4. Department of Defense · Minor
Redefine irregular warfare to cover state adversaries
Printed page 121 4. Department of Defense
“Define irregular warfare as "a means by which the United States uses all elements of national power to project influence abroad to counter state adversaries, defeat hostile nonstate actors, deter wider conflict, and maintain peace in great-power competition."”
What has happened
- Not started
The definition was not changed, and the strategy document that would carry a change was published inside the window and does not use the term at all. The 2026 National Defense Strategy was read in full on 2026-09-03: over its complete 34-page text, **"irregular" and "irregular warfare" each appear zero times**, as do "unconventional", "Special Operations", "SOCOM" and "USSOCOM". So the strategy neither adopts the Quote's proposed definition nor rejects it — it declines the subject. Irregular warfare remains defined for the Department at 10 U.S.C. 127e and the surrounding chapter, and the only in-window amendment touching the statutory irregular warfare architecture is FY2026 NDAA sec. 1204, which substitutes the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict for the Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency in 10 U.S.C. 345(c)(4)(B) — a change of who chairs the Irregular Warfare Center's advisory arrangement, not of what irregular warfare means. The Quote's proposed wording ("counter state adversaries, defeat hostile nonstate actors, deter wider conflict, and maintain peace in great-power competition") appears in no enacted instrument, no Federal Register document and no allowlisted departmental publication in the window. 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 negative search covered the page 121–122 irregular warfare asks together.
- The instrument for a definitional change would be a DoD directive (DODD 3000.07) or the National Defense Strategy.
- The National Defense Strategy has now been read in full (2026-09-03). It had earlier been out of reach; media.defense.gov now serves it. The strategy PDF (6.9 MB, titled 2026 National Defense Strategy, author DoW, created 2026-01-23) was fetched and all 34 pages extracted. The negatives above are term counts over the complete text, not an index search. The event was re-dated from the search date to the instrument’s date and now carries the strategy as Evidence of action on the ask’s subject that does not satisfy it — this is a not started that rests on a document read, not on a refused page. DODD 3000.07 itself remains unread.
- What the strategy carries instead of irregular warfare: a single counterterrorism bullet under Line of Effort 1 (“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 under Line of Effort 3 in the same terms. Neither engages the Quote’s definition.
- Action
- issue
- Object
- definition of irregular warfare
- ID
- 246