Military Review English Edition September-October 2016 | Page 32
How America Will
Be Attacked
Irregular Warfare, the Islamic State,
Russia, and China
Dr. Sebastian Gorka
[The Future Operating Environment] “will feature the erosion of sovereignty, weakened developing states, the empowerment of small groups or individuals, and an increasingly
contested narrative environment favoring agile nonstate
actors and state actors demonstrating persistent proficiency
in the irregular domain.”
—ARSOF Operating Concept: Future Operating
Environment, U.S. Army Special Operations Command
adept at exploiting irregular warfare (IW) and unconventional modes of attack will exploit these forces. This
article is an introduction to three of the most important
enemies we face today and who we will also face in the
future, and how these actors use IW and unconventional
warfare (UW) against our interests: the Islamic State,
China, and Russia.
You may not be interested in War but War is interested in you.
—Apocryphally attributed to Leon Trotsky
There are many kinds of manouevre [sic] in war, some only of
which take place upon the battlefield.1
—Winston Churchill
A
s this paper is being written, the U.S. national
security establishment is under significant
internal and external pressures: internally
from the consequences of prosecuting the longest war
in the Republic’s history, which has seen unprecedented
post-Cold War operational tempos, matched by constant downsizing of our forces and sustainment budgets;
externally from the events occurring in the Middle East,
North Africa, Asia, and Africa, which has included the
rise the Islamic State (IS), the most powerful jihadist
organization of the modern age, and the concurrent
displacement of more than sixty-five million refugees, a
historic world record surpassing even World War II.
These pressures are not going to abate, which will
most probably lead to the reality of our armed forces
having to accomplish more missions with less resources.
At the same time, both nonstate and nation-state adversaries of the United States who have become supremely
30
The Operating Context
The United States is still engaged in the longest
formal military campaign since the founding of the
Republic. Launched in October 2001, the war against
the global jihadi movement—including al-Qaida and
IS—persists and will continue into the next administration. We may have weakened the original al-Qaida’s
operational capacity, but the threat has transformed
and moved elsewhere in the last fifteen years to areas as
diverse as Yemen, Mali, and Nigeria, and more recently
to Libya and Syria, with IS becoming a fully-fledged
insurgency mobilizing eighty thousand-plus fighters.
Additionally, the jihadist threat to the continental
United States has not subsided but increased as the
bloodshed and mass violence of San Bernardino and
Orlando attest. In fact, according the terrorist monitoring organization SITE, between 2 June 2016 and 1
August 2016, outside of Iraq and Syria, a jihadist attack
is perpetrated every eighty-four hours.
September-October 2016 MILITARY REVIEW