Beyond COIN: Governance Warfare and the Changing Character of Irregular Conflict
Why today’s decisive contests are increasingly fought through institutions, not campaigns
For more than two decades, counterinsurgency has exerted a gravitational pull on how irregular warfare is understood, debated, and operationalized. Even as doctrine evolves and the language shifts to strategic competition, campaigning, or the “gray zone,” the underlying assumptions that shaped COIN continue to structure how many institutions perceive irregular problems. COIN no longer appears as a named framework. It appears as the default mental posture: the instinctive way planners define the problem, the way staffs organize action, and the way organizations explain legitimacy, integration, and influence.
That persistence reflects professional formation. Many practitioners built their operational identity inside COIN’s logic—its emphasis on population security, governance support, and the idea that integrated civil-military action could reshape outcomes in contested environments. That experience created deep muscle memory: what “success” looks like, what “progress” feels like, and what “good planning” requires.
But the strategic environment has shifted. The contests that increasingly decide advantage operate through institutions, rules, procedures, standards, and legitimacy ecosystems that change slowly and compound effects. Power is exercised through governance and administrative shaping—sometimes quietly, sometimes aggressively, often without the clear signatures of insurgency or occupation. In that environment, COIN’s inherited assumptions generate friction and drift.
Governance warfare is the systematic shaping of institutional rules, procedures, incentives, and legitimacy pathways to produce strategic advantage without relying on overt force. It marks a decisive break with the COIN era and cannot be treated as a renovated version of counterinsurgency. It runs on different terrain, different timelines, and different mechanisms of leverage. When institutions try to retrofit COIN logic to compete in governance space, they produce recognizable patterns: planning that creates activity without advantage, integration that collapses civilian authority into military process, and legitimacy work that stays surface-level while competitors reshape the underlying system.
Treating this clearly requires treating COIN for what it is: a completed operational framework.
COIN as Institutional Muscle Memory
COIN remains embedded in institutions because it was more than a doctrine. It became a professional operating system. Its persistence appears in ways that rarely get labeled “COIN,” yet continue to shape daily work.
Planning architecture defaults to organizing problems around “lines of effort” that mirror COIN-era integration: security, governance, development, information. The template creates coherence and gives diverse actors a shared map. It also encourages familiar sequencing: stabilize, build capacity, strengthen governance, shape perception. That sequencing assumes a contested population under visible threat where security provision unlocks political space.
Resource allocation categories favor activities that look like presence, engagement, and capacity-building. They can be scheduled, measured, staffed, and briefed. They fit into rotational models and programmatic funding. Administrative competition rarely does. It rarely produces quick metrics, rarely conforms to operational cycles, and often requires working inside systems that sit outside military control. When institutions face ambiguity, they lean toward what they can justify in familiar terms.
Interagency mechanics treat “whole-of-government” as an integration ambition managed through coordination. In practice, coordination collapses into military-led process because the military owns the operational tempo, the staff capacity, and the planning discipline. The resulting “integration” becomes a procedural substitute for genuine governance leverage, especially when civilian authorities operate on different timelines, incentives, and legal constraints.
Legitimacy is discussed as something that can be generated through improved service delivery, improved security, and improved messaging—often within the temporal frame of an operation. That framing appears in competition concepts that treat influence as an overlay rather than a system. In governance warfare, legitimacy sits deeper: in whether rules are perceived as fair, whether procedures are trusted, whether institutions filter truth upward, and whether citizens experience governance as coherent.
These inherited reflexes become misaligned when applied to contests decided inside administrative systems.
COIN as a Completed Operational Framework
COIN emerged to solve a specific operational challenge: how a militarily superior force could suppress insurgency and stabilize a population under conditions of contested control. Its organizing assumptions reflected that reality.
Presence created leverage. Security provision enabled political engagement. A contested population could be secured and separated from insurgent influence. Governance support could then consolidate authority. The military served as the primary integrator, synchronizing security, governance assistance, development inputs, and information effects in a bounded battlespace. Progress could be tracked through visible indicators: reduced violence, improved access, improved partner performance, improved stability.
Within those parameters, COIN was coherent. It offered planners a way to link tactical action to political outcomes. It gave commanders a language for legitimacy that could be translated into operational priorities. It created a shared map between military and civilian efforts, even when coordination was imperfect.
COIN’s limitations were boundary conditions. The framework excelled in environments where insurgency was visible, authority was contested locally, and physical security could create meaningful space for governance consolidation. Its logic was precise. Its precision is why it remains so influential. Where insurgency, occupation, and population control genuinely define the contest, COIN remains applicable; those conditions no longer define today’s strategic trajectory.
The Strategic Environment COIN Cannot Register
Unlike earlier political warfare concepts centered on populations and messaging, governance warfare operates primarily through institutions and administrative systems—encompassing but extending beyond narrower lenses such as strategic corruption, elite capture, or administrative subversion. The most consequential contests today often proceed without the markers COIN was built around. Many occur without occupation. Many occur without an insurgency. Many unfold in states that are nominally stable, institutionally brittle, or politically captured. Many occur through law, regulation, procurement systems, standards regimes, and elite incentive structures that sit beneath the surface of daily life.
These contests operate on administrative time. They accumulate effects through procedural changes, dependency formation, institutional normalization, and narrative conditioning. They often remain “below the threshold” not because they are minor, but because their mechanisms are systemic.
Presence does not automatically translate into leverage. Engagement does not automatically translate into influence. Capacity-building does not automatically translate into alignment. The misalignment manifests in tactical-strategic friction: more exercises, expanded engagements, published strategies, and continued trajectory drift. The framework produces motion while the terrain produces outcomes elsewhere.
The Structural Incompatibility
COIN organizes action around campaigns. Governance warfare organizes competition around institutions. COIN assumes a singular integrating authority. Governance warfare disperses leverage across bureaucratic processes, legal authorities, standards bodies, and legitimacy systems that cannot be commanded in the military sense. COIN’s unit of success often sits at the community or district level. Governance warfare’s unit of leverage often sits at the ministry, regulator, court, procurement authority, licensing regime, or narrative gatekeeper level.
These differences are structural. Governance warfare functions through penetration of systems rather than control of space. It works through altering incentives, constraints, and procedural pathways. It privileges persistence and administrative positioning. It often produces strategic effects without producing operational “events.”
When institutions attempt to treat governance warfare as COIN refreshed for strategic competition, the contest becomes framed in operationally legible ways: engagements, influence campaigns, partner capacity, visible demonstrations. Those activities become a substitute for the deeper system-level leverage that governance warfare actually exploits.
Activity Without Trajectory
Current approaches to competition generate activity without trajectory. One side runs exercises, expands advisory teams, funds capacity-building programs, and reports rising engagement metrics. At the same time, procurement rules quietly shift, licensing regimes narrow, standards bodies align, and regulatory authorities become dependent. Nothing appears destabilized, but the system’s trajectory changes anyway.
The pattern begins with a problem that appears external and adversarial: competitor influence, coercion, elite capture, corruption, malign narratives. The response is organized around what the institution can mobilize quickly: presence, engagements, training, messaging, security cooperation, advisory efforts, capacity-building. Success is assessed through activity and output metrics: number of engagements, partner units trained, exercises completed, messages delivered, leaders engaged, programs launched.
Meanwhile, the competitor’s decisive actions occur inside the partner’s administrative system. Procurement, licensing, regulatory, and judicial authorities gradually align in ways that lock in dependency without visible disruption. Elite incentives are rewritten through patronage, exposure, debt, and access. Narrative ecosystems are shaped through media ownership, platform regulation, and education content. Each move looks bureaucratic. Each move compounds.
The drift emerges because the institutional center of gravity remains operational while the contested center of gravity remains administrative. Activity rises. Trajectory continues.
This pattern unfolds even in environments that look “friendly.” A partner hosts exercises, signs agreements, and publicly aligns, while administrative systems quietly absorb competitor dependencies. A government accepts capacity-building while its regulatory architecture becomes less transparent. A ministry cooperates while procurement rules harden into closed networks. A public remains outwardly calm while legitimacy erodes through the everyday experience of institutional incoherence.
The strain manifests as frustration with interagency friction, fatigue with briefings that show high activity and low impact, skepticism toward messaging that fails to shift perceptions, and the quiet suspicion that the decisive contest is happening in rooms the operational plan never enters. These are symptoms of a framework mismatch.
Beyond COIN: The End of Military-Led Irregular Warfare
Moving beyond COIN means recognizing that in governance warfare, the military is rarely the primary designer of advantage.
Force shapes risk. It can protect access. It can impose costs. It can deter escalation. It can create space. These are significant roles. They become strategically incomplete when treated as the primary integrating authority in environments where leverage is generated through governance mechanisms. In governance warfare, the integrating center of gravity sits in civilian legal–administrative authorities—finance, justice, regulators, standards bodies, and procurement systems—rather than in military command structures.
The terrain consists of rules, procedures, institutions, legitimacy systems, and administrative pathways. It includes the infrastructure of decision-making: who decides, under what authorities, through what processes, influenced by which incentives, constrained by which dependencies. This terrain does not yield to campaign logic. It responds to persistence, positioning, and systemic shaping.
Beyond COIN functions as a boundary marker. COIN addressed a particular historical problem set and left enduring professional lessons. Governance warfare describes a different category of contest. Collapsing them into a single continuum obscures both.
The Contests Ahead
The next era of irregular warfare will hinge on the ability of states and societies to sustain legitimacy under pressure, to preserve institutional coherence, and to resist administrative capture that changes outcomes without dramatic events. Cognitive resilience will matter because perception is governed. Procedural credibility will matter because trust is institutional. Governance performance will matter because legitimacy compounds.
These contests will be won or lost long before violence appears, often without violence at all. They will be shaped in systems that resist operational pacing and cannot be managed as campaigns. The friction will continue whenever institutions default to activity-centered models while competitors focus on system-centered leverage. Assessment shifts from counts of activity to indicators of dependency, procedural credibility, institutional coherence, standards lock-in, and elite incentive alignment.
Irregular warfare has not disappeared. Its decisive arenas have migrated into governance terrain that military-led frameworks struggle to see clearly. COIN remains valuable within its boundary conditions and insufficient as a template for a governance contest.
Governance warfare does not ask for a COIN retrofit. It asks for recognition that the environment has changed, and that the inherited operating system many institutions still rely on was built for a different war.