What is the US Navy Doing to Avoid A Gaza Fiasco? Navy Role in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism

Why was a service built around aircraft carriers and submarines suddenly deploying thousands of sailors to patrol rivers, clear roadside bombs, and help draft governing documents for Iraqis? This volume reproduces the Congressional Research Service report that laid the question before lawmakers: Navy Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism Operations: Background and Issues for Congress, report number RS22373, written by Ronald O'Rourke, the CRS Specialist in Naval Affairs, and dated December 23, 2009. CRS is the nonpartisan research arm of the United States Congress; a report of this kind takes no position but organizes the facts, the budget figures, and the issues for Congress a legislator might raise in conducting oversight. The report captures a precise inflection point. By late 2009 the United States had fought in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was arguing that capabilities improvised to support troops in theater needed a permanent institutional home in the base budget rather than in wartime supplementals. The 2009 Quadrennial Defense Review was underway, expected to settle how much emphasis the services placed on irregular versus conventional warfare; Gates described his proposed FY2010 budget as roughly 10 percent irregular, 50 percent conventional, and 40 percent dual-purpose, a formulation that recurs throughout. O'Rourke documents how thoroughly the assumption that irregular warfare belonged to ground forces had broken down. By 2009 some 14,500 sailors served ashore and another 9,200 afloat across Central Command, performing riverine operations, explosive ordnance disposal, infrastructure protection, combat logistics, medical care, and engineering, while Navy aircraft flew much of the close air support and nearly all airborne electronic attack, and military sealift moved about 90 percent of the equipment bound for the theaters. The Navy had stood up new organizations, the Navy Irregular Warfare Office, the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, and a dedicated riverine force, and launched the Global Maritime Partnership and the Africa and Southern Partnership Stations. Much of the report's value lies in its granular accounting of how irregular warfare appeared in the FY2010 budget, from migrating NECC funding into the base budget to procurement decisions on the Littoral Combat Ship, Joint High Speed Vessels, DDG-51 destroyers, SSGN submarines, the P-8 patrol aircraft, and unmanned systems. O'Rourke pointedly notes that the Navy itself flagged some items as only debatably irregular, turning that into an oversight question, and surfaces the deeper tension: how much should the Navy invest in small wars relative to its enduring role as a strategic reserve against a modernizing Chinese navy? He quotes Admiral Gary Roughead and Vice Admiral Barry McCullough debating the point, and preserves the actual committee language of the FY2010 cycle along with an appendix of framing statements by Gates and Deputy Secretary William Lynn. Readers should know that the publisher's framing title invoking a Gaza fiasco is editorial repackaging; the 2009 document does not address Gaza. This Nimble Books edition reproduces the report faithfully and adds a full editorial apparatus prepared for this volume: an original Historical Context essay setting the report in the post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan defense debate; two complementary plain-language abstracts, an accessible explain-it-simply summary and an advanced analytical reading of the report as legislative tradecraft; a Glossary of terms such as IW, CT, NECC, and QDR; Indexes of persons, places, and concepts; and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis situating the document among related naval and defense-policy works. It serves defense analysts, congressional staff, scholars, students, librarians, and engaged general readers.