regular vs irregular warfare

Following over a decade of irregular war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is attempting to reset towards a conventional, regular type of warfare. If there is one thing that Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new book, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought in the Civil War, delivers on from the outset is that the irregular war no sideshow to the larger military campaigns beginning in 1861. Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept, 2008. The above quote reflects the discomfort that the US military had (and continues to have) in coming to terms with an aspect of warfare that was becoming increasingly apparent in the wake of its struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. How irregular warfare differs from regular warfare (4 ways) a) Sub-state actors are fighting (make up either one or both sides).

Irregular Warfare (IW) Joint Operating Concept (JOC).

Finally on 11 September 2007, the Department of Defense began the process for formally creating Joint Doctrine for Irregular Warfare by publishing the . Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare, and so is asymmetric warfare.. Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. Irregular warfare is warfare in which one or more combatants are irregular military rather than regular forces. States Air Force, Irregular Warfare, AFDD 2-3, Washington, D.C., August 1, 2007, p. 11. Unconventional warfare is a frequently misunderstood and often maligned form of warfare. Some of these ideas have already been incorporated into official Chinese military thinking. These included economic warfare, financial warfare, telecommunications and network warfare, resource warfare, information and media warfare, and international law warfare, to name but a few. Regular vs. irregular The words "regular" and "irregular" have been used to describe combat forces for hundreds of years, usually with little ambiguity. The . IW JOC. battlefields dominated by irregular warfare will be dramatically improved. Irregular warfare favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capacities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will. c) Lack of uniform (causes confusion). The requirements of a government's chain of command cause the regular army to be very well defined, and anybody fighting outside it, other than official paramilitary forces, are irregular. It is often portrayed as U.S. commandos running around the jungle and blowing up bridges, secret missions to assassinate uncooperative foreign leaders, or U.S. support to repressive regimes for neo-colonial ends. b) Line between combatant and non-combatant blurred (non-state can be ad hock, less organized). The term “hybrid warfare” describes a strategy that employs conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. The overuse of the term 'warfare' in contemporary military terminology to describe both a specific type of engagement and the type of forces participating in it can lead to false conclusions.