Imagining the Near-Future of American Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific

The Environment

Malign actors deploy cyberattacks, economic coercion, disinformation, and illicit gray zone tactics to destabilize the modern Indo-Pacific region. Competition in the region is currently not characterized by kinetic engagements—it is a protracted, complex struggle that advances incrementally. Economies, friendly nations, and innocent people pay the price. The primary perpetrators include the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a range of Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs) – the 4+1 construct of bad actors (while acknowledging that all current US security strategy documents explicitly highlight the CCP as the primary national security threat).

These actors destabilize the international order with hostile intent, prioritizing their interests over others’ sovereignty by subverting, manipulating, and circumventing established laws, rules, and norms to their benefit at the cost of others. To counter this, considering recent Irregular Warfare (IW) developments, this paper outlines a new IW framework designed to undermine and mitigate 4+1 aggression while pushing decentralized, offensive IW to the advantage of America and its partners. The intent of this framework is to develop an evolving irregular warfare network of actors. It would eventually encompass multiple cells that inflict damage on the CCP as it seeks to dominate maritime chokepoints, Russia as it manipulates media and elections, Iran as it targets Middle Eastern adversaries in the region, North Korea as it evades sanctions and escalates tensions, and VEOs pursue a range of political objectives through violence or the threat of violence. All of these actors employ some degree of asymmetric tactics.

The Theory of a New Irregular Warfare Approach in the Pacific

Conventional military strategies seek decisive victories within defined timelines. While complementary to conventional approaches, the IW campaign proposed here instead emphasizes shaping the operational environment, mitigating adversarial influence, and securing enduring strategic advantages over years or decades. These goals are accomplished through sustained influence activities, gaining and maintaining legitimacy (for both the US and its partners) among local/regional populations, and operational successes—both big and small — while minimizing large-scale confrontations. Though targeting the 4+1 through more direct methods will always be an option, this campaign prioritizes human-domain solutions. It leverages localized partnerships and unconventional approaches to build, enhance, and empower resilient networks. The desired outcome is to diminish malign influence and ensure a persistent competitive advantage for friendly actors.

While maintaining proficiency in traditional warfighting capabilities remains essential for potential major theater conflicts, this campaign demands more than conventional defenses and doctrine—it requires autonomous or semi-autonomous resistance/insurgency elements across the Indo-Pacific, including capable operators, self-reliant economies, and resolute combatants. In addition to IW fundamentals like interagency cooperation and trust-building with partners, the campaign suggests even more unconventional, potentially contentious concepts. It requires incorporating emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, encrypted peer-to-peer coordination, and decentralized logistics. While some of these innovations are not yet fully operational, they are within reach given the pace of research and technological advancement. Diverging from reliance on partner militaries or elite units like Special Operations Forces (SOF), the campaign proposed here argues for more localized, self-sustaining IW communities. They will operate independently of persistent US presence or fragile supply chains, extending beyond military personnel to civilian populations—fishermen, maritime workers, small business owners, and the like. They will be educated and equipped to counter coercion and form decentralized, hard-to-detect cells. Embedded within societies and amplified by technology, this IW campaign will ensure greater adaptability and resilience than current constructs. It will endure beyond adversarial control through active human effort aligned with a decades-long timeline.

Successful IW hinges on dominance over cognitive perception. The CCP, Russia, and their counterparts recognize this dynamic and exploit it in what is often dubbed the “New Cold War” or “Second Cold War.” They frequently forgo kinetic strikes in favor of narrative manipulation—disinformation campaigns, fabricated news, election interference, and psychological operations—to erode trust, generate confusion, and undermine perceptions of legitimacy. Strategic planning for the US traditionally encompasses air, land, maritime, space, and cyber domains. Yet the most critical and complex domain to manage is absent from this list: the human domain.

One might argue that the human domain is inherent in every aspect of strategic planning. Ideally, that would be the case, but conflicts in American history over the past half-century suggest otherwise. Furthermore, considering the human domain may seem so obvious that it is somehow and too often overlooked, it must be prioritized. Integral to the human domain is the cognitive dimension, which must be fully acknowledged and strategically leveraged in any successful IW campaign. However, before taking action and trying to “fix” things, which is the preferred method for the US, there must be a deliberate process to understand the environment and the people in it so that any actions are not in vain. Alternatively, actors must use this deliberate process so that the wrong actions are not taken. This leverage cannot be an ancillary consideration—it must constitute the campaign’s central focus. Only after spending sufficient time understanding the motivations, grievances, and levers of each targeted population—friendly and enemy—should the following steps be taken.

Information dominance must extend beyond countering misinformation and work toward actively shaping reality for affected populations. Merely competing in influence operations is inadequate. The capability to generate and customize narratives in real-time, utilizing AI-driven content, will influence public sentiment and define it. This is the primary objective, and unfortunately, it is currently absent from existing strategies. While adversaries are not always the direct target, properly influencing public sentiment in real-time can enable friendly actors to shape the environment before adversaries respond. Emerging technologies are essential to secure this advantage, potentially including deepfake-resistant authentication utilizing blockchains and decentralized data hubs. Integrating traditional narrative techniques with advanced tools will prevent adversaries from corrupting the information space. A successful IW campaign must preempt adversarial narratives, establishing a dynamic, self-reinforcing digital network that drives public discourse based on free expression and a free press. Public discourse serves as the mechanism through which reality is constructed. Timely exposure to the truth and practical narratives will ideally positively influence decision-making, shaping outcomes before conventional military force becomes necessary.

The Practical Application of a New Irregular Warfare Approach in the Pacific

Consider a fishing village off the coast of Vietnam or Indonesia, where CCP trawlers illegally harvest fish and intimidate locals. These actions are not the result of rogue operatives; they are directed by the highest levels of leadership in the CCP. In this scenario, there is no time for headlines to distort, misrepresent, or dilute the narrative. Instead, the campaign delivers an immediate response: a team equipped with AI tools produces a video—a fisherman denouncing the perpetrators on turbulent waters, displaying the damaged nets, with GPS locations to verify the invasion of sovereignty. It disseminates from devices in Hanoi to screens in Jakarta before Beijing reframes it as “routine patrols.” This is not public relations but a genuine strategic communications instrument. It unites locals into a cohesive network, exposes the CCP’s tactics, places them at a disadvantage, and prompts reevaluation on their part. While not flawless, blockchains represent the most efficient and shareable instruments in the current information toolkit to ensure authenticity in examples like the one above. Facts are verified and unalterable to prevent falsification of the fisherman’s testimony through anti-deepfake technology. The apps for this resistance incorporate biometrics and secure keys, ensure integrity, and thwart CCP proxies from impersonating the fisherman. Data hubs distributed across the Indo-Pacific eliminate a centralized target for 4+1 to compromise or destroy. This scenario represents ground-up, irregular, integrated deterrence and can support free and fair journalism by providing reputable sources of information. This line of effort will report on what is happening so the media, often under-resourced to investigate such activities, can effectively expose and counter the disinformation and malign activities of the 4+1.

Technology alone does not constitute the entire effort. Populations must be informed. Educational institutions must train students to detect disinformation and misinformation—instilling the ability to question, “Who is disseminating this, and what is their intent?” In Manila, students should be able to dissect a CCP-orchestrated rumor regarding “US basing” and trace it to a Beijing disinformation hub. Training programs in rural areas must equip local populations to identify Russia’s financial influence schemes, North Korea’s illicit trade operations, or VEO recruiting. These illicit and hazardous activities can be countered with rigorous training and sustained education at all levels.

Large bases, centralized command structures, and prominent targets represent an outdated warfare paradigm. Agile cells are the alternative—ordinary individuals transformed into operatives. Office workers, truck drivers, market vendors, teachers, and yes, individuals with rifles in some cases—not uniformed soldiers, but locals with intimate knowledge of their communities—are critical assets. Envision a South Pacific island nation’s economic exclusion zone that covers hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Fishermen who the Coast Guard has trained detect CCP vessels encroaching—encrypted radios facilitate communication, and drones are deployed. At low cost, these individuals relay intelligence to a blogger who disseminates it unfiltered. No one awaits authorization from a senior officer—they act and adapt. If the CCP disables one vessel or Russia’s proxies apprehend an individual, the other cells remain operational and healthy. Despite one segment being disrupted, the network survives.

The community of resistance is well-equipped but not conventionally so. It is furnished with secure applications, ISR tools, cameras, sensors, targeting systems, and power sources. It is a modern-day take on the Coast Watchers of WWII, but instead of just watching for adversarial movements, they simultaneously mitigate misinformation. Locals already utilize publicly available satellite imagery in numerous regions to navigate routes and avoid bad weather. They need to be slightly better trained and armed with secure apps and devices to augment existing capabilities. This is all to create strategic challenges for adversaries and ensure there is no centralized vulnerability to exploit.

Economic warfare in the campaign warrants distinct emphasis because of its critical role in determining competitive outcomes. It must be redefined as a core component of this reimagined IW campaign. Rather than mitigating 4+1 coercion through alternative investments, the campaign must establish micro-resilience communities—localized economic ecosystems engineered to resist external manipulation. These zones would leverage AI-enabled supply chains, decentralized finance (DeFi) models, and cryptographic barter systems, enabling small nations and communities to function beyond the reach of traditional financial constraints. The goal is economic growth and autonomy, transforming supply chain resilience into a tool of irregular competition. If the necessity of extending an IW campaign beyond the military domain is not apparent, the economic warfare component clarifies this requirement. Militaries alone cannot execute this campaign. Effective irregular competition demands economic, technological, and civilian-led initiatives, creating conditions where adversaries struggle to assert dominance. The future of IW will not be determined solely by military actors but by the capacity to shape, sustain, and defend independent economic structures that deny adversaries leverage before kinetic engagement.

Financial mechanisms are essential to IW—for good and bad actors alike. The CCP restricts trade, Russia manipulates accounts or emboldens rogue regimes, Iran controls oil and exports weapons, and North Korea circumvents the rule-based order through sanctions defiance. This campaign will outmaneuver malign economic warfare with micro-resilience networks. Consider a resistance scenario where the PLA partially occupies Taiwan. Small factories and solar farms that remain functional could employ AI to reroute commodities when enemy-induced congestion occurs in different areas on the island. Locals can transact with blockchain tokens, reducing reliance on banking systems susceptible to CCP coercion. They might cultivate food, repair equipment, stockpile medicine, move people through underground systems, and develop unconventional logistics lines onto the island to ensure sustenance despite CCP blockages—thereby enabling continued resistance.

While forward basing remains an important component of US national security strategy, establishing persistent, indigenous capability enables like-minded people to defend themselves. Fixed installations will retain relevance, but US and partner assets must evolve into dynamic, nonlinear teams of teams, or to borrow a phrase from General Stan McChrystal – that integrate seamlessly into civilian and commercial infrastructure. This approach will necessitate innovations such as subsurface ISR hubs, maritime traffic manipulation tools, and rapidly deployable autonomous supply elements. This effort concurrently embodies a key aspect of IW’s contribution to furthering the US’s worldwide Defense Industrial Base (DIB) aims. In IW, the objective is to create an unpredictable support system for friends and partners while diminishing adversarial ability to operate effectively across tactical, strategic, political, industrial, and diplomatic levels. The aim is not merely to outmatch the 4+1 in firepower or logistics but to render its strategies ineffective before they can be implemented. The campaign’s logistics architecture should ideally operate as an adaptive system—drones deliver equipment to isolated combatants, AI anticipates the CCP’s next maneuver or Russia’s disinformation surge, and encrypted networks unify the effort. Governments, technology enterprises, private industry, and committed individuals work to adjust and sustain the apparatus.

Establishing IW networks in unrestricted or permissive environments is manageable. The challenge, admittedly, is finding creative ways to establish such networks in contested environments where opposition to authoritarian regimes often leads to imprisonment, threats to family members left behind, and/or death. This may be done by developing IW elements outside of the contested environment to be inserted later, enabled by communications and other logistical support. Resistance in contested environments always comes with greater risk. Whether in contested or permissive environments, the political will of all parties involved will be significant to success or failure.

Conclusion

A forward-looking IW campaign in the Indo-Pacific cannot afford to replicate historical models. The 4+1 will undoubtedly attempt to emulate or surpass US and partner IW efforts, pursuing destabilization and strategic revisionism. Achieving a more stable, prosperous, and secure Indo-Pacific requires a departure from static alliances, predictable force postures, and reactive approaches. Instead, the US and its partners must leverage the human domain and cognitive space, utilizing emergent technologies, resistance infrastructures, and decentralized communities to construct a new operational reality. So, what are the next steps? After spending time and resources to fully understand the people, the environment, adversaries, and the intended strategic outcomes, the US must design the campaign in great detail, with as many elements of the government, private sector, industry, think tanks, academia, and foreign partners brainstorming and working together. The US will likely need new and expanded authorities to execute as described here. A long-term investment must be routinely reassessed and adjusted—a decades-long endeavor. If successful, this campaign has the potential to disrupt, cut, and bleed evolving adversarial strategies while gaining time and space for the US and its partners to compete more forcefully.

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