David Maxwell
Irregular warfare (IW) refuses to sit still. It shifts with politics, adapts to technology, and lives in the human domain where definition is always contested. That is why the argument matters. If we ever stop arguing about irregular warfare, then irregular warfare will be dead. Not because it disappears, but because we will have turned it into a static concept, disconnected from strategy and stripped of utility.
This tension sits at the heart of the problem. Practitioners want clarity. Policymakers want clean definitions. Bureaucracies demand terms that can be codified, resourced, and measured. Yet as LTG Mike Nagata observed on a recent Irregular Warfare Institute podcast, “So long as we can’t settle on a definition of the term, the likelihood we’re going to make this a useful instrument for national security purposes, or frankly, for any other purpose, is pretty low.” He is right. But he is also incomplete. The failure to settle the definition is not only a weakness. It is also a source of strength. The debate itself forces rigor. It exposes assumptions. It sharpens thinking.
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