The U.S. Government has a long history of dealing with interagency challenges—a legacy filled with epic successes, monumental failures, and everything in between. Washington has gotten more wrong than right when it comes to instituting a feasible, suitable, and acceptable whole-of-government approach. This article discusses five major missteps and recommendations for improvement. One misstep is that Washington has no professional historical foundation on which to build whole-of-government activities.

There is much to be learned about the national security threats generated by transnational criminal organizations, insurgents or politicized gang,s and other violent nonstate actors. Regardless of differing sizes, motives, and methods of operations, the primary objective of all gangs is to influence or compel radical policy and achieve political change. The gang phenomenon transcends law enforcement problems to extend to national security and sovereignty concerns. The author analyzes three demonstrative cases with varying forms of nonstate violence—the Jamaican Posses, the Brazilian Primero Comando da Capital (PCC), and the al Qaeda gang that was responsible for the 2004 bombing of the Madrid commuter train station

Irregular conflict poses a wicked problem—with contradictory and changing requirements, multiple stakeholders, many interdependencies, and problems that keep evolving. Successful resolution demands strategies that can produce satisfactory results despite imperfections in motivations, capabilities, and techniques. Based on an analysis of successful irregular conflict resolutions, this article proposes a framework and broad set of techniques. In undertaking to generate “good enough” resolutions, a combination of competitive, collaborative, and authoritative approaches will allow for greater flexibility and effectiveness.