Marc sort of mentioned it in one of his posts here, but words not only have meaning, they shape the way we perceive and explain the world. Imagine a doctor from the 16th century and a doctor from the 21st century explaining the life cycle of a disease. The doctor from the 16th century would not only be limited by available knowledge, but by his vocabulary. Not only do we have more knowledge, we have developed additional terms that explain certain phenomena that simply were inconceivable previously. More to the point, words shape the way we define problems (whether simple or complex), to include the nature of war and how we should respond to it.

After several false starts, under GEN Abrams the Army seemed to have finally relearned that war is not simply war, but that the nature of war varies greatly, as does the way we should wage it. If the book, “Army at Dawn” is considered credible, than at the start of WWII we had officers who didn’t see the value of armor, and sincerely believed they could defeat Rommel’s armor with horse Calvary. This further illustrates our reluctance to change, thus true leaders are those who have the ability to push past these self imposed cultural constraints that limit how and what we think (we’re more like Mao’s communist puppets than we want to admit).

Whether or not irregular warfare is old term in a new dress is not important, what is important is that our Army as a whole didn’t understand the underlying concepts of IW, so therefore resurfacing the term was critical in facilitating a needed cultural change within the Army to enable it to adapt to the type of war it is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Terms can help facilitate a more accurate understanding of the problem, which is the first step to effectively solving any problem. Is the term IW needed? Definitely!

I’ll take a stab at further mudding the waters by attempting to explain away the apparent conflict between irregular warfare and stability operations.

In short irregular and conventional warfare are broad strategic approaches to solving a problem with armed force. In conventional warfare the objective is defeating the enemy’s fielding armed forces and/or forcing their leaders (usually state leaders) to capitulate by targeting their national infrastructure. In irregular warfare the objective is controlling (which means influencing) the populace. There is a gray area in the middle where there is some overlap, but if one attempts to control the populace with conventional warfare they will fail unless they identify the entire populace as hostile and target them for genocide or dislocation.

To further complicate the matter, unconventional warfare tactics such as guerrilla warfare and sabotage can be used to support conventional warfare. If the focus is on defeating fielding enemy forces or coercing/killing their leadership versus controlling the population, then it is still conventional warfare. An interesting note is that the first Special Forces qualification course was called the PSYWAR course for psychological warfare (or political warfare). At least at one time we understood the true nature of this type of warfare.

Moving on to stability operations, FM 3-0 states we do offensive, defensive, and stability operations in both conventional warfare and IW. This is overly simplistic, but it does clarify that stability operations are an operation, not a strategic approach in itself. It further states there must be a degree of peace (stable to unstable peace) before we can conduct stability operations, which may mean we need to first conduct offensive operations to clear an area, then defensive operations to provide security for the populace while concurrently conducting stability operations in the areas secured.

Stability operations can be conducted in numerous situations, including counterinsurgency operations, peace enforcement operations, humanitarian assistance operations, etc. The objective is to establish, or re-establish a safe and secure environment and facilitate “essential” services. The military’s role can range from providing logistics to security to actually providing the services as a stop gap measure.
Stability operations, if successful, create a window of opportunity for effective political intervention. They are not an end in themselves.

Since most of us are focused on COIN currently (a mission within the scope of IW), stability operations are a supporting operation to help establish conditions to effect government control of an area. As stated earlier there are two types of control, coercive and legitimate. If the situation warrants the government conducts defensive operations (coercive control of the populace), then they strive to achieve legitimate control as quickly as possible with stability operations and other political activities.