Announcing the Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare

• June 16, 2023

The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is pleased to announce the establishment of the Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare, a new National Security Program initiative led by Philip Wasielewski.

“We are excited to launch this new initiative to study and promote best practices in intelligence and nontraditional warfare, a term that FPRI shall use to describe irregular warfare and political warfare as complementary tools of statecraft. This is an area of great interest to the policy community, practitioners, and the public at large. Under Phil Wasielewski’s capable leadership, I anticipate that this new Center will produce groundbreaking research and analysis,” commented President of FPRI Carol “Rollie” Flynn.

The Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare’s mission is to facilitate the study of intelligence and counterintelligence, nontraditional warfare, and covert action. The Center aims to promote understanding of these specialties and how they relate to the nation’s security, including caveats in their application and lessons learned from past actions to inform future policy decisions. 

The Center will do this via two methods:

• Educate to help others navigate: The Center will conduct scholarly research of the past to educate the general public on intelligence and irregular warfare, including their various subset elements, and why they are important to US national security. It will also assist intelligence and irregular warfare practitioners by providing lessons from history to guide them in their current duties.
• Trailblaze new paths: The Center will investigate current challenges in the intelligence and irregular warfare communities and recommend possible solutions, with an emphasis on the unorthodox or the revolutionary. It will also explore future challenges and threats to America’s ability to conduct intelligence operations and irregular warfare. 

“We are delighted to be establishing this Center under Phil’s leadership, and to strengthen our National Security Program’s rigorous and inventive research on nontraditional warfare” said James Ryan, FPRI’s Director of Research. 

Philip Wasielewski is the Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and a 2023 Templeton Fellow. He is a former Paramilitary Case Officer who had a 31-year career in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was a member of the first CIA team into Afghanistan in 2001 and served a three-year assignment on the National Security Council staff as the Director for Intelligence and Covert Action programs. His CIA career was paralleled by a concurrent 30-year Marine Corps career (7 years active duty and 23 reserve) as an infantry officer including mobilizations for Afghanistan and Iraq. Philip Wasielewski graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 with a B.A. in International Relations and European History. He also has an M.A. from Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and an M.A. in National Security Studies from the Army War College.