The American Way of Irregular Warfare

M.T. Mitchell

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The American Way of Irregular Warfare is a memoir co-authored by retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Charles T. Cleveland with Daniel Egal that explores how the United States military has employed the concept of irregular warfare.[1] The authors draw on Cleveland’s observations from his 37-year military career to argue the U.S. should restructure its military with doctrine, authorities, and education conducive to proper understanding and the proper employment of irregular warfare. Cleveland commanded the United States Army Special Operations Command and served in special operations through the unique historical period spanning the 1980s and the U.S. Global War on Terror. He asserts that operational and strategic level leadership must learn to better employ tactical irregular warfare units to solve people-centric campaigns.

He defines irregular warfare as conflict below the threshold of conventional warfare waged in the minds and wills of the population with limited support.[2] His theme throughout is that warfare is a human endeavor and the U.S. military must retool its understanding of how it affects human behavior through psychological, relational, economic, and military means. Humans are the key to successfully influencing local politics and culture, in Cleveland’s mind. Thus, leaving a competent partner force in place is the only way the US can avoid future indefinite commitments of Americans to stay and fight.

While satisfied with the U.S. military’s tactical performance in irregular warfare, Cleveland rejects the argument that special operations can raid their way to victory or capture enough terrain. Cleveland uses the strategic failures of the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to argue the U.S. military must focus on its failure to structurally, doctrinally, and militarily invest in irregular warfare to succeed.

In practice, Cleveland sees leveraging of a partner force interspersed with American Special Operations Forces advisors as the ideal model. Advisors serve as a connecting sinew between fighters and external assets as a partner nation gains military competence and political legitimacy. He wants the U.S. to eliminate the grey-zone gaps that nation-states and non-state actors exploit in competing against a nuclear and conventionally dominant U.S. military. He argues the United States military is designed to dominate in the land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace domains but has failed to understand or appreciate the necessity of influencing populations.

Cleveland asserts locals must be empowered to retain legitimacy, or operations and U.S. personnel will foster resentment and insurgency against an occupying force. He offers a vignette from his experience removing Manuel Noriega from power in Panama. Panamanians approached U.S. soldiers with a report of a homicide. In response, the American leaders armed and empowered the local police detective. Cleveland observes that the Panamanian detective solved the case better than any platoon of U.S. soldiers could have.[3]

He contrasts U.S. relative success in Panama to the dissolving of the Iraq Ba’ath Party and the costly insurgency that followed. Cleveland warns that the U.S. military cannot afford to ignore its operational and strategic inadequacies in irregular warfare operations to focus on conventional warfare.

Cleveland concludes with a structured call to action. He recommends starting with a bipartisan congressional investigation into the employment of U.S. irregular warfare capability with a focus on policies, strategies, and campaigns in irregular conflict. Beyond a broad reassessment, he offers a range of proposals for institutionalizing the investigation’s conclusions.

Cleveland makes a number of recommendations. First, he recommends a restructuring of the Department of Defense to create a hybrid combined department with expertise from the military, State Department, intelligence, and private enterprise to focus on irregular warfare campaigns. He also suggests establishing a second four-star Special Operations headquarters dedicated to irregular warfare, separate and different from current special operations commands. He suggests the new command could be component under one of the military service departments similar to that of the Department of the Navy’s relationship with the US Marine Corps.

To support the restructuring initiatives he proposes, Cleveland suggests creating civilian educational institutions independent of professional military education to continue the academic study of irregular warfare. These outside educational institutions would critique military capability, policies, and strategies while capturing and analyzing irregular warfare actions for American public scrutiny. Lastly, he suggests creating professional military education outside the conventionally minded service-specific professional military education system. He points to the Naval Postgraduate School’s master’s degree focused on irregular warfare as a positive example worth emulation.

While thoughtful, Cleveland’s proposals are ripe for critique. He applies irregular warfare to every scenario as the golden key while ignoring factors that seem to preclude any reasonable likelihood of fostering local legitimacy in places such as Afghanistan.

Cleveland and his co-author also use exhaustive half-page footnotes that merely amplify the message in the original paragraph. They discuss the concept of an American way of irregular warfare, but Cleveland fails to provide a succinct definition that works across the instruments of national power. However, he does reference several different current military definitions in his footnotes.

Cleveland rightly observes decisive victories are unlikely in the nuclear and information age. Anyone seeking to understand irregular warfare as integral to the entire continuum of warfare should read this book.