We all do IW!

Irregular Warfare is a hot buzzword these days, the kind of generic catch-all phrase that covers all those things the American military doesn’t do all that well but are actually a lot more “regular” than most would like to believe.

The Small Wars Journal linked to an Inside Defense piece (behind a paywall, which the NewsWire does not have the capital to tear down) reporting that the House subcommittee on unconventional threats agrees unanimously that there needs to be an “Executive Agent” for Irregular Warfare. As opposed as I normally am to creating yet another bureaucratic agency, there may be some value in
this. As the SWJ excerpt points out:

“There are a lot of different people that have concerns” with irregular
warfare operations, Smith said, adding an interagency approach would
ensure those concerns would be heard.

Damn straight. Just about everybody has some sort of capability to offer for IW fight. If there is anything my Special Operations class taught me, it is that Major Ray is right. SOCOM is not the beast for this. There’s too much going on.

This wide field is a key reason to assign an overall Executive Agent for this, but it’s also a major challenge. For such an agent to be effective, it’s going to need a few key qualities:

• A clear chain of command. One way of doing this might be to establish a SOCOM-like organization, with its own budget, and fit the civilian agencies into that command structure somehow. Regardless of how it works, if this agent doesn’t have some real power, they’re going to get the shaft. Big Green and Big Blue won’t want to send men or money to this mission, and if they can’t be forced to, they won’t. The same goes for the CIA, or the FBI. Somebody (by which I mean a person, not an agency) has got to be in charge, and they’ve got to be in charge all the way.
• Its own money. This goes along with the issues from above. If this agent can’t buy its own gear, it will get secondhand castoffs that nobody wants anymore. See Operation EAGLE CLAW’s helicopters for an example.
• A bunch of brains. Even though eventually one person (and therefore one agency) is going to be running the show, they can’t be an intellectual dictator. There has got to be a joint discussion going on with this thing. That should seem obvious, but if care isn’t taken to make sure it happens, it just won’t.

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