The arc of irregular war bends toward persistence.
The military establishment has spent the better part of a generation in conceptual retreat. After two decades of counterinsurgency doctrine, expeditionary campaigns, and the attempt to build partner forces in hostile political terrain, the consensus among major military powers has shifted back toward peer competition: large formations, long-range precision fires, electronic warfare, the battle for contested airspace.
The retreat is understandable. The wars that consumed resources, reputations, and soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq did not end in strategic victory. The lesson many drew was that irregular warfare was a trap — that state militaries should not enter it, or should enter it only under conditions so narrow as to be nearly theoretical.
But irregular conflict has not retreated with them. The landscape of violence across the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, across the Syrian and Iraqi borderlands, in Myanmar's interior, in the eastern forests of the Congo — none of these have adopted the doctrines of conventional military competition. The non-state actors who inhabit these environments fight as they always have: through political embedding, population exploitation, patience, and the manipulation of legitimacy.
What has changed is the technology available to all parties. Commercial drones, encrypted communications, satellite imagery accessible to formation commanders at low cost, and cheap precision guidance have altered the operational calculus of irregular warfare without transforming its fundamental character. A militia with a drone and a targeting network is not a peer competitor. But it is more capable than it was, and its operational reach has extended.
State militaries reorienting toward peer competition are not wrong about the strategic landscape. But they risk institutional forgetting of hard-won knowledge about the character of irregular conflict at a moment when that conflict is expanding, not contracting. The arc of irregular war bends toward persistence.
