Articles
Our articles cut through the noise on irregular warfare to connect strategic theory to operational reality and translate complexity into insight for practitioners and policymakers. No time to read? Check out our podcast, "Insider: Short of War," which transforms our articles into concise, engaging audio pieces you can listen to anywhere. Available directly in most of our articles and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms.
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 edited for clarity
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 the
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
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 cyberspace. The ominous
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 Warfare
Review of Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics by Ben Gans
When everything is “special,” nothing is. In Special Operations and National Security: Policies, Strategies, and Tactics, Ben Gans confronts an enduring and increasingly relevant question: what exactly constitutes a special operation in the modern era? As technological innovation, multidomain integration, and the blurring of military and intelligence activities reshape contemporary
Russian Maritime Sabotage: From Subcomponent of Special Operations to Evolving Form of Irregular Warfare
Russian sabotage is a matter of growing concern in Europe, with the risk of maritime sabotage taking particular prominence. And yet, the offence of ‘sabotage’ was only introduced in the UK in 2023, under the UK’s National Security Act. Sabotage is a key component of irregular warfare, whether conducted
Microinsurgency: Introducing and Defining a Distinct Category of Intrastate Conflict
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 11.12.2025 and is available here. Introduction Microinsurgencies, small-scale armed conflicts over natural resources internal to one country,
Bridging the gap between irregular warfare scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.