Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide (V1.0, 5 April 2016)

Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide is forty-four pages of doctrine, definitions and annotated further reading, written to be carried rather than studied. It is the smallest document in this archive and one of the most useful, because it states the doctrinal position on unconventional warfare in the plainest available language and then tells you where to read further. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.

What this document is

The purpose is stated on the first page: to provide a pocket reference of unconventional warfare doctrine, concepts, academic inquiry and suggested supplementary reading for military leaders and planners. The guide is candid that it is not a complete treatment of the subject, and it structures itself accordingly, spending sixteen pages on doctrine and terms and then nineteen on annotated references.

It leads with definitions because that is where the confusion is. Joint Publication 3-05.1 defines unconventional warfare as activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla force in a denied area. The guide then prints the statutory definition from Public Law 114-92, section 1097 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2016, and the two are set next to each other so the reader can see that the law says “or guerrilla force” where the doctrine says “and”. That is a small difference with real consequences for what counts.

The guide is unusually direct about the political weight the term carries. It notes that unconventional warfare provokes strong responses in both directions and that many people using it misunderstand it, and then reduces it to a sentence: unconventional warfare is support to a resistance movement. It gives the historical pattern, American support to a semi-organised militarised irregular force such as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001, and immediately warns against treating that pattern as the definition, since support to a movement in its incipient state is small, sensitive, long in duration and often conducted under Title 50 authority, while support to a movement in a war of movement is large and open.

The core of the doctrinal half is the seven-phase construct, from a steady state through preparation, initial contact, infiltration, organisation, buildup and employment to transition. The guide insists that the phases in doctrine are descriptive rather than prescriptive, present to make planners consider the full range of possibilities rather than to be executed in order. It also covers the components of a resistance and the practical problem of coordinating foreign disclosure and the release of US tactics, techniques and procedures, which is the kind of administrative obstacle a planner meets before any of the theory becomes relevant.

The second half is a reading list and it is the reason the guide outlasted its version number. References are grouped into law and policy, joint, Army and ARSOF doctrine, research and science, white papers and academic studies, books, and videos, each with an annotation explaining what it is for. The ARIS studies appear in that list, which is how a document with no series branding of its own came to sit inside an ARIS archive.

Contents

The document’s own contents list, in its own order.

Provenance and lineage

This document needs its record set straight. The ARIS repository lists it as the Resistance Pocket Guide and the hosted file is named for 2019. The document itself is titled Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide and prints V1.0, 5 April 2016 in the running footer of every page. The PDF was created in April 2016. Neither the title nor the year in the filename is supported by the document, and this page uses what the document prints.

Its relationship to the ARIS series is also worth stating precisely. The title page carries no ARIS branding, no series statement and no named author, editor or project lead. The point of contact is given as the USASOC Deputy Chief of Staff G3, Sensitive Activities Division G3X, at Fort Bragg, the same office that sponsors the ARIS volumes. It recommends ARIS studies in its research and science section. It is best described as a USASOC staff product that sits alongside the series rather than within it, and it should be cited that way.

No rights notice of any kind is printed on the document. It carries neither the Title 17 statement that appears in most ARIS volumes nor a copyright line nor a distribution statement. This page records that as an observation about what the front matter prints, and makes no claim about the document’s copyright status either way.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the reference we use when a piece needs the doctrinal definition of unconventional warfare stated correctly, including the difference between the joint definition and the statutory one. Its seven phases are the frame that our coverage of unconventional warfare campaigns assumes, and its insistence that those phases are descriptive is a useful corrective when reporting treats doctrine as a script. It pairs naturally with the Resistance Operating Concept, which addresses the same problem from the perspective of a state preparing to be occupied rather than an outside power supporting a movement.

The components of a resistance are treated at far greater length in Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare, and the guide is a good way to check the vocabulary before going there. Its annotated reading list remains a fair map of the open literature as it stood in 2016. Definitions are recorded in our irregular warfare and resistance glossary, the field is indexed in resistance core concepts, and the rest of the archive sits in the ARIS archive.

Download

The hosted filename retains the doubled extension and the incorrect year under which the file was originally uploaded, so the link above is spelled exactly as the file is stored. The document itself is the Unconventional Warfare Pocket Guide, V1.0, 5 April 2016.