Institutional impedance: Why the post-war American military fails to adapt irregular war

Before the Second World War, the United States successfully prosecuted a number of counterinsurgency campaigns, defeating irregular adversaries in the Philippines and throughout the Caribbean. Since, the United States has not defeated a single irregular adversary despite numerous campaigns against such enemies. This paper hypothesizes that the institutional United States military's failure to fight effectively in irregular environments stems from its difficulty in constructing a flexible theory of victory and its preference for ignoring the integration of non-military factors in campaign planning. While this explains the observed phenomenon, the change after World War Two appears to correlate to an increase in the political influence of the institutional US military that promotes its inflexibility and focuses its campaign planning on overwhelmingly military mechanisms. Though the ongoing operation in Iraq offers an example of adaptation, the need to circumvent the institutional decision-making process in order to change the campaign plan actually reinforces the notion that the US military as an institution has extreme difficulty adjusting to the irregular environment due to its inflexible theory of victory and difficulty incorporating non-military endeavors into operational plans.