Irregular Techniques for Controlling Under-Governed Space

摘要

The United States government has identified undergoverned areas in weakened or failed states as one of the threats faced by the United States and its allies because these spaces can provide safe havens for terrorists. Under certain circumstances, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) may choose to counter these threats by utilizing specific elements of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to work indirectly through irregular forces to achieve control over the populations within these undergoverned areas. This study uses the cases of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan to determine how irregular forces, with external support, can establish political control of undergoverned space. The cases of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan provide examples of how irregular forces established control of undergoverned space through the coercion and persuasion of military, political, social, economic, and informational techniques. In these cases, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (Lebanon) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (Afghanistan), provided techniques for how organizations providing external support to irregular forces can influence their surrogates to allow the state providing the external support to achieve its foreign policy objectives. To a more limited extent, the study also determines methods that Special Operations Forces (SOF) can utilize to influence irregular surrogates, should SOF choose to operate with or through them to establish control of undergoverned space within weakened or failed states. The author concludes with lessons learned that can be applied to future DoD and USSOCOM Irregular Warfare doctrine design and operational planning.