Latest Pentagon 'roadmap' reveals serious frustration.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

WHEN PENTAGON OFFICIALS ARE confronted with questions for which they lack clear answers, they turn to one of the bureaucracy's preferred stratagems: the roadmap.

At the Defense Department, there are roadmaps for just about everything--network-centric warfare, unmanned vehicles, strategic communications, hypersonic weapons ... The list goes on.

Roadmaps--which involve lengthy studies and exhaustive reports--can be quite useful in highly technical areas that require in-depth research. The latest Pentagon roadmap, however, seeks to address the decidedly non-technical issue of "irregular warfare."

One would assume that, five years after the United States went to war in Afghanistan and three years after the invasion of Iraq, the Defense Department by now would have figured out what it needs to do to win these unconventional wars. The chaos in Iraq and the sense that nobody knows what to do about it cost the administration its control of Congress and Donald Rumsfeld his job. It remains to be seen whether his replacement, Robert M. Gates, can bring an influx of fresh ideas into an uninspired bureaucracy.

It should come as no surprise that even within the Defense Department there is no agreement on what irregular warfare means exactly.

"We're working through a definition process," Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson, deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told a House Armed Services Committee panel in late September. Short of a definitive answer, the Defense Department has come up with a "working definition" of irregular warfare, which is characterized as a mix of "insurgency and counterinsurgency, guerilla warfare, unconventional warfare, asymmetrical warfare and much more."

Lawmakers at the hearing--somewhat startled by the notion that the top counter-terrorism officials at the Defense Department are still dabbling with semantics at a time of escalating violence and rising death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan--wanted to know how this irregular warfare roadmap is going to help win these wars.

That is not the point of the roadmap, replied Mario Mancuso, who is the deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism.

Speaking in impeccable Pentagonese, Mancuso explained that the roadmap is "about how we can get better and how we can institutionalize some of the best practices ... So, as we think about the roadmap it is not tied to anything--it is certainly not tied to Iraq and Afghanistan directly, nor is it tied...