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TACTICAL THOUGHT
2014 September 29 th
Irregular Warfare can thus challenge us to reconsider how we characterize war and
peace, and can lead us to think about both constructions in more creative and
imaginative ways. A key issue here is to what extent do our own western biases
contribute to the fog of words and thought that seem to surround the term Irregular
Warfare. Besides the apparent spaces of experiences and the horizons of expectations,
there are obviously forces that come into play, in this case, unhinging an otherwise
logically connection. I argue that social structures interpret actions, experiences and
expectations, gains and losses and positions in social value structures.
Decisions on horizons of expectations, such as strategy, not only decide outcomes in
conflicts, they decide on what forms of violence that resources are directed towards.
Such questions effect instant life, death, development or stagnation of different military
systems and units, and thus lay the ground for tactical horizons of expectations. Once
again, if we look at a summary of how Irregular Warfare can be described in broad
terms, the horizons of expectations at the beginning of the 21 st century focusing on high
technological warfare among states, and the spaces of experiences with legacies of
Counterinsurgency from the 50s and 60s, it seems illogical. The empirical
generalization can be discussed as follows. As a term, Irregular Warfare implies
conflicts whose strategy, operational art and tactics focus on the lower end of the
violence spectrum; subversion, terrorism, Guerrilla Warfare, but can also include more
conventional forms of military operations and tactics.
Violence is not restricted to the traditional military practices common to Western
nations and states. Violence can take forms from and between non-state actors against a
state. These conflicts can include Insurgency strategies, where the political and civilian
elements are more important than military concerns and the will and support of the
people can be of vital importance. What distinguishes Irregular Warfare can be argued
to be the inventive intellectual use of limited physical military resources, parallel with
hidden and subversive actions. Drivers are often the endurance and will of the people,
extensive local knowledge and use of means hard to detect of organizing and carrying
out operations and activities. Terrorism and subversion are key elements with the ability
to identify and exploit what is culturally effective against the opponents. This can
include criminal and illicit activities that fall outside of what is morally acceptable in
Regular Warfare. Irregular Warfare relies on fluid, highly adaptable and flexible
networks of influence groupings; ones that are often difficult for conventional military
forces to detect, track and neutralize. This summary of an understanding of the traits of
so-called Irregular Warfare becomes challenging when thinking of tactics.
On the one hand, a social and military paradigm not any longer effective for
contemporary conflicts, an unsatisfactory horizon of expectations, and on the other, a
diffuse and shallowly researched and limitedly educated space of experiences. The stage
for understanding and acting with tactics is new. However, ways to understand and
explain phenomena in the world, even the military and political, have dynamics over
time. The now widespread discussion of COIN, which did not exist before 2006, is a
good example of this. Explanations and understanding related statements can be seen as
constructions of words, given a certain meaning. These affect how we perceive the
world and thus the knowledge which we consider important.
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