we welcomed one of Belgium’s key figures in the cyber domain: Major-General Pierre Ciparisse. Appointed in September, General Ciparisse serves as Commander
IWI Editorial’s Year in Review: Looking Back at 2025
Where else would you find pirates, space special forces, sharp debates over Operation Spider’s Web, cultural heritage protection as a means of outcompeting China, and even an AI chatbot designed to anticipate Beijing’s next grand-strategic move …all under one roof? In 2025, that place was the Irregular
Bridging the gap between irregular warfare scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
