Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare

This comprehensive edited volume provides the first canon for SOF, interagency, and conventional forces to understand irregular warfare, competition, and deterrence. The theories and concepts provide insights for students and practitioners to appreciate the dynamics of intrastate conflict as well as internationalized intrastate conflict. It adds new research highlighting the asymmetric strategies of adversaries to subvert the world order, including the malign activities of the CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations. Practitioners can use this information to inform campaign planning as well as contingency plans.Part I provides foundations in resilience and resistance and includes chapters on military science, political science, sociology, and history (including case studies of Cuba, Laos, Tibet, and Colombia). Part II builds on those foundations and examines ways to operationalize methods of resilience and resistance frameworks. It advocates a data-centric approach to understanding and quantifying intrastate conflict to inform foreign policies and military strategies. It also explores the strengths and weaknesses of a coalition approach to achieving collective security.Looking to the future, the book also includes a chapter that explores how cyber, AI, and space will intersect with the deployment of SOF teams. Finally, the book offers an example of how to apply the book's concepts through an examination of Iran in terms of resilience, resistance-measuring and quantifying available opportunities to influence change. Read more