BETTER CURRICULA, BETTER STRATEGIC OUTCOMES: IRREGULAR WARFARE, GREAT POWER COMPETITION, AND PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION
Heather S. Gregg | 03.15.22
Better Curricula, Better Strategic Outcomes: Irregular Warfare, Great Power Competition, and Professional Military Education
This article is part of the contribution made by the US Army War College to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
On April 29, 2021, cyber hackers broke into the networks of the US Colonial Pipeline system through a compromised VPN account and installed ransomware, effectively shutting down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States a week later. In the following days, US citizens up and down the Eastern Seaboard waited in hours-long lines, fearing that gasoline supplies would run out. Panic buying actually resulted in some states nearly running out of fuel before executives paid the ransom, ending the crisis. A postmortem investigation of the incident tied the attack to individuals from the “ransomware as a service” group Darkside, who reportedly resided in Russia and had ties to the Russian government, intelligence services, or the military.
This attack, which was perpetrated by a near-peer adversary but with a degree of plausible deniability, directly targeted the American public with the goal of achieving a strategic effect. It demonstrates that the United States and its allies are in an age of strategic competition with a range of actors, including near-peer adversaries, rogue states that do not conform to international laws and norms, as well as nonstate actors who seek to challenge the status quo. These strategic competitors leverage a wide variety of means below the threshold of armed conflict, including cyber activities, to provoke the United States and offset its conventional military capabilities.
This dynamic is identified in the 2020 Irregular Warfare (IW) Annex to the 2018 US National Defense Strategy:
https://mwi.usma.edu/better-curricula-better-strategic-outcomes-irregular-warfare-great-power-competition-and-professional-military-education/
