The American Way of Irregular Warfare

The American Way of Irregular Warfare: An Analytical Memoir. Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egal. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2020.

He defines irregular warfare as conflict below the threshold of conventional warfare waged in the minds and wills of the population with limited support.[2] His theme throughout is that warfare is a human endeavor and the U.S. military must retool its understanding of how it affects human behavior through psychological, relational, economic, and military means. Humans are the key to successfully influencing local politics and culture, in Cleveland’s mind. Thus, leaving a competent partner force in place is the only way the US can avoid future indefinite commitments of Americans to stay and fight.

While satisfied with the U.S. military’s tactical performance in irregular warfare, Cleveland rejects the argument that special operations can raid their way to victory or capture enough terrain. Cleveland uses the strategic failures of the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to argue the U.S. military must focus on its failure to structurally, doctrinally, and militarily invest in irregular warfare to succeed.

Cleveland asserts locals must be empowered to retain legitimacy, or operations and U.S. personnel will foster resentment and insurgency against an occupying force. He offers a vignette from his experience removing Manuel Noriega from power in Panama. Panamanians approached U.S. soldiers with a report of a homicide. In response, the American leaders armed and empowered the local police detective. Cleveland observes that the Panamanian detective solved the case better than any platoon of U.S. soldiers could have.[3]

He contrasts U.S. relative success in Panama to the dissolving of the Iraq Ba’ath Party and the costly insurgency that followed. Cleveland warns that the U.S. military cannot afford to ignore its operational and strategic inadequacies in irregular warfare operations to focus on  conventional warfare.

Cleveland concludes with a structured call to action. He recommends starting with a bipartisan congressional investigation into the employment of U.S. irregular warfare capability with a focus on policies, strategies, and campaigns in irregular conflict. Beyond a broad reassessment, he offers a range of proposals for institutionalizing the investigation’s conclusions.

Cleveland makes a number of recommendations. First, he recommends a restructuring of the Department of Defense to create a hybrid combined department with expertise from the military, State Department, intelligence, and private enterprise to focus on irregular warfare campaigns. He also suggests establishing a second four-star Special Operations headquarters dedicated to irregular warfare, separate and different from current special operations commands. He suggests the new command could be component under one of the military service departments similar to that of the Department of the Navy’s relationship with the US Marine Corps.

To support the restructuring initiatives he proposes, Cleveland suggests creating civilian educational institutions independent of professional military education to continue the academic study of irregular warfare. These outside educational institutions would critique military capability, policies, and strategies while capturing and analyzing irregular warfare actions for American public scrutiny. Lastly, he suggests creating professional military education outside the conventionally minded service-specific professional military education system. He points to the Naval Postgraduate School’s master’s degree focused on irregular warfare as a positive example worth emulation.

While thoughtful, Cleveland’s proposals are ripe for critique. He applies irregular warfare to every scenario as the golden key while ignoring factors that seem to preclude any reasonable likelihood of fostering local legitimacy in places such as Afghanistan.

Cleveland and his co-author also use exhaustive half-page footnotes that merely  amplify the message in the original paragraph. They discuss the concept of an American way of irregular warfare, but Cleveland fails to provide a succinct definition that works across the instruments of national power. However, he does reference several different current military definitions in his footnotes. 

Cleveland rightly observes decisive victories are unlikely in the nuclear and information age. Anyone seeking to understand irregular warfare as integral to the entire continuum of warfare should read this book.

M.T. Mitchell is a Marine Corps Officer studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He holds a bachelors of political science and a graduate certificate from Texas A&M University and a Masters of Art and Science from the U.S. Air Force University.  The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egel, The American Way of Irregular War: An Analytical Memoir (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA301-1.html.

[2] Cleveland and Egel, The American Way of Irregular War, 4–9, 102–3, 133,150-51, 165–68, 217.

[3] Cleveland and Egel, The American Way of Irregular War, 72.