Rediscovering Irregular Warfare

The action itself ranges across the world, beginning in the eighteenth-century North American wilderness. There the opening markers are the deaths of British general Edward Braddock and more than a thousand of his troops in 1755, ambushed by a very small Franco-Indian force, and the formation of a colonial ranger unit better able to wage such wilde

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Time and again, guerrilla warfare seemed to be superseded by the “new new thing”—industrial warfare in the 1910s, aerial warfare in the 1930s, nuclear warfare in the 1950s, network-centric warfare in the 1990s. And yet each time it reasserted itself with a vengeance. Since World War II, insurgency and terrorism have become the dominant forms of con

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“Hybrid threats,” writes Frank Hoffman, “blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare.”5 Hybrid war does not change the nature of war; it merely changes the way forces engage in its conduct. However it is waged, war is war. Much as the term “combined arms” describes the tactical combination of

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SOF resource limitations may require SOF to collaborate with conventional forces in fighting insurgents and terrorists, but SOF should retain the lead in the collaborative relationship and control when and where conventional forces are used in support. This is because SOF’s intrinsic attributes—to the extent they have and safeguard them—give them a

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