Irregular Warfare Center Achieves Milestone Growth in FY25, Pivots to Homeland Resilience and the Indo-Pacific in FY26
ARLINGTON, VA—The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) has concluded an exceptionally productive year dedicated to advancing the understanding and application of Irregular Warfare (IW) across the defense community and its global network of partners. The IWC has cemented its role as the central hub for innovation and synchronized effort in irregular warfare, focusing its efforts on refining educational standards, providing expert subject matter input to the Joint Staff, and fostering meaningful collaboration across sectors and borders.
The Center’s digital education footprint expanded dramatically throughout the year, making foundational and advanced IW knowledge more accessible than ever before. The flagship course, IW 101, saw phenomenal success with over 2,300 enrollments and is now a mandatory prerequisite for all special operations force’s students attending the Army Command and General Staff College. Building on this success, the IWC successfully deployed the self-paced IW 110: Approaches for Homeland Security and Defense Course for DoW personnel and international partners, pivoting essential IW knowledge to professionals focused on the homeland.
IW 201 began making waves by offering sophisticated comparative analysis and timely case studies, including China’s gray zone strategy and Russia’s use of IW in Crimea. Specialized training programs, including the Transformational Irregular Warfare Leaders Thought Courses (TILT-C) and the IW Analysts Course for the Army’s 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), were conducted globally, actively synchronizing cutting-edge IW content across diverse units.
“The success of this past year is a testament to our commitment to institutionalizing Irregular Warfare knowledge. By dramatically expanding our digital catalog from over 2,300 enrollments in the now-mandatory IW 101, to deploying the more advanced IW 201 with timely case studies on gray zone strategy, we are not just educating, we are actively synchronizing and professionalizing the IW community,” said IWC Director Dr. Dennis Walters. This ensures that every practitioner, from our newest students to our senior analysts, is equipped with the shared, cutting-edge expertise required to face tomorrow’s complex challenges across the joint force and with our global partners.”
Beyond the classroom, the IWC served as a catalyst for critical IW research and strategic discourse. It successfully hosted its third annual University Research Colloquium, which brought together junior scholars and senior practitioners to strengthen the vital bridge between academia and the operational community.
The Center relaunched PRISM: The Journal of Complex Operations, which continues to serve as the leading scholarly journal for irregular warfare. Strategically, the IWC engaged in complex analyses ranging from examining China’s maritime gray zone operations to supporting the development of actionable foresight products, such as the Taiwan Occupation Foresight Workshop. Collaboration also grew significantly, with the annual symposium on Total Defense bringing together over 300 experts from across five continents.
On the global stage, the IWC provided leadership to international bodies, including the European Hybrid Center of Excellence, and enhanced NATO Integrated Deterrence by embedding critical IW insights into scenario development alongside more than 20 allied nations. The Center also successfully co-hosted the Intelligence Support to Irregular Warfare Symposiums and saw its digital reach expand, growing its social media presence. Its “Spotlight” newsletter continued to succeed with a subscriber base of over 10,700 and increasing.
Looking ahead to Fiscal Year 2026, the IWC has announced a dynamic slate of upcoming events designed to tackle the most pressing IW challenges and strengthen collective resilience. The second quarter will feature the pivotal Maritime & Rail Transportation Working Group, a cross-sector forum dedicated to identifying vulnerabilities, mapping critical gaps, and developing integrated, actionable solutions to counter gray-zone activities, insider threats, and sophisticated cyber-attacks across U.S. ports and global shipping.
The Annual IWC Symposium, the Center’s premier annual event, is scheduled to take center stage in June 2026 and will shift its focus to the foundational topic of Homeland Defense, featuring a powerful keynote and targeted panels for practitioners, allies, interagency, industry, and academia.
The third quarter of 2026 will also include a dedicated Critical Infrastructure Working Group, a crucial forum dedicated to identifying and mitigating IW threats targeting the systems and networks that keep the nation running. Building on a prior year’s success, the IWC will co-host the next IW Intelligence Symposium with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USD(I&S)) in the third quarter, which will provide a detailed, global examination of adversary capabilities and the complex convergence of threats, including how transnational criminal organizations and state-sponsored criminality are leveraged in the gray zone.
Capitalizing off the success of past colloquiums, in the fourth quarter. The colloquium brought together junior and senior scholars, as well as practitioners, to discuss a range of topics related to modern irregular warfare.
In the Indo Pacific, the IWC is focusing on strengthening regional alliances to counter malign influence. In the spring of 2026, the IWC will host several events with partners and allies, focusing on Foreign Interference and Malign Influence and a strategic communications course. Leveraging the IWC’s functional area networks (FANs) to empower allied forces in countering disinformation. The Center will expand its footprint to East Asia in the third quarter of FY26, collaborating with the Joint Interagency Task Force West and the Drug Enforcement Agency. This joint training will provide international border officials with the tools to identify irregular threats and transnational criminal networks, a critical security step as the U.S. and partner nations explore the opening of new direct air routes.
The Center will also continue its virtual “Lunch & Learn” Lecture series with timely topics such as Chinese Cognitive Warfare, Building Societal Resilience Against Hybrid Threats, Mapping the BRICS+ Cryptocurrency Ecosystem, and Measuring Impact of Messaging. The IWC remains committed to ensuring U.S. irregular warfare priorities are integrated into multinational planning as it works to secure the future.
“Looking ahead to FY26, our focus is crystal clear: to strengthen our nation’s resilience against the most complex irregular threats. From safeguarding our essential supply chains at the Maritime & Rail Transportation Working Group to dedicating our premier annual Symposium to Homeland Defense, the IWC is driving the hard work that matters,” said Walters. “We will continue to serve as the vital coordinating body, bringing together the best minds from defense, interagency, industry, and our allies, to collectively stay ahead of the curve and secure our future.”
For more information follow us on:
Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/company/irregularwarfarecenter/?viewAsMember=true
X https://x.com/IrregularWarCtr
Check out our website https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/news/
NEWS INFO
Date Taken:
01.01.2026
Date Posted:
01.02.2026 11:41
Story ID:
555642
Location:
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, US
Web Views:
14
Downloads:
0
PUBLIC DOMAIN
This work, Irregular Warfare Center Achieves Milestone Growth in FY25, Pivots to Homeland Resilience and the Indo-Pacific in FY26, by Pedro Rodriguez, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
