The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan
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 08.18.2025 and is available here. Introduction What if China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) successfully invaded
From Tanks to TikTok: Adapting Article 5 for Graduated Responses to Hybrid 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 07.15.2025 and is available here. The Soviet-era bronze statue in Tallinn was relocated long ago, but
The History of U.S.-Iranian Irregular Warfare
The relationship between the United States and Iran is far more intricate than a conventional bilateral conflict. Dubbed the “twilight war,” U.S.-Iranian relations is replete with examples of Irregular Warfare (IW), including events of the recent past like the U.S.-Russia-Iran proxy war in Syria, the
Winning Without Fighting: Economic Power and Information Warfare (Part 2)
Episode 133 is the second installment in our two-part series exploring how the United States can leverage non-kinetic instruments of power to compete effectively without resorting to military force. Building on our previous discussion, our guests examine America's strategic blind spots in treating economics and information
Preparing for the Silent Surge: Countering North Korea’s Gambit in a Dual Contingency
Strategic planners across the Indo-Pacific must reckon with an increasingly plausible scenario: a dual contingency in which North Korea opportunistically launches a full-scale war against South Korea while China conducts military operations against Taiwan. Such a scenario, discussed in a recent Atlantic Council report, represents an acute test
Rebuilding Combat Electromagnetic Warfare for U.S. Ground Forces
From Ukraine to the South China Sea, the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer an ancillary support function. Russian forces in Ukraine deploy systems like Zhitel, Krasukha and Leer-3 to jam communications, spoof GPS, and locate command posts in near real time. These capabilities enable rapid precision fires and drone
Democratized Intelligence: How Open-Source Intelligence is Reshaping Asymmetric Advantage
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 passengers. Russian-backed separatists and the Russian government denied involvement despite the world pointing in their direction. Russia promoted multiple alternative explanations, which a small team of online investigators at Bellingcat systematically disproved. Using only publicly available
America’s Forgotten War in China: Psychological Warfare Against Imperial Japan’s Chinese Puppet Army
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 06.26.2025 and is available here. Abstract: This article explores the little-known U.S. psychological warfare campaign
Winning Without Fighting: Strategic Culture and Gray Zone Competition (Part 1)
Episode 132 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast explores how strategic culture shapes approaches to irregular warfare and competition in the gray zone. This is part one of a two-part series examining why nations conceptualize irregular warfare differently and how cultural biases affect competition below the threshold of armed conflict.
Russia’s Shadow Fleet: The Dangerous Tanker Network Threatening Global Waters
Russia’s so‑called “Shadow Fleet” operates in plain sight, turning the world’s shipping lanes into a tool of economic and ecological risk. Hundreds of these shadow tankers carry crude through European waters each day, many beyond their service life and registered under opaque holding structures. The result is
Bridging the gap between irregular warfare scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
