Conflict, Defense, Power & Security The Lessons of Two Decades of War: A Review of IWI's Inaugural Conference
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November 8, 2021
By
Various Authors | Modern War Institute
Perry World House Postdoctoral Fellow Sara Plana writes about the Modern War Institute's first ever Irregular Warfare Initiative conference.
The Irregular Warfare Initiative’s inaugural conference was conducted on September 10, 2021, and brought together almost nine hundred participants. This conference builds on the mission of IWI—to bridge the gap between scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to support the community of irregular warfare (IW) professionals. A conference medium aims to complement the podcast series and written pieces, providing an interactive means of discussing topics of interest to this community...
Unconventional Warfare with Melissa Lee and Mark Grdovic—by Sara Plana
Unconventional warfare (UW) is just one tool in a toolkit of militarized and nonmilitarized tools to advance foreign policy objectives. Research shows that UW is appealing to states for several reasons: it allows them to outsource effort to another actor, compete with a rival without needing to maintain superiority with that target, and hide involvement and escape retaliation through plausible deniability. But the risks and disadvantages of employing UW often do not receive similar attention, especially in policy audiences.
A key downside to UW is that by delegating some form of warfare to nonstate armed groups, these groups could use the support they receive to engage in behavior outside what their state sponsors wish to achieve. States have often struggled to find nonstate partners with preferences sufficiently aligned with theirs, and it is rare, if not impossible, to have perfect alignment on all interests.
Controlling the behavior of sponsored groups always comes with tradeoffs. For example, the tools used to increase monitoring over these groups could risk the ability of states to plausibly deny their involvement. In addition, once these relationships are built, the question of when to walk away from a given group involves giving up a potential advantage in a theater or potentially harming a state’s ability to engage with other groups later on by harming that state’s reputation as a partner. However, it is an open empirical question whether a state’s experiences of UW in one theater affect the likelihood that a potential future group would partner with it. At the same time, continuing a relationship with a nonstate armed group is not always strategically beneficial. Another important downside of employing UW is that it is much easier to sponsor nonstate warring parties to break institutions and societies (and prolong civil wars) than to build them back up.
Given the failures and risks of UW, the discussion challenged whether practitioners should reframe their approach to the tool, investigating first whether a situation actually merits its use as opposed to including it by default in every options list. Experts agreed that it might not be the most applicable tool for most situations.
