The JAPCC paper Air Power in Countering Irregular Warfare has been released. One of our major workstrands in 2007 was to consider the role of air (and space) power in what we called security and stability operations and as characterised by NATO operations in Afghanistan. The paper encapsulates the thoughts of the practitioners, academics and others who contributed to the articles in our Fall 2007 Journal, and to the discussion at our 2007 Annual Conference, and from further research by the JAPCC.This work is extremely timely as on 30 April 2008 the Allied Joint Operations Doctrine Working Group recommended to the Military Committee Joint Standardization Board that the USA, as custodian, should start work immediately on a revised Allied Joint Publication 3.4 Crisis Response Operations, and subordinate doctrinal documents, to include doctrine to address evolving missions such as counterinsurgency operations and irregular warfare.The JAPCC will use Air Power in Countering Irregular Warfare paper to inform this work. By way of background the International Military Staff (IMS) confirmed in November 2007 that the extant NATO policy in Military Committee policy (MC327/2) is flexible enough to incorporate the desired doctrinal changes. Also the IMS were working on an Asymmetric Warfare Concept, of which irregular warfare was a subset.  The Allied Air Operations Working Group, responsible for air power doctrine also agreed in April 2008, based on the US recent experience, that the place for the irregular warfare doctrine, including that related to air power, was in joint and not single environment doctrine.

Air Power in Countering Irregular Warfare (167 kb)