May 2025
We founded Inter Populum: The Journal of Irregular Warfare and Special Operations in 2023 to be “the locus of professional exploration, discussion, and debate on irregular warfare, special operations, and their role in strategic competition.” Much has changed since then, but we maintain that irregular warfare—and its nexus with special operations—have only grown in importance. As the second Trump administration takes shape, irregular threats are on the rise, and SOF is increasingly seen as the force of choice to address these challenges. As Christopher Miller makes clear in his contribution to Project 2025, now is the time to capitalize on SOF’s hard-earned experience in counterterrorism by revising USSOCOM’s mission to include irregular warfare in the context of great-power competition, including deterrence and defense of the homeland.[1]
General Bryan Fenton seems to agree. In recent testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, the USSOCOM commander said that SOF are “America’s irregular warfare experts.”[2] He further argued that “SOF are tailor-made for this era. Rapidly responding to crisis, disrupting terrorist organizations, and asymmetrically deterring our adversaries.” Irregular warfare has been—and will remain—central to USSOCOM’s mission. Of the five main mission sets that comprise irregular warfare under U.S. doctrine, four (CT, COIN, UW, and FID) are core SOF missions. The fifth (stability operations) is often conducted in conjunction with the interagency, though frequently with SOF in the lead. We aim to keep Inter Populum at the center of the conversation, fostering the kind of debate and analysis needed to navigate what General Fenton called the “most complex, asymmetric, and hybrid threat environment” of the past four decades.
To operate effectively in this environment, irregular warfare practitioners—from SOF to general purpose forces to the intelligence community and the interagency—need timely research and fresh ideas on irregular warfare. We need a genuine exchange of ideas, much like the one developing between Inter Populum and Small Wars Journal. The academic community of interest is broad, spanning civilian universities and government institutions, from the DOD’s Irregular Warfare Center and Joint Special Operations University to the Naval Postgraduate School and National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs (home to the Joint Special Operations Master of Arts program, chaired by our Editor-in-Chief). The field is open for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers—from operational units to think tanks to PME classrooms—to engage in the debates that will serve as a knowledge base for confronting this evolving threat environment.
The early response to Inter Populum has been overwhelmingly positive, with great feedback and deep engagement on topics ranging from unconventional warfare to the “many ways to be irregular.” We have received many excellent submissions (thank you to all who have submitted their work for consideration!) and many volunteers to help with the peer-review process (thank you to our peer reviewers for their valuable time and commitment). The result has been a compelling collection of content—from commentary to long-form research—that contributes meaningfully to our understanding of irregular warfare and its intersection with SOF. As we continue to develop our web-based platform and print circulation, we hope you will consider joining the discussion by contributing your own ideas to the journal.
Sincerely,
Christopher Marsh, Fort Liberty, NC
Ryan Shaw, Tempe, AZ
James Kiras, Maxwell AFB, AL
[1] Project 2025, p. 121-123.
[2] Prepared comments before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, April 9, 2025.
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October 2023
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Inter Populum: The Journal of Irregular Warfare and Special Operations. A product of the Competitive Statecraft Initiative at Arizona State University, this publication aims to be a central voice in the scholarly literature on issues related to irregular warfare (IW), special operations, and the intersection between them. Inter Populum will be a peer-reviewed academic journal for the scholar and practitioner, a place to explore everything from lessons learned through historical case studies, to current best practices, to the nature of future conflict. We are very excited to introduce what we hope will become the central medium for discussion, debate, and the collegial exchange of ideas among the IW and special operations communities of interest.
Inter populum is Latin for “among the people.” In 2005, General Rupert Smith coined a phrase when he postulated that rather than large-scale, interstate wars between nation-states, the 21st century would be dominated by “wars amongst the people.”[1] Of course, there have been wars among the people as long as there have been people, and it remains to be seen whether we can avoid a great power war in this century. But the human domain is the principal concern of both IW and special operations, and is therefore the particular focus of this journal.
U.S. doctrine has long recognized that the defining feature of irregular warfare is the struggle for control over or support of relevant populations. Most recently, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff define IW as “a struggle among state and non-state actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy.”[2] The 2020 Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy emphasized the relevance of IW in great power competition as well as its economic aspect, and committed the Department of Defense (DoD) to mastering it as a core competency.[3] A more expansive definition of IW, one perhaps better suited to current and future strategic competition, is offered by defense expert Seth Jones. He states that IW “refers to activities short of conventional and nuclear warfare that are designed to expand a country’s influence and legitimacy, as well as to weaken its adversaries.”[4] We encourage and look forward to vigorous debate on the scope and continually evolving character of IW in future issues of Inter Populum.
Special operations—from direct, time-sensitive, and discrete “surgical strikes” to indirect, longer-term “special warfare”—have long been considered critical to conducting or countering IW. However, as the IW Annex to the NDS made abundantly clear, one myth in need of shattering is that IW is coterminous with countering terrorism (CT), that Special Operations Forces (SOF) own the CT mission, and therefore SOF are the only ones who can play a meaningful role in IW. Nothing could be further from the truth. CT is only one of the military missions under the IW umbrella, and conventional forces play a critical role in all of them. More broadly, IW can be considered the military contribution to competitive statecraft, which demands a coordinated and synchronized whole-of-government / whole-of-society approach in which interagency and cross-sector partners play a central and, in many cases, leading role. Thus, Inter Populum intends to focus on the nexus between IW and special operations, as well as the integration of these activities with those of other government agencies, civil society, and the private sector. In doing so, Inter Populum will drive the analysis, reflection, and conversations necessary to reconceptualize IW for an era of strategic competition.
Inter Populum will publish two online issues per year, with both issues combined into one printed volume annually. Copies will be made available across the DoD, to other government agencies, academic institutions, and many other stakeholders.
We look forward to establishing Inter Populum as the locus of professional exploration, discussion, and debate on IW, special operations, and their role in strategic competition. But we cannot do it without support from readers and contributors like you. Please consider submitting your own work for publication in an upcoming issue. Thank you, and welcome to the discussion.
Christopher Marsh, Fort Liberty, NC
Ryan Shaw, Tempe, AZ
James Kiras, Maxwell AFB, AL
[1] Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
[2] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Warfighting: Reference Copy, JP 1, Volume 1 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020), GL-4.
[3]Department of Defense, Summary of the Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2020), 1.
[4] Seth Jones, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), 11.
