The New Kind of Warfare Reshaping Global Politics
Why the U.S. needs a proactive policy for winning in the gray zone.
by Simon Clark
December 6, 2019
Russian internet trolls interfering in the 2016 US election; Russian hitmen murdering Putin’s opponents abroad; Chinese spies manipulating Australian politics while the country’s coast guard ships harass Japanese fishing fleets. These are not random acts of autocratic aggression. They are examples of a new form of warfare that is becoming a bigger challenge for the United States and its western allies: gray-zone conflict.
Once an obscure Russian military concept, the gray zone is now one of the hottest topics in Western strategic debate. As Hal Brands, professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins explains: “Gray zone conflict is best understood as activity that is coercive and aggressive in nature, but that is deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of conventional military conflict and open interstate war.†Gray-zone tactics are ambiguous and incremental, including the use of information operations (a term of art for fake news), psychological manipulation, corruption, economic coercion, and covert paramilitary activities, like the “little green men†Russia sent in to invade Crimea.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/12/06/the-new-kind-of-warfare-reshaping-global-politics/
