Uprooting the Enemy: A New Paradigm for Irregular Warfare Analysis

Editor’s Note: This article and accompanying report are a part of Project SOF in Competition. The report, Integrated Understanding: Re-Thinking the Human Environment of Military Operations, is the first of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s occasional paper series. If you would like to contribute to this Special Project, please submit proposals and ideas to Adam Darnley-Stuart with the subject line “Project SOF Submission / Proposal.”

Irregular warfare is a vital instrument in America’s national security toolkit. As we compete on the global stage with states like Russia and China while maintaining pressure on terrorist networks and drug cartels, irregular warfare enables the US government to “campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” Put another way, irregular warfare is a means to apply subtle (yet potentially sharp) pressure that advances our national interests via sophisticated and multifaceted campaigns in the “gray zone” between peace and outright war.

This begs a question for the irregular warfare community: what is the foundational analytical view from which these campaigns are designed, implemented, and evaluated? Within the national security establishment, irregular warfare is typically discussed as an activity through which certain ends are achieved by applying a particular set of means. Far less attention is paid to the situational understanding from which such activity should flow. How do we develop a focused understanding of the issues that matter within a given time and place, so that we know where, when, and how to implement irregular approaches?

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From this vantage, the irregular warfare community has gotten ahead of itself. The desire is to be “operators” who conduct irregular warfare—without having institutionalized a robust, consistent, and scalable approach to generating the necessary understanding to do so effectively. If the US government wants to step up its game on par with Russia’s “New Generation Warfare” and China’s “Unrestricted Warfare,” a solid analytical foundation of threats and opportunities is a critical prerequisite.

Irregular warfare demands a focused and granular understanding not only of our enemies and adversaries, but also of the environment where we confront them. Waging strategically meaningful irregular warfare campaigns thus requires an understanding of operational environments that is far broader than what is provided by enemy-centric intelligence. This, in turn, calls for a high-end exploratory and analytical enterprise that can identify and assess key features of the information and civilian environments, establish their connectivity to the activities and interests of our opponents, and then drive the development of subtle and sophisticated courses of action to uproot those opponents from the human terrain. That, after all, is the fundamental value proposition of irregular warfare.

This should be seen as an opportunity: professionalize the analytical foundation from which the US wages irregular warfare. At present, there is no unifying analytical framework to examine the operational environment of irregular warfare, and no attendant signature product (or products) to anchor the design, implementation, and evaluation of campaigns. Institutionalizing such an exploratory and analytical approach, and standardizing fit-for-purpose analytical outputs, would generate a host of benefits for the practitioners of irregular warfare—and likewise for American national security interests writ large.

The Challenge of Understanding

The challenge of developing the optimal understanding of a given operational environment is by no means unique to the practice of irregular warfare. On the contrary, the US military has struggled throughout the past two decades to structure its view of operational environments for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN). The fundamental issue is the inescapable fact that the complexity and dynamism of the real world preclude any attempt at a comprehensive understanding of any operational environment. Fighting within their borders against an intimately familiar enemy, there is no prospect of the Ukrainians achieving “comprehensive” understanding on the battlefield. The same dynamic holds for the Israelis in Gaza, despite the exceptionally narrow geographic remit of that campaign.  Practitioners have no choice but to prioritize and structure their view. The challenge, therefore, is to develop the best possible understanding of the dynamics that matter most within a given context.

The special operations community, for its part, took a molecular view of the battlefield during counter-terrorism campaigns within the Global War on Terrorism. Day after day, year after year, special operations forces (SOF) methodically picked apart enemy networks around the globe. In so doing, they became a hi-tech lethal targeting powerhouse—mastering a process through which terrorist networks were disrupted and degraded. However, the distortions and limitations of this molecular view were decisive factors in SOF’s inability to translate tactical excellence into strategic outcomes. Organizations like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the constellation of Shi’a militias that resisted the United States in Iraq were not molecules in suspension, but rather organic outgrowths of the human terrain. The underlying analytical paradigm that drove SOF’s lethal targeting barrage was incomplete, insofar as it did not see that connectivity. Consequently, sustainable results remained elusive as these networks regenerated and evolved.

The challenge of developing an optimal understanding of the operational environment was also central to the inability of COIN enthusiasts to pivot from theory to action. The signature achievement of the COIN endeavor—the “Surge” to secure greater Baghdad in 2007 and 2008—was premised on a basic misunderstanding of the dynamics of violence in the Iraqi capital. This misunderstanding was not the byproduct of analytical error, but rather structural and methodological faults in the way that the US military as a whole sought to understand Baghdad.

The Surge’s population-centric approaches assumed that the populace held agency vis-à-vis patterns of violence, and that “winning hearts and minds” could shape its trajectory. This a priori belief was a core tenet of COIN theory. On the atomized human terrain of post-Saddam, post-sanctions, and post-sectarian war Baghdad, this was simply not the case—but the US military lacked a systematic approach to explore and understand the connectivity between insurgent networks and the general population. Irrespective of the popularity of aphorisms like “the population is the center of gravity” and “the human terrain is the decisive terrain,” contextual insights were siloed off from enemy-centric intelligence reporting and marginalized within the military’s intelligence architecture. Put another way, the problem was not that analysts misjudged the ways in which grassroots societal dynamics shaped patterns of violence, but rather that those dynamics were not prioritized and integrated within the military’s core view of the battlefield.

Our closest allies also faced these exact same challenges. In 2021, the British Army commissioned an independent review of difficulties encountered in achieving Integrated Action—the doctrinal mandate to harmonize and synergize lethal and non-lethal instruments of power. This study, previously unpublished, offered a sharp critique of the investigative tools prescribed by British doctrine for the exploration of operational environments. It also exposed structural faults in the intelligence architecture into which information was fed, processed, and synthesized to produce understanding. A disjointed, siloed approach to making sense of complex environments created insurmountable obstacles within the intelligence fusion process and prevented British forces from seeing their opponents as an integral feature of the human terrain. This, in turn, precluded Integrated Action.

The Future of Analysis in Irregular Warfare

Looking to the present, the irregular warfare community must learn from the challenges of the past twenty years and refine its view of operational environments. What are the signature products that should drive the planning of irregular warfare campaigns and provide a structured understanding of an adversary as an integral feature of the human terrain? What analytical methods should be used to create these products? What role should Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) play in generating this type of understanding and how should we manage expectations around the siren call of effortless insight “at the push of a button?”

All of this should be a field for urgent, competitive experimentation within the irregular warfare community. Practitioners should be comparing and contrasting the merits of fieldwork-based, human-centric work versus data-centric AI/LLM outputs. We should be field-testing new exploratory and analytical approaches that frame our view of operational environments (while relegating the ASCOPE/PMESII crosswalk to the ash heap of history), and refining the tradecraft required at the point of collection. We should also be prototyping new analytical products, with the active participation of combatant commanders and their planning staffs.

One potential signature deliverable, outlined in the doctrine note linked above and detailed further in a recent book, is the “Root Map” analytical product. This product would detail, for example, “the roots of Chinese activity and influence in the South China Sea,” “the roots of Russian activity and influence in Georgia,” or “the roots of the Islamic State’s activity and influence in Khorasan Province” using a consistent set of analytical criteria, leading to a standardized output for irregular warfare.  

Looking back to the “molecular” paradigm that defined SOF’s approach to the Global War on Terrorism, a better metaphor would have been that of a tree, with branches and limbs representing the enemy, as well as a root structure through which the enemy connects into the human terrain of an operational environment. The molecular view was blind to this root structure, and so hacking away at branches and limbs had the effect of pruning enemy networks.

Figure 1: Root Map Illustration

The Root Map product would broaden the investigative scope of enemy-centric intelligence, to systematically identify and evaluate an opponent’s position in an operational environment. This would establish a shared framework for the design, practice, and evaluation of irregular warfare campaigns across the competition continuum. It could be oriented at the strategic level, examining the roots of an adversary within a theater of operations. Alternatively, the same view could be oriented at the hyper-local level, within a single city or a neighborhood therein. This would break down the investigative and analytical silos that have previously separated the military’s view of the enemy from the work of the various capabilities tasked to explore and understand the civilian and information environments, and it would also enable joint and inter-agency collaboration.

The net result would be a consistent foundation from which irregular warfare campaigns could be designed, executed, and evaluated. The irregular warfare community of practice seeks to develop sophisticated, multi-faceted campaigns against our adversaries. As noted by the British, this sort of “integrated action” cannot be achieved without an integrated understanding of enemies and adversaries as inter-connected features of an operational environment. The Root Map product could provide that understanding, and the image above could also stand as an emblem of an irregular warfare enterprise in the business of surgically picking apart its enemies through targeted strikes upon key nodes and vulnerabilities, while simultaneously uprooting them from operational environments.

Dr. Nicholas Krohley is a consultant and researcher. He is the Founder of FrontLine Advisory, and the author of The Death of the Mehdi Army: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Iraq’s Most Powerful Militia. Nick specializes in the first-hand examination of localized dynamics of conflict, development, and urbanization in the developing world. He received his PhD and MA from King’s College London and his BA from Yale University.

Main Image: Green Berets with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) alongside their Marine counterpart move through a swamp during a Jungle Warfare Exercise. May 23, 2021. (Photo courtesy of 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) via DVIDS)

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

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