In 2013, Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno, Marine Corps Commandant General James Amos, and commander of US Special Operations Command Admiral William McRaven cosigned a document that should have grabbed the attention of the entire American defense establishment. Its central observation was unambiguous: The Pentagon’s concept of competition does not reflect the fundamental reality that “competition and conflict are about people.” A decade later, the Army proposed cutting its special operations forces by up to 20 percent. Congress felt compelled to insert a $20 million provision into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act simply to make permanent US special operations forces’ ability to conduct irregular warfare by, with, and through partners. The defense establishment continued its decade-long debate about whether irregular warfare capabilities are still needed at all. The warning from three four-star generals produced no durable institutional change. Why? And what should the defense establishment do about it now?
The answer is not primarily a question of doctrine, resources, or operational concepts. It is a question of institutional culture, political incentives, and a structural bias so deeply embedded in American strategic practice that it survives every reform effort launched against it. Until the defense establishment names that bias precisely, diagnoses its mechanisms with honesty, and proposes changes that engage the actual levers of institutional behavior, it will continue producing sophisticated frameworks that change nothing.
The Diagnosis: Three Structural Biases
The Measurability Bias
The American defense establishment is organized, resourced, and assessed around what it can count. Platforms, sortie rates, kill chains, network nodes disrupted, high-value individuals neutralized—these are the currencies of institutional credibility because they satisfy the demand for accountability that runs from the operator through the chain of command to the congressional appropriator. This is not a conspiracy or a failure of individual judgment. It is the rational response of a large bureaucratic institution to the incentive structures it operates within.
Irregular warfare’s decisive variables are not measurable in this register. The quality of a movement’s relationship with a population, the depth of legitimacy accumulated over a decade of dispute resolution and economic provision, the population’s willingness to work with and absorb costs on behalf of an actor—none of these appear in a dashboard, a readiness report, or a congressional testimony. They are real strategic variables. They determine outcomes. And they are systematically excluded from the institutional calculus because the institution cannot account for what it cannot count.
The consequence is predictable and has been demonstrated repeatedly: campaigns that achieve every measurable objective while losing the strategic contest. Iraq and Libya produced regime change on schedule, followed by years of instability. Afghanistan produced two decades of measurable progress, training metrics, governance assessments, and infrastructure investment, against a backdrop of strategic deterioration that the measurements could not see, analyze, or cope with. The measurability bias does not cause failure directly. It causes the US defense enterprise to optimize for the wrong variables while remaining blind to the ones that matter.
The Temporal Mismatch
The American political system operates on a four-year electoral cycle. The Pentagon’s planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process operates on a two-year appropriations cycle. Individual military careers turn on three-year assignment rotations. Theater campaign plans are written in annual increments. Irregular warfare, when practiced by actors who understand it, operates on a generational timeline.
This is not an inconvenience. It is a structural vulnerability that sophisticated adversaries deliberately exploit. Iran’s strategic architecture, the “axis of resistance,” the patient accumulation of proxy capacity across four decades, was built on a theory that American domestic politics cannot sustain long-horizon commitments. The current campaign of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin in Mali and Burkina Faso is not designed to defeat the Malian army; it is designed to outlast the Malian state’s capacity to govern, a process measured in years of sustained pressure rather than decisive engagements. The Taliban operated on a similar theory for twenty years and proved it correct.
The temporal mismatch means that even when the strategy correctly diagnoses a problem requiring sustained long-term investment—in partner capacity, in governance support, in the relational bonds that constitute real population-centric legitimacy—it cannot translate that diagnosis into durable institutional commitment. Each new administration inherits the problem, reframes it in its own terms, and begins a planning process that will be disrupted before it reaches maturity. Each commander inherits a theater, reorients the campaign to his or her priorities, and departs before the consequences of that reorientation are visible. The institution learns tactically in rotation cycles. It does not learn strategically, across the timescales that matter.
The Conventional Primacy Reflex
The third structural bias is the deepest and the most resistant to reform. American military culture, professional identity, promotion pathways, and resource allocation are organized around the preparation for and execution of conventional high-intensity conflict. This was true during the Cold War, survived the post-9/11 era as a persistent countercurrent, and has reasserted itself in the era of strategic competition. The Army’s proposed reduction in special operations forces is not an anomaly; it is the expression of an institutional preference that has never been genuinely displaced.
The conventional primacy reflex operates through several mechanisms. Career incentive structures reward command of conventional formations and proficiency in conventional warfighting skills. Promotion boards, shaped by the preferences of senior leaders whose own careers were built in the conventional track, systematically undervalue irregular warfare expertise. Budgetary processes are designed for platforms and systems, not for the patient investment in partner relationships and governance capacity that irregular warfare requires. War colleges teach strategy through the lens of state-on-state competition, employ Clausewitzian curricula, and place irregular warfare as a footnote rather than a discipline.
The result is a defense establishment that treats irregular warfare as a specialized capability maintained at the margins, the domain of special operations forces, of civil affairs, of a handful of regional experts, rather than as a fundamental mode of strategic competition that permeates every instrument of national power and demands commensurate institutional investment. When the strategic environment shifts, as it does, cyclically, the joint force rediscovers irregular warfare, launches a reform effort, produces doctrine and concepts, and then allows the conventional primacy reflex to reassert itself as soon as the immediate pressure subsides. This cycle has repeated itself with remarkable consistency across the post-Vietnam era.
Why Previous Reform Efforts Have Failed
Understanding why reform efforts fail is prerequisite to designing ones that succeed. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a diagnosis.
Reform efforts in the irregular warfare space have characteristically targeted the visible symptoms of the institutional deficit—doctrine, organizational structure, training programs, special operations funding—while leaving the underlying incentive structures untouched. The Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2020 National Defense Strategy was a genuine intellectual contribution. It did not change what the joint force rewards. The Irregular Warfare Center’s establishment in 2022 was a meaningful organizational step. It did not change how promotion boards evaluate career patterns. The 2024 NDAA provision codifying special operations forces’ irregular warfare authorities was a useful legislative protection. It did not change the Army’s decision to reduce the force that would employ those authorities.
This is not to diminish these efforts. It is to observe that they all operated at the level of declared policy and organizational structure, which is where institutional change is easiest to achieve and least likely to produce behavioral change. The institution’s actual behavior is determined by what it resources, what it promotes, and what it holds leaders accountable for, and on all three dimensions, irregular warfare remains a secondary priority dressed in primary rhetoric.
A second pattern is seen in reform efforts that have consistently been framed as additions to the existing institutional architecture rather than as arguments for fundamental reorientation. The ask has been also fund irregular warfare rather than reconsider what irregular warfare is for. This framing is politically understandable; it minimizes the threat to existing equities and reduces institutional resistance. It is strategically inadequate, however, because the core problem is not that irregular warfare is underfunded but that it is misconceived. Adding resources to a conceptually flawed approach produces a better-resourced conceptually flawed approach.
The deepest reason reform efforts fail is that they do not engage the civil-military dimension of the problem honestly. Irregular warfare’s temporal requirements are fundamentally incompatible with the American democratic political system’s natural time horizon, not because the system is defective, but because sustaining long-horizon irregular campaigns requires a quality of bipartisan political consensus and public understanding that the defense establishment has consistently failed to build.
The Prescription: What Must Change
The following prescriptions are offered not as a comprehensive reform agenda but as the minimum set of changes that address the actual mechanisms of the institutional deficit rather than its symptoms.
Restructure What the Joint Force Measures and Rewards
The most durable institutional change available to senior military leaders is the redesign of assessment frameworks for irregular warfare operations and the career pathways of practitioners. This requires two specific actions.
First, the joint force must develop and mandate the use of assessment frameworks that capture the variables that determine irregular warfare outcomes: structural position mapping, governance performance metrics, and population alignment indicators measured behaviorally rather than attitudinally. These frameworks exist in prototype form in the special operations and civil affairs communities. They have never been elevated to the level of campaign assessment that commands and theater strategies are evaluated against. Making them mandatory and holding commanders accountable for their results over timescales that transcend individual assignment cycles is the foundational reform from which everything else follows.
Second, promotion and assignment systems must demonstrably value irregular warfare expertise. This means deliberately tracking officers with deep regional knowledge, language proficiency, and irregular warfare operational experience through career paths that lead to strategic-level positions, not lateral assignments that cap at the O-6 level. It means war college curricula that treat irregular warfare as a primary intellectual discipline rather than a regional studies elective. It means, ultimately, that the officers who design and assess American strategy have personally been shaped and sharpened by the institutional logic of the adversaries they are tasked to understand.
Reframe the Civil-Military Conversation Around Timelines
The most important conversation the American defense establishment is not having is the one about time. The joint force has become skilled at explaining to civilian principals and congressional overseers what irregular warfare requires in terms of resources and authorities. It has not developed the capacity to explain what irregular warfare requires in terms of time, and what the political system must provide to make long-horizon strategic commitments viable.
This conversation requires senior military leaders to make arguments that are institutionally uncomfortable. It requires telling civilian principals that the choice to engage in irregular competition carries a genuine temporal commitment, measured not in deployment cycles but in years of sustained investment, and that the absence of that commitment produces the predictable failure pattern the joint force has experienced repeatedly. It requires telling congressional overseers that appropriations cycles that reset strategic priorities every two years are structurally incompatible with irregular warfare campaigns if they are to be leveraged as a primary competitive instrument. It requires working with civilian partners to facilitate the bipartisan political consensus around specific irregular warfare commitments that makes those commitments durable across administrations.
This is not the military telling civilians what to decide. It is the military fulfilling its professional obligation to provide honest strategic counsel about the actual requirements of the strategic choices civilian leaders make. The alternative, accepting inadequate timelines and compensating with tactical ingenuity, is the recipe for the strategic failures the United States has already suffered.
Separate Irregular Warfare from the Great Power Competition Framing
The current strategic discourse has created a dangerous false choice: Irregular warfare is either a supporting capability for strategic competition, useful insofar as it can be employed against Chinese or Russian interests, or it is a legacy of the counterterrorism era that should be reduced as the joint force orients toward peer competitors. Both framings are strategically incoherent.
Irregular warfare is not a specialized capability or a phase of competition. It is a permanent mode of strategic interaction that operates continuously, in every theater, across the full spectrum of conflict. The Sahelian jihadist movements that are currently displacing Western influence across West Africa are not primarily a counterterrorism problem or a strategic competition problem. They are an irregular warfare problem: actors accumulating structural position and relational legitimacy faster than the states they oppose, in an environment where no amount of kinetic pressure can substitute for governance performance. Subordinating attention to that problem to the requirements of a Taiwan scenario or a Baltic contingency is not strategic prioritization; it is strategic avoidance dressed in the language of resource discipline.
The institutional conversation must reframe irregular warfare as a standing strategic requirement, as permanent and pervasive as the conventional deterrence mission, rather than as a specialized capability maintained for specific contingencies. This reframing has resource implications, organizational implications, and, most importantly, conceptual implications for how the joint force and broader defense establishment understands the competitive environment it inhabits. Strategic competition and irregular warfare are not alternative framings of the strategic environment; they are simultaneous and interdependent features of it, and a defense establishment that can only think about one at a time is not thinking strategically.
The Conversation Only the Defense Establishment Can Have
This essay opened with the observation that General Odierno, General Amos, and Admiral McRaven’s 2013 warning produced no durable institutional change. It is worth asking why three four-star officers, representing the Army, the Marine Corps, and the special operations community, speaking in unison, failed to move the joint force. The answer is that they were arguing for resources and attention within an institutional framework that remained unchanged. The framework—what the joint force measures, what it rewards, what its civilian overseers demand of it, and what the political system can sustain—was not addressed by the argument. It could not be, because the argument was made within the joint force rather than about it.
The conversation that the defense establishment must now have is different in kind. It is not an argument for more irregular warfare capability within the existing institutional architecture. It is an argument about the architecture itself, about whether American strategic institutions, like the war colleges, as currently constituted, can teach joint force officers how compete effectively in the irregular warfare environment that the next several decades will present. That argument requires the defense establishment to be honest about failure—not the failure of individual campaigns or commanders, but the systemic failure of institutions that were not designed for the competition they are now required to win.
The actors the United States faces in irregular competition—patient, governance-focused, relentless in their investment in population relationships, and explicitly theorized around the exploitation of American temporal vulnerabilities—are not winning because of superior weapons or superior ideas. They are winning, where they are winning, because they understand the nature of the competition and have organized themselves accordingly. The American defense establishment understands the nature of the competition. The question is whether it has the institutional will to organize itself accordingly. That question cannot be answered in essays like this one. It can only be answered by the sustained, honest engagement of the people who read them.
Andrew Rolander is an irregular warfare and strategic competition analyst supporting the US Department of Defense. He is particularly interested in maritime strategy and irregular warfare.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Zachary Wright, US Air Force
