Get Moving on That Irregular Warfare Center, DOD Leaders

LTC Eugene Chu
"It’s hard to list all the ways our friend and fellow veteran, John McCain, left his mark on our country, especially when it comes to our national security. He saw a lot of things more clearly than others, not least of which was that in 2014, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to rebuild the Russian Empire went far beyond Crimea. But John saw something distinctive in the strategy that Russia deployed to invade and eventually annex Crimea: with their intelligence branches funding and organizing Russian sympathizers, they destabilized the region and set the stage for invasion. John recognized a reality that now stares us all in the face, that in order to outcompete our adversaries in the 21st century, it’s not enough to just have more and better missiles, ships, and aircraft. We must also compete before the war, in the gray zone of irregular warfare.

We all talk a lot about great power competition, but the practical details of what that means and how we engage in it are less understood. When it comes to irregular warfare, it’s not just Russia with their tactics in Crimea and sweeping disinformation campaigns. It’s also Iran employing proxies in an effort to eliminate the Jewish State and gain regional influence. It’s China trying to coerce foreign governments into economic deals in Asia, South America, Central America, and Africa—the latter of which we saw during our travel there in February. Often without a shot fired, our adversaries are trying to build their influence in a way that can displace our own critical relationships around the globe and put our troops at a disadvantage if a conflict ever came to pass. How we understand cultures, use information, and shape relationships in competitive spaces is critical to achieving our national security goals against these adversaries, without starting a war. "...