Gray Zone Warfare |
 | BUILDING A WALL OF DENIAL AGAINST GRAY-ZONE AGGRESSION By Elisabeth Braw
NATO member states and partners today face
national security threats that extend far beyond
military aggression. Indeed, they are regularly targeted
by nonmilitary means, so-called gray-zone aggression.
Because gray-zone aggression can include any measures below the level of war, including illegal ones, it
is impossible for the targeted countries to deter every
act with the threat of punishment.
This means liberal democracies should give more attention to societal resilience. By ...Read more > | 25 Pages 669.04 KB |
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 | GRAY IS THE NEW BLACK : A FRAMEWORK TO COUNTER GRAY ZONE CONFLICTS By Heather M. Bothwell
T oday’s joint operational environment is characterized by
states increasingly competing
to enhance power and gain influence
while seeking to avoid major conflict.
Although concerted efforts to undercut U.S. interests without force are
not unprecedented, more aggressive
attempts to contest the status quo
through nonkinetic means as a way
to diminish U.S. power will likely
increase. As a result, the joint force
must hone its understanding of the full
spectrum of conflict and ...Read more > | 6 Pages 308.40 KB |
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 | IRAN’S GRAY ZONE STRATEGY : CORNERSTONE OF ITS ASYMMETRIC WAY OF WAR By Michael Eisenstadt
S
ince the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran has distinguished itself (along with Russia and
China) as one of the world’s foremost “gray zone” actors.1
For nearly four decades, however, the United
States has struggled to respond effectively to this asymmetric “way of war.” Washington has often
treated Tehran with caution and granted it significant leeway in the conduct of its gray zone activities due to
fears that U.S. pushback would lead to “all-out” ...Read more > | 21 Pages 646.34 KB |
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 | AMERICA’S GLOBAL COMPETITIONS: THE GRAY ZONE IN CONTEXT By Lieutenant General James M. Dubik (U.S. Army, Ret.) and Nic Vincent
The international community is grappling for
its future, but the wrestling is more complicated
than Carl von Clausewitz’s “pair of wrestlers.”1
The U.S. is part of three ongoing regional and
global competitions. At stake: the future of the
international order. The first competition involves
revisionist powers—Russia, China, and Iran.
This competition is below the
threshold of war so far, but
recent events in Syria show
just how easily that threshold
might be crossed. ...Read more > | 36 Pages 9.52 MB |
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 | MASTERING THE GRAY ZONE: UNDERSTANDING A CHANGING ERA OF CONFLICT By Michael J. Mazarr
In the remote reaches of the South China Sea in the
Spratly Island chain, China is creating land. In order
to bolster its claims to the waters of the region, Beijing
is pouring millions of metric tons of sand and concrete onto submerged reefs, creating artificial islands.1
Island-building is merely one of the most obvious of
many ...Read more > | 157 Pages 6.23 MB |
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 | A WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT APPROACH TO GRAY ZONE WARFARE By Elizabeth G. Troeder
Gray zone warfare, also known as irregular warfare,
political warfare, hybrid warfare, asymmetric warfare,
and unconventional warfare, is increasingly becoming
the norm. It is a significant concern today, threatening
U.S. national security as well as the security of U.S.
allies and partners. Despite its population’s immense
capacity for creativity and innovation, the United
States is losing this war. ...Read more > | 55 Pages 2.23 MB |
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 | THE REEMERGENCE OF GRAY-ZONE WARFARE IN MODERN CONFLICTS: ISRAEL’S STRUGGLE AGAINST HAMAS’S INDIRECT APPROACH By Omer Dostri
Over the last decade, the use of gray-zone warfare—part of a coercive strategy—has increased.
Various actors in the international system use
this kind of warfare to achieve political, economic, and
military advantages while minimizing risks and the reactions of their opponents. The means of gray-zone warfare
are based on ambiguity and low signature that provide
politicians and decision-makers with a strategic capacity
of plausible deniability. These include surgical, restrained,
and ...Read more > | 8 Pages 1.25 MB |
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 | THE CONTEMPORARY SPECTRUM OF CONFLICT: PROTRACTED, GRAY ZONE, AMBIGUOUS, AND HYBRID MODES OF WAR By Frank G. Hoffman
Hew Strachan, the preeminent military historian at Oxford, stated in a lecture delivered
in 2006 that one of our most serious problems today is that we do not know what war is. He put
his finger on a critical shortfall in Western thinking
about security:If we are to identify whether war is changing,
and—if it is—how those changes affect international relations, we need to know first what war is.
One of the central challenges confronting ...Read more > | 12 Pages 214.71 KB |
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 | COUNTERING GRAY-ZONE HYBRID THREATS By John Chambers
The gray zone is an operating environment in which aggressors use ambiguity and leverage nonattribution to achieve strategic objectives while limiting counter-actions by other nation states. Inside the
gray zone, aggressors use hybrid tactics to achieve their strategic objectives. While hybrid threats have
historically been associated with irregular and conventional warfare, their use in the gray zone ...Read more > | 59 Pages 8.24 MB |
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Final2-web.jpg) | WINNING IN THE GRAY ZONE: USING ELECTROMAGNETIC WARFARE TO REGAIN ESCALATION DOMINANCE By BRYAN CLARK, MARK GUNZINGER, JESSE SLOMAN
The United States has again entered a period characterized by great power competition after
a quarter century as the world’s sole superpower. By expanding exports in a globalizing
economy and exploiting the precision-strike weapons revolution,1
China and Russia have
improved their military capabilities and economic positions2
over the last 20 years. They now
seek to revise the international order in their favor, in part by undermining U.S. influence in
their regions and ...Read more > | 84 Pages 3.22 MB |
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 | GAINING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE GRAY ZONE By Lyle J. Morris, Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Stephanie Pezard, Anika Binnendijk, Marta Kep
The 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy and the publicly released
summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy agree on one fundamental theme: The United States is entering a period of intensifying strategic competition with several rivals, most notably Russia and
China. Numerous statements from senior U.S. defense officials make
clear that they expect this competition to be played out primarily ...Read more > | 237 Pages 2.29 MB |
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 | WAR'S FUTURE: THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF GREYZONE CONFLICT AND HYBRID WARFARE By David Carment, CGAI Fellow and Dani Belo
Today’s geopolitical conflicts, especially among great powers, involve a desire to fundamentally
revise the order of alliances as well as solidify new norms of conduct. The purpose of our paper is
to delineate two distinct phenomena in international affairs – hybrid warfare, which emphasizes
the tactical level and grey-zone conflicts, which incorporates a long-term strategic dimension into
international disputes. We argue that hybrid warfare can be a tactical subset of grey-zone ...Read more > | 19 Pages 522.42 KB |
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 | CHRONOLOGY OF POSSIBLE RUSSIAN GRAY AREA AND HYBRID WARFARE OPERATIONS By Anthony H. Cordesman
This chronology explores the full range of Russian competition with the United States. It focuses
on the need to address all of the key aspects of this competition, including Russia’s “gray area,”
hybrid warfare, and multi-domain/joint combined-domain operations.
It takes a different approach to defining such operations from those used in a number of official
sources and other reports. As is discussed later in this chronology, the official and other open
source reporting now ...Read more > | 45 Pages 1.98 MB |
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