Full Spectrum Dominance: Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror

By Maria Ryan

America's war on terror is widely defined by the Afghanistan and Iraq fronts. Yet, as this book demonstrates, both the international campaign and the new ways of fighting that grew out of it played out across multiple fronts beyond the Middle East. Maria Ryan explores how secondary fronts in the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa, Georgia, and the Caspian Sea Basin became key test sites for developing what the Department of Defense called "full spectrum dominance": mastery across the entire range of possible conflict, from conventional through irregular warfare.

Full Spectrum Dominance is the first sustained historical examination of the secondary fronts in the war on terror. It explores whether irregular warfare has been effective in creating global stability or if new terrorist groups have emerged in response to the intervention. As the U.S. military, Department of Defense, White House, and State Department have increasingly turned to irregular capabilities and objectives, understanding the underlying causes as well as the effects of the quest for full spectrum dominance become ever more important. The development of irregular strategies has left a deeply ambiguous and concerning global legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503610668

Book preview

FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE

Irregular Warfare and the War on Terror

Maria Ryan

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ryan, Maria, 1979– author.

Title: Full spectrum dominance : irregular warfare and the war on terror / Maria Ryan.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004068 (print) | LCCN 2019005341 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503610668 | ISBN 9781503609990 (cloth: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Military policy. | Irregular warfare—United States. | Terrorism—Prevention—Government policy—United States. | War on Terrorism, 2001–2009. | United States—Foreign relations—2001–2009. | United States—Foreign relations—2009–2017.

Classification: LCC UA23 (ebook) | LCC UA23 .R966 2019 (print) | DDC 355/.033573—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004068

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover images: Map, VectorStock; Flag, from U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Peter Shinn, Task Force Bastogne Public Affairs, via DoDLive

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. 9/11 and the Early Seeds of Irregular Warfare

2. The Philippines and the War on Terror in Southeast Asia

3. The War on Terror in Sub-Saharan Africa

4. Terrorism and the Great Game in Georgia and the Caspian Basin

5. Irregular Warfare at the Pentagon, 2004–2008

6. State, USAID, and the Interagency Mobilization

7. Irregular Warfare with Restraint: The Obama Years

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for helping, directly or indirectly, to bring this project to fruition.

At Stanford University Press, I am grateful to Alan Harvey for the faith he showed in this project from the outset. I am indebted to Alan and to Leah Pennywark for the work they put into making this book happen. Beverly Miller did a wonderful job copyediting the manuscript and made this a better book. My thanks to Tim Roberts for turning it all into a real book.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom generously supported this project in its early stages with an Early Career Fellowship. The University of Nottingham provided me with three terms of research leave. Without these, the project would have been impossible.

Over the years, friends and colleagues have kindly given their time to read through parts of the work and provide feedback. David Fitzgerald provided a rigorous and engaged critique of the entire manuscript, which has improved the final version immeasurably. I am deeply grateful to him. The other anonymous reviewer for Stanford University Press provided comments that were extraordinarily gracious, perceptive, encouraging, and constructive—for which I am profoundly thankful. Additional thanks go to Adam Quinn, whose sharp analysis I much needed at an early stage; Bevan Sewell, who is one of the most discerning readers I know; Paul McGarr, who always encouraged my preoccupation with twenty-first-century history; and Steve Hewitt, who read material on short notice and still offered thoughtful, constructive comments. I am grateful to them all.

The Yuchengco Center at De La Salle University in Manila kindly mailed me reference material that was not available in the United Kingdom. Renato Cruz de Castro helped explain the legal intricacies of US activity in the southern Philippines and pointed me toward relevant sources.

I owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues and friends in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. My thanks go to Susan Billingham for being such an excellent (and tolerant) head of department and friend. Christopher Phelps and Vivien Miller were warm and supportive colleagues when I especially needed it.

As my wise friend, Burnt Paw, says, Every ship of dreams sails a ragged ocean. For keeping me going through some difficult times, I am so grateful to the following amazing people: the Baxters—Claire, Andrew, and Charlie—Celeste-Marie Bernier, Will Boyle, Michael Burns, Andy Green, Ian Haines, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Ruth Maxey, Hui Miao, Helen Oakley, Mara Oliva, Sue Paffett, Gillian Roberts, Catherine Rottenberg, and Rizwaan Sabir. This past year, I have been lucky to have Rabi Aminudin, Oanh Hoang, and Byamba Luguusharav in my life too. Thank you all.

Finally, I am indebted to the whole extended Ryan clan (including, of course, the flying club): Mum and Dad; Helen, Pasquale, and Olivia; Bernadette, Sandro, Elia, and Luca; Ant, Jules, and Jack. Thank you.

Nottingham, November 2018

Introduction

This book offers a political history of how and why the US military—and indeed the whole of the US government—reoriented the country’s early twenty-first-century national security strategy to encompass a concept that came to be known as Irregular Warfare. (Throughout the book, I use the term Irregular Warfare, with capital letters, to refer to the US government’s official definition of the concept, while irregular warfare, without capitals, refers to the concept contested by scholars and practitioners.) It focuses on the intellectual, organizational, strategic, doctrinal, and operational shifts—with particular emphasis on the importance of the peripheral theaters of the war on terror—that led to and resulted from the elevation of irregular warfare in planning and operations across the US government, led by the Department of Defense (DoD), from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. The ultimate purpose of this was what the Pentagon called full spectrum dominance—dominance across the entire spectrum of conflict from conventional war through to irregular forms of conflict, for it was only through ensuring supremacy across the range of possible conflict that the United States could prolong its position of primacy in an era of globalization in which the information revolution had apparently changed the character of some of the security challenges faced by the United States.

The concept of irregular warfare, derived from the first internationally accepted definition of regular war in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, was—and remains—a contested one.¹ Colin S. Gray calls it exceedingly illusive.² According to Hew Strachan, war cannot be subdivided neatly into regular and/or irregular forms because hybrid wars—encompassing both regular and irregular techniques have been the historical norm.³ M. L. R. Smith and David Martin Jones claim that entire attempt to categorize war is futile and counterproductive because—as Carl Von Clausewitz, the canonical theorist of Western warfare, argued—wars must vary with the nature of their motives and the situation which gave rise to them. In other words, all wars are the unique product of their specific time and place.⁴ The term irregular warfare also has ethical connotations that can elicit both opposition and support depending on the context.⁵ Moreover, there are significant disagreements about how to execute irregular warfare in practice.⁶

These debates notwithstanding, the US defense community developed its own specific definition of irregular warfare, embodied in the September 2007 Joint Operating Concept on Irregular Warfare, the first of its kind:

Irregular warfare (IW) is defined as: a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations. IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.⁷

This explanation of irregular warfare, which emerged from several years of debate, resulted in a final definition that encompassed three elements: the agent, who was doing the fighting—which was just as likely to be a nonstate actor as a state; the method—the tactics and techniques used, which were likely to include indirect and nontraditional methods as much as military force; and the objective—winning the allegiance of the people rather than relying on brute force to assert control. The most distinctive feature of IW, according to the Joint Operating Concept, was its focus on co-opting the population.⁸

This official definition drew on classic accounts of unconventional or untraditional wars, especially counterinsurgencies fought against independence movements by imperial powers such as Britain in Malaya and France in Algeria.⁹ Unlike conventional interstate war, fought by traditional military units to assert physical control over vast swathes of territory, irregular warfare was a population-centric form of conflict that aimed to secure decisive influence over an area by winning the allegiance of the population—often referred to as a hearts-and-minds approach. This effort employed a panoply of political, psychological, social, economic, and military measures. Famously described by Mao Zedong as 20% military, 80% political, irregular warfare relied just as much on nonmilitary methods as on kinetic military activity—that is, ground operations in which lethal force is used.¹⁰ Undermining the appeal of irregular forces required not just military activity to separate insurgents from the indigenous people they hid among, but also a host of ideological, political, social, and economic activities designed to undermine the insurgents’ ideological appeal to the people, offer a counternarrative, and ultimately secure the territory by building an alternative society that the population would have a stake in defending.¹¹

The purpose of this book is not to refine or challenge the US government’s definition of irregular warfare, as a practitioner might, but to offer a political history of the rise of this conception of IW across the US government and in practice on the ground in the war on terror on the periphery—the first testing grounds for IW techniques in the twenty-first century. My concern is how and why the US government came to approve such a countercultural definition of warfare and elevate a concept that had been largely peripheral to military planning and U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s, alongside more conventional notions of conflict, and how this initially manifested in the peripheral regions of the war on terror.

Arguably more akin to nation building than conventional conflict, this type of protracted warfare had little in common with what Russell Weigley described in 1977 as the American way of war. Weigley argued that US wars had traditionally focused on overwhelming battlefield victories and physical destruction of the enemy with little account for what came afterward.¹² The traditional conception of conventional interstate war also informed the principles of military intervention articulated by Casper Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense, in 1984, and later by General Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 1990. The Weinberger and Powell doctrines both emphasized clear and attainable objectives, the use of overwhelming battlefield force, and the importance of an exit strategy.¹³ In this conception of war, the conflict was enemy-centric, not population-centric, and relied overwhelmingly on raw military power.

For most scholars, it was not until the United States faced an insurgency in Iraq in the mid-2000s that the Army and, ultimately, the U.S. government were forced to grapple with the realities of irregular warfare—in this case, counterinsurgency, a variant of IW.¹⁴ Until then, the military was devoted almost exclusively to conventional war, and it was principally in response to the crisis in Iraq that the U.S. Army rediscovered the practice of counterinsurgency that it had largely ignored since Vietnam. This book argues that the pursuit of an irregular warfare capability was also part of a much broader project, with roots that predated the application of counterinsurgency in Iraq (and later, in a modified form, in Afghanistan) and transcended the war on terror. This was the pursuit of what the Pentagon called full spectrum dominance, a phrase that came to refer to dominance across the entire spectrum of warfare from conventional through to irregular conflict, in order to ensure the continuation of US military preeminence in an era of globalization, in which networked nonstate actors now also challenged US hegemony alongside traditional state-based threats.

Irregular warfare was not a new phenomenon, as its imperial lineage demonstrated, but for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the contemporary wave of globalization and the communications revolution had given new leverage to nonstate actors such as terrorists that could turn the technologies of the information revolution against the United States. The impact of globalization on conflict has been contested by Patrick Porter, who argues convincingly that physical distance and geography still act as constraints on both states and nonstate actors even in a globalized world, and that networked threats from the latter have been exaggerated.¹⁵ This was not the view that prevailed in the US defense establishment, however, where the apparent challenge from networked nonstate actors was taken seriously.

I argue here that it was not just the quagmire in Iraq that catalyzed the turn toward irregular warfare, but also 9/11. The shock of 9/11 set in motion a new interpretation of the twenty-first century security environment for senior US policymakers. This developed gradually and unevenly, but nevertheless discernibly. For policymakers, the devastating terrorist attacks inside the United States exposed America’s security vulnerabilities, despite its awesome and overwhelming conventional military power. In Theo Farrell’s schema of norm change in modern conflict, the attacks functioned as an external shock to the US defense community, catalyzing, over time, voluntary, radical cultural change by undermin[ing] the legitimacy of existing norms.¹⁶ As Joseph Nye observes, for US policymakers, September 11, 2001 was like a flash of lightning on a summer evening that displayed an altered landscape.¹⁷ In this altered landscape, states were no longer the only or even the principal security threat. Nonstate actors and substate groups and networks could challenge the United States in ways it was not equipped to respond to: by employing asymmetric means and irregular methods that exploited new technologies.¹⁸ While the al-Qaeda network—a kind of transnational insurgency—was the immediate adversary in the post-9/11 world, it was but one manifestation of the new landscape of power. Over time, policy makers came to believe that to fight and win these new conflicts, and thereby ensure continued US global primacy, it was essential to develop irregular capabilities to complement existing strengths in conventional warfare. This book is the story of an attempt to maintain unchallenged and unassailable military preeminence in an era when potential challenges to American power seemed to be proliferating in ways that US officials had not anticipated.

As Max Boot demonstrates, small wars that did not fit the template of conventional interstate war were in fact a regular occurrence in American history.¹⁹ However, US military culture and doctrine, and the country’s overall national security strategy, remained firmly rooted in conventional notions of industrial interstate war. Time and again, lessons learned in the ‘small’ nontraditional conflicts were not institutionalized and passed on, but forgotten or ignored at the end of the campaign. When it came to unconventional wars, the US military was not, in John Nagl’s phrase, a learning institution.²⁰ As David Fitzgerald notes, this resulted in a peculiarly American dual narrative: a long tradition of small wars and, at the same time, a disavowal of their lessons. As Fitzgerald observes, these wars have not lingered in the [military’s] historical memory.²¹ The archetypal example is Vietnam. Though certainly not a small war, Vietnam required, at least in part, the tactics and skills of counterinsurgency against the guerrilla forces of the National Liberation Front. The loss of the war in Southeast Asia was so traumatic for the US Army that it buried the lessons, expunged the defeat from its collective consciousness, and regrouped around its favored paradigm of industrial interstate war in Central Europe against the Soviets.²² This conventional American way of war informed the principles of US defense strategy through the Cold War and into the very early twenty-first century. Nor was this just down to strategic preferences; to some extent, the U.S. economy relied on what Jerry Sanders calls Keynesian militarism.²³ As Daniel Wirls demonstrates, the continued reliance on military spending to stimulate the domestic economy goes some way to explaining why the state-centric model of equipment-heavy conventional warfare endured in US defense planning into the twenty-first century.²⁴

Anticipating Irregular Warfare: Debates on the New Wars and Globalization

While official US defense planning at the end of the Cold War continued to rely primarily on models of conventional interstate conflict, at a lower level, military practitioners and defense intellectuals in the United States began to debate how the demise of the East-West confrontation and the nascent information revolution might bear on international security. Defense scholars and military officers, rather than senior policymakers, were the first to describe the contours of a new type of irregular conflict—though the word irregular was not used at this stage—quite different from the interstate model that they claimed would dominate the twenty-first century, a kind of war for which the US military, at the end of the Cold War, was thoroughly unprepared for. Indeed it was America’s dominance in conventional military terms that meant potential challengers would likely choose other ways of confronting the United States.²⁵

One of the most enduring contributions to this debate was the concept of fourth-generation warfare (4GW), a term coined in 1989 by William S. Lind and colleagues.²⁶ These authors argued that the history of warfare could be broken down into four distinct generations, each reflecting the technology, social conditions and ideas of the day, from smoothbore muskets (first generation) to machine-gun and mass firepower (second), followed by the third-generation blitzkrieg tactics: the synchronization of tanks, infantry, and airpower. Each of these generational shifts was characterized by change in four key areas: greater dispersion on the battlefield, decreasing dependence on centralized logistics, more emphasis on maneuver, and the goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Fourth-generation warfare would be marked by an intensification of each of these existing trends and would no longer be recognizable as conventional warfare. The trend toward decentralization meant that the fourth generation battlefield is likely to include the whole of the enemy’s society, the authors wrote. The ultimate target would change: rather than focusing solely on destroying the adversary’s armed forces and associated infrastructure, targets would also include the population’s support for war and the enemy’s culture. Grinding down the will of the enemy government and its population would lead to victory. Dependence on centralized logistics would decrease further, and there would be a higher tempo to operations. The 4GW battlefield would be widely dispersed and largely undefined. Lind and colleagues described a kind of permanent low-intensity war in which the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point and the distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ may disappear.²⁷ In many respects, this anticipated what the DoD would much later label irregular warfare: the dispersed battlefield, the decentralized form of command, and the targeting of civilian society would become indispensable components of the Pentagon’s IW concept.

Advocates of fourth-generation warfare particularly emphasized the importance of culture as a contested battleground and the imperative of psychological operations. Since 4GW took place—in Rupert Smith’s phrase—amongst the people, winning or maintaining the allegiance of the population was a strategic imperative.²⁸ This required offering an attractive political narrative and undermining the adversary’s vision—an objective that could not be achieved through force of arms. Instead, according to Lind and colleagues, Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of combat forces. A major target will be the enemy population’s support of its government and the war.²⁹ In Lawrence Freedman’s words, the challenge for each adversary in an irregular conflict would be to seek to unbind the enemy force by undermining the[ir] strategic narrative.³⁰ In an age where information was cheaper than ever before and omnipresent, information warfare would become a central component of conflict. Even more prescient was Lind and colleagues’ suggestion that the genesis of fourth-generation warfare might be visible in terrorism. A fourth-generation terrorist might combine high technology with highly sophisticated psychological warfare while operating on a transnational basis, making it difficult for conventional forces designed to operate within a nation state framework to confront.³¹

The 4GW concept was updated for the 1990s by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes in 1994.³² According to Hammes, The world is organizing itself in a series of interconnected networks, meaning that nation-states were no longer the only actors on the international stage. Transnational and subnational groups and networks were emerging as powerful forces too. Since they lacked the resources to wage interstate war, these groups preferred to fight low-intensity conflicts, encompassing political, economic, social, cultural, psychological, and military measures. In many respects this sounded like classic insurgency warfare, but what distinguished 4GW from its predecessors, according to Hammes, was the use of all the networks available in the information age.³³ Thus, the dominant form of conflict in the twenty-first century would be networked insurgency-style warfare.

Nevertheless, even transnational networks required physical bases somewhere. According to Mary Kaldor, who coined the contested but much-discussed term new wars to describe the conflicts of the 1990s, this type of warfare would flourish in the context of state disintegration. For Kaldor, the Balkan wars were the archetype of the new wars, defined by the disintegration of nation-states, ethnic conflict between nonstate and substate actors, and globalized financial networks that funded the conflict, often through illicit means.³⁴ Observing the disintegration of West African states in the early 1990s, journalist Robert Kaplan came to similar conclusions about twenty-first century conflict. The chaotic and lawless megacities of West Africa were, he argued, the auguries of the coming anarchy.³⁵ In other words, it was no longer powerful, centrally organized states that posed the greatest security threat but weak and failing states that might be exploited by nonstate actors.

What all these variants of low-intensity warfare had in common was a consideration of the impact of contemporary globalization on the character of conflict in the late twentieth century. The most recent phase of globalization had been driven by deregulation and a revolution in communications technology. The former led to the removal of barriers limiting the free flow of goods, finance, services, and people; the latter resulted in cheap global communications, the Internet, and an unprecedented sense of global interconnectedness.³⁶ The Internet provided a new global communications platform for nonstate actors to share ideas and tactics and organize in relative freedom and secrecy.³⁷ The removal of barriers facilitated global travel, the easy transfer of large sums of money, and the emergence of what Herfried Münkler calls the shadow globalization economy, from which nonstate actors could draw the resources necessary to wage conflict, including financial transfers from émigré communities, and (possibly illegal) business interests—all of which were easier to operate and to hide in a deregulated global economy.³⁸ William Hartman points out that the 9/11 terrorists transferred over $500,000 into the United States to support their work, but with $1.5 trillion transferred around the world daily, the terrorists’ transactions were too small to attract any attention.³⁹

Moreover, technology that had formerly been limited to states was increasingly available commercially.⁴⁰ In October 1998, the Pentagon requested its Defense Science Board conduct a study on the security implications of the globalization of military production.⁴¹ The report warned of the irresistible leveling effect [globalization] is having on the international military-technological environment. Indeed because of

the proliferation of military technology, the commercialization of former military-specific technology, and the increasing reliance of militaries worldwide on commercially-developed technology, and the general diffusion of technology and know-how, the majority of militarily useful technology is or eventually will be available commercially and/or from non-U.S. defense companies.⁴²

The resulting perception was what one commentator called the democratization of violence.⁴³ Although states had never had a monopoly on the use of force, the contemporary wave of globalization nonetheless appeared to alter the balance of power between states and nonstate actors significantly. It was now easier than ever before for nonstate groups to communicate, organize, sustain themselves on a global scale, and acquire technological and even military capabilities that were once accessible only to states.

Twenty-First Century Irregular Warfare: 9/11, Iraq, and the Periphery

This book argues that 9/11 was the initial catalyst for the turn toward irregular warfare because it exposed U.S. security vulnerabilities in spite of its unassailable conventional military power. However, the initial testing ground for irregular tactics in the twenty-first century was not Afghanistan, the first target of the war on terror. Since the Taliban government had sheltered Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps, the objective there was a fairly conventional one: regime change. It was also the only militarily realistic option at that time since the capabilities, resources, and doctrine of the general-purpose forces were dedicated almost entirely to major conventional conflict.⁴⁴ Policy on IW did not suddenly arrive fully formed immediately after 9/11. Instead, the first testing grounds for irregular tactics in the twenty-first century were the peripheral, or smaller, secondary, theaters of the war on terror—weak states that lacked full control over their borders and territory, that policymakers feared terrorists might exploit as operational bases. On September 19, 2001, Rumsfeld wrote, The President has stressed that we are not defining our fight narrowly and are not focused only on those directly responsible for the September 11 attacks.⁴⁵ While Afghanistan was the opening front in the war on terror, peripheral fronts developed from late 2001 onward across sub-Saharan Africa, in the Philippines, and in Georgia and the wider Caspian Sea region. On these fronts, US action would be led by special operations forces, which specialized in non-traditional warfare. The irregular approach used to secure these areas from transnational terrorists would later be subsumed into the official definition of Irregular Warfare contained in the 2007 Joint Operating Concept, and become, for a time, a core part of the mission of the general-purpose forces and a component of U.S. national strategy. Thus, peripheral counterterrorism operations constituted an important track—though by no means the only one—along which the policy, doctrine, and practice of IW gradually developed.

Yet the peripheral theaters of the war on terror, and their significance, are often overlooked. Most scholars focus on the war in Iraq as the key theater where IW—in particular, counterinsurgency—was rediscovered and implemented in the mid- to late 2000s, with a particular emphasis on the surge in 2007 and, in an institutional sense, on the US Army specifically.⁴⁶ I agree with these scholars that important lessons about counterinsurgency (COIN) were learned from Iraq. The development of COIN in this theater was in part spontaneous and pragmatic, led from the bottom up by officers serving on the ground there, who realized they were facing an increasingly organized resistance distinctly recognizable as an insurgency.⁴⁷ In 2003, Major General David Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, had used counterinsurgency tactics in the city of Mosul based on his experience of nation building in Bosnia and Haiti.⁴⁸ For the most part, however, the deployment of a comprehensive COIN approach across Iraq from 2007 on was down to the subsequent influence of a cadre of scholar-officers, also led by Petraeus, who had a particular devotion to the reclamation of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice, and who, as Paul Rich notes, found a momentary period of influence at the center of political decision-making on Iraq in 2006–07.⁴⁹ While serving as head of the US Army’s Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 2005 to 2007, Petraeus oversaw the rewriting of the Army’s Field Manual on counterinsurgency. In the meantime the insurgency in Iraq gathered pace, policymaking in Washington became dysfunctional, and neither the president nor the secretary of defense could forge consensus on the way forward. This policymaking deadlock provided the political space for enthusiastic COIN advocates to exercise decisive influence on the US approach to Iraq.⁵⁰ The new COIN Field Manual, FM 3–24, provided the doctrinal guidance for the troop surge in early 2007 and attracted so much interest that a trade paperback version was released by the University of Chicago Press.⁵¹ The perceived success of the COIN tactics in Iraq led to Petraeus’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2010 to oversee a similar approach.

Writing in the Clausewitzian tradition of strategic thinking, many scholars who critique COIN in Iraq argue convincingly that the war on terror in this theater was, in Hew Strachan’s words, astrategic.⁵² In Clausewitz’s view, the strategist’s role was to define an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its purpose.⁵³ In other words, a strategy required a political goal and viable military tactics to achieve that goal. For scholars of COIN in Iraq, the US failure there was down to the absence of strategy: COIN offered a set of military tactics, but political leaders could not articulate overall goals and objectives.⁵⁴ The United States therefore needed to return to a Clausewitzian understanding of war in which policymakers provided coherent and realistic political objectives.

The peripheral theaters of the war on terror were not astrategic in this sense. They were governed by different premises and objectives, which included a political goal and a set of military tactics—flawed though they all were. The political goal in these areas, clearly stated in national strategy documents and understood by personnel on the ground, was to strengthen the security and governing capacities of weak and failing states and bolster their ideological appeal so as to prevent violent nonstate actors from finding refuge there, and to diminish the likelihood of local people tacitly supporting such groups. This was a capacious and ultimately unrealistic political goal, but a goal nonetheless. It was also accompanied by a set of military tactics that the relevant policymakers and practitioners appeared to agree on. As policymakers began to interpret the new al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism as a transnational, networked phenomenon, they tentatively began to turn toward nontraditional responses. In this context, irregular tactics were increasingly seen as the best method for bolstering weak and failing states that were most likely to attract terrorists, though such tactics ultimately proved to be an ineffective remedy. This was the Bush administration’s strategy in the peripheral regions of the war on terror, and the campaigns there developed in advance of the introduction and maturation of COIN in Iraq.

In fact it was in operations on the periphery, rather than in a bureaucratic or policy sense or in terms of national strategy, that IW was most advanced in the early years of the war on terror—most likely, because these activities were led mainly by special operations forces that were already trained to conduct unconventional operations.⁵⁵ Under the auspices of Operation Enduring Freedom–the Philippines, a series of campaigns across sub-Saharan Africa (including Operation Enduring Freedom–Trans Sahara) and, on a smaller scale, in the Georgia Train and Equip program, the United States engaged in sophisticated multifaceted campaigns of foreign internal defense (FID) in which US forces would assist in every aspect of counterinsurgency but would stop short of direct participation in combat operations.⁵⁶ In comparison, policy, doctrine, and new bureaucratic manifestations of IW were underdeveloped in the early war on terror. The irregular tactics used from an early stage in peripheral theaters anticipated the formalization of policy, doctrine, and supporting bureaucracy back in Washington, and eventually their application to the larger theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan. The turn toward irregular warfare was gradual. Although the irregular operations on the periphery were quite sophisticated, the IW concept did not come fully formed in late 2001. While the seeds of the comprehensive articulation of irregular warfare contained in the 2007 Joint Operating Concept are visible in the early months and years of the war on terror, the development of a national strategy, catalyzed by 9/11, that incorporated IW took several years to come to fruition. This process was uneven, often ad hoc, sometimes chaotic and contested. Nevertheless, to fully understand the evolution of US Irregular Warfare capacity and its elevation into national strategy, as opposed to merely its use by the Army in Iraq and later Afghanistan, it is important to think more broadly about the lessons policymakers learned from the 9/11 attacks and the ways in which the turn toward irregular operations often transcended the large core theaters of the war on terror, where the initial tactics and objectives were more conventional. Ultimately, then, this book argues that the elevation of IW in national strategy and doctrine developed along multiple complementary tracks. First and foremost, it was a response to the perceived impact of globalization on international security—with the al-Qaeda network and the 9/11 attacks the principal manifestation of this. Second, the peripheral theaters of the war on terror became the initial testing grounds for the utilization of irregular tactics; and, finally, as an insurgency developed in Iraq, that campaign became the focus of a major new counterinsurgency effort for the US Army, subsequently applied in a modified form to Afghanistan. That final track has been the subject of almost all studies of counterinsurgency and the war on terror. This book does not dispute the importance of those core theaters, but it seeks to widen the analysis by considering other locations in which IW techniques were applied and draws attention to the broader project to develop and embed an irregular warfare capacity to ensure full spectrum dominance.

Although the whole of the US government was eventually involved in an interagency attempt to build an Irregular Warfare capability, the individual who did most to drive these changes was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a major proponent of IW in the peripheral theaters of the war on terror. Rumsfeld saw IW as an integral part of national defense because he believed that irregular and hybrid wars would be the wars of the twenty-first century, and, as we shall see, even before 9/11, he worried about America’s vulnerability to asymmetric and nonconventional attacks. In this respect, then, the rise of IW was not purely a bottom-up phenomenon led by serving members of the US military in Iraq and scholar-generals like Petraeus, but also a top-down phenomenon led by the secretary of defense.

To some, this focus on Rumsfeld may seem like a counterintuitive argument. It is well known that as the violence in Iraq became increasingly deadly, Rumsfeld stubbornly refused to use the word insurgency to describe it.⁵⁷ As Jeffrey Michaels argues, it is uncertain whether this was because he either genuinely believed the United States was not involved in fighting a guerrilla war or felt that to make this admission, even in closed political and military circles, somehow reflected a personal failing that in turn could have jeopardized his bureaucratic position and authority.⁵⁸ An important premise of my argument is that the invasion of Iraq was not governed by the same (flawed) strategic logic as the peripheral theaters of the war on terror and needs to be separated from them intellectually and politically—because this appears to be what US policymakers did, at least in the buildup to the Iraq invasion and its immediate aftermath. For most in the Bush administration there was a strong preexisting tendency to see Iraq as a conventional state-based challenge. The problem, they thought, was not that Iraq was a weak or failing state (the concern in peripheral theaters); it was Saddam’s hold on power that was the problem. Regime change in Baghdad was conceived long before 9/11. Leading members of the Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, had lobbied for Saddam’s ouster during the Clinton years, and their support for regime change then had nothing at all to do with networked transnational terrorism or the supposed perils of weak states. The 2003 invasion was conceived and executed as a conventional projection of American power designed to make the Middle East region more pro-American. As Rumsfeld put it in the first meeting of the National Security Council in February 2001, Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that is aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about.⁵⁹ For instrumental reasons,