In what might be seen as a response to last year’s popular Army Field Manual 3-24 on Counterinsurgency (pdf), the U.S. Air Force has issued a new publication on “Irregular Warfare” (pdf).
“Irregular warfare (IW) is defined as a violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations. IW favors indirect approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities to seek asymmetric approaches in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.”
Though less rigorous and less original than the Army manual, the new document still contains points of interest.
It notes, for example, that counterinsurgency is not the sum total of U.S. military objectives. To the contrary, sometimes the U.S. will side with insurgents: “Various US government organizations are postured to recruit, organize, train, and advise indigenous guerrilla or partisan forces,” the document observes.
“In some UW [unconventional warfare] operations, the use of US military aircraft may be inappropriate, tactically or politically. In those cases, training, advising, and assisting the aviation forces of insurgent groups, resistance organizations, or third-country nationals may be the only viable option.”
See “Irregular Warfare,” Air Force Doctrine Document 2-3, 1 August 2007.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.