A Roadmap for Enduring Advantage

Irregular warfare is no longer the shadowy edge of conflict; it’s where strategic competition is already being won or lost. As adversaries blend proxies, cyber aggression, lawfare, economic pressure, and narrative manipulation, the United States risks falling behind not for lack of talent or tools, but for lack of institutional alignment.

This paper serves as the capstone to CACI’s series on irregular warfare and strategic competition, which introduced CAPIA as a practical framework for understanding what matters in irregular warfare. Building on this framework and Positional Play Planning, it lays out how the nation can transform irregular warfare from episodic activity into an enduring, coalition-enabled enterprise embedded across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, education, personnel, facilities, and policy.

This institutional roadmap isn’t another boutique fix; it’s a call to redesign how the nation plans, sequences, resources, and assesses irregular warfare across the full continuum of competition. And if adversaries are already campaigning then the United States must finally build a system that can campaign back.

Read the full whitepaper to explore the logic behind this shift from fragmented irregular warfare efforts to a fully institutionalized national enterprise.