4. Department of Defense · Minor
Incorporate irregular warfare directly into the National Defense Strategy
Printed page 122 4. Department of Defense
“Direct that irregular warfare resources, capabilities, and strategies be incorporated directly into the overall National Defense Strategy instead of being relegated to a supporting document.”
What has happened
- Not started
Tested against the exact instrument the Quote names, and it fails. The Quote asks that irregular warfare resources, capabilities and strategies be carried in the National Defense Strategy itself rather than relegated to a supporting document. A new National Defense Strategy was issued on 2026-01-23 and was read in full on 2026-09-03: over its complete 34-page text, **"irregular" and "irregular warfare" appear zero times**, and so do "unconventional", "Special Operations", "SOCOM" and "USSOCOM". The strategy carries none of it — not the term, not the capabilities, not the resources. Its only adjacent content is one Line-of-Effort-1 bullet, "Counter Islamic Terrorists. The Department will maintain a resource-sustainable approach to countering Islamic terrorists, focused on organizations that possess the capability and intent to strike the U.S. Homeland", and an Africa paragraph in the same terms. What can be read elsewhere points the same way: the FY2026 NDAA's irregular warfare provisions are peripheral rather than strategic — sec. 1094 permits the Secretary to establish an Irregular Warfare Exercise Laboratory, sec. 1204 changes who oversees the Irregular Warfare Center — and sec. 1095 establishes a Commission on the National Defense Strategy to review the strategy without naming irregular warfare among the elements it must examine. See the Chapter 4 cluster negative search for pages 121-122.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
One search covered the page 121–122 irregular warfare asks, #246, #248 and #251.
- The open question is closed (2026-09-03). It was predicted that one document would settle #246, #248 and #251 at once, and it did. media.defense.gov answers a normal browser request — war.gov was the wrong site, not a wall — so the strategy PDF (6.9 MB, titled “2026 National Defense Strategy”, author “DoW”, created 2026-01-23) was downloaded and all 34 pages extracted as text. The event above was re-dated from the search date to the instrument’s date and carries the strategy as contrary Evidence, because action on an ask’s object that does not satisfy it is cited on the not started event itself. This is the strongest of the three negatives: the other two ask about a definition and a designation that could live in several documents, while this Quote names the National Defense Strategy and nothing else, so the ask was tested against its own instrument and failed.
- Lawfare’s article on the 2026 NDS (https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-administration-releases-2026-national-defense-strategy), first used as Secondary Evidence for #134/#135, does not discuss irregular warfare; it has now been retired from those items’ frontmatter in favor of the Primary and was never usable here.
- Action
- issue
- Object
- National Defense Strategy
- ID
- 248