Artificial Intelligence and Irregular Warfare: Strategic Governance and Institutional Integration

Artificial intelligence is reshaping irregular warfare by accelerating decision-making, expanding cyber and information operations, and transforming competition below the threshold of conventional conflict. AI-enabled systems strengthen intelligence processing, anomaly detection, predictive analytics, surveillance, cyber defense, and influence operations, but they also introduce governance, ethical, legal, and escalation risks in ambiguous operational environments. This paper examines how military and security institutions can integrate AI across strategic, doctrinal, operational, technical, and regulatory domains while preserving accountability and legitimacy. Building on scholarship in AI-enabled cybersecurity, cognitive security, digital twin resilience, and national security governance, the study develops a five-layer institutional integration model: strategic alignment, doctrinal adaptation, operational embedding, data fusion, and human-AI governance. The model is applied to four irregular warfare contexts: the Russia-Ukraine conflict, cyber and information operations, extremist networks, and digitally dependent critical infrastructure. Findings indicate that AI can serve as a force multiplier when embedded within coherent institutional structures, but adoption without coordinated oversight increases risks of accountability erosion, algorithmic opacity, miscalculation, and normative destabilization.