Outplayed: Regaining Strategic Initiative in the Gray Zone (original) (raw)
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Operating in the Gray Zone: An Alternative Paradigm for US Military Strategy
In this monograph, Professor Antulio J. Echevarria II aims to provide military strategists with a vehicle for thinking about out-positioning rival parties rather than merely subduing them through kinetic force. By re-orienting our thinking in terms of positioning, Echevarria argues, we will find ourselves better prepared to coerce or deter our competitors, two essential competencies for operating in the gray zone.
Referring to a range of conflict interactions short of conventional war, the term " gray zone " has become de rigueur in policy and military circles, despite its near total absence from the security studies literature. This article attempts to address this policy-scholarship mismatch by making among the first serious attempts to define, categorize, and conceptualize the specific tactics found in the " gray zone " that seem to vex national security elites: intermediary actors; faits accompli; and challenges to the status quo that avoid confronting defender " red line " commitments. The article proposes that these tactics do not represent a new phenomenon, but that they have garnered far less theoretical attention than they deserve. It makes the logical and empirical case that gray zone tactics tend to favor first-movers by incentivizing defender restraint in various ways, but that even these tactics—aimed at avoiding war—cannot escape escalatory risks and second-order consequences of competition.
American Political Science Review, 1982
viii emergent Asian arms race, spurred by North Korea's burgeoning nuclear and missile capabilities, is becoming increasingly prevalent, and respected commentators regard the chances of war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula as being as high as 50 per cent. Scholars and practitioners alike, such as Harvard Professor Graham Allison and Chinese President Xi Jinping, have cautioned repeatedly on the dangers of China and the United States falling into a 'Thucydides trap' in a historical allusion to the strategic competition between Athens and Sparta 2,500 years ago, which tragically brought to an end a golden age in ancient Greece. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is equally fond of this historical analogy, has warned against taking the so-called Asian peace of recent decades for granted. As Turnbull observed in his keynote address to the June 2017 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, 'the gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region'. 3 xi Preface Twenty-five years before the conference recognised in these pages, The Australian National University's Strategic & Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) marked its silver anniversary with a conference and resulting proceedings entitled New Directions in Strategic Thinking.
International Competition Below the Threshold of War: Toward a Theory of Gray Zone Conflict
Journal of Strategic Security, 2021
Drawing on existing literature, this research offers a theoretical delineation of the gray zone conflict, that is, conflict below the threshold of armed conflict. It begins by identifying the characteristic features attributed to the gray zone to propose a definition of the concept. It then situates gray zone conflict within the framework of the International Relations theory of Realism before setting out the main lines of strategic action used. Lastly, it examines the various levels of escalation that can arise in conflict of this nature.
A Critical Juncture: American Foreign Policy and Asymmetric Warfare
Strategic Insights, 2009
Asymmetric warfare is arguably the main threat facing the United States since the end of the Cold War. Gone are the years when America knew who its enemy was, and more importantly, knew where it was. With the Obama administration now in the White House, this is a crucial juncture in American foreign policy making. The following pages examine the body of scholarship on asymmetric warfare as it has been impacted by the three primary components of American foreign policy: unilateralism, preemption, and military hegemony. This article asks two central questions. First it inquires as to whether these three key components of America’s foreign policy, popularly known as the Bush Doctrine, have been more extreme under the administration of President George W. Bush than they have under previous administrations. The second question is whether the Bush Doctrine has increased asymmetric warfare in the form of terrorism—or whether it has been an effective policy against it. The article begins by examining the Bush administration’s foreign policy as outlined in both the 2002 and the 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS), investigating the history of each of the three primary components of the Bush Doctrine in America: unilateralism, preemption, and military hegemony—and reviewing the opinions of a number of scholars, security professionals, and journalists as to whether the impact of these initiatives reduced global asymmetric warfare in the form of terrorism or whether it incited more terrorist activity.
Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
International Security, 2013
to our recent article advance the debate on U.S. grand strategy, and not only in the usual way-by highlighting contending claims and assessmentsbut also by revealing areas of agreement. 1 Given their support for "a U.S. military with global reach far exceeding any rival," it is clear that both we and Friedman et al. are "primacists." Like us, they do not expect the rise of peer competitors or U.S. relative decline to erode the position of the United States as the world's number one military power, nor do they favor defense cuts sufªcient to restrict U.S. military action to its own region. Both we and Friedman et al. are also in favor of "restraint" in the use of American power. Like us, they see military interventions in places such as Haiti and Kosovo as optional choices that are outside our preferred grand strategy's logic. The debate is clearly not about primacy or restraint as these terms are conventionally understood. It is about whether the United States should remain deeply engaged in the security affairs of East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe or should instead retrench, abrogating its alliances with its security partners.
All-In or All-Out: Why Insularity Pushes and Pulls American Grand Strategy to Extremes
Routledge eBooks, 2023
Critics of the expansive US grand strategy of deep engagement argue that the United States should pursue strategies of retrenchment to avoid provoking conflicts with major powers and allied freeriding. Retrenchers believe the United States can rely on the inherent security its insularity and distance from other major powers provides and delay its possible interventions until strictly necessary. Should a hegemonic power emerge in Eurasia, its command of the maritime commons will allow US reentry into the region. This paper argues that such strategies are not likely to succeed for the US in Asia, but neither is the US likely to avoid escalation with China if it continues deep engagement. The balance of interests between the United States and its allies and adversaries is inherently asymmetric because the United States is a distant, offshore power. This in turn makes it difficult to convince adversaries and allies that it is willing to spend blood and treasure and to convince the domestic audience of the need to do so. Entanglement abroad and overselling at home are thus endemic in the US grand strategy. The history of US engagement in Cold War Europe illustrates how US commitments swung between the extremes of the pendulum. This paper shows how this dynamic applies to the Sino-American competition in the Western Pacific, where China seeks to raise the costs for the United States, and the United States seeks to maintain military-technological superiority to maintain access. If the United States is committed to upholding the balance of power, it must be willing to court disaster and treat China as an existential threat. In Asia, the former thus faces a stark choice between dangerous escalation and retreat. Should the United States remain deeply engaged globally through alliances and retain a military presence in multiple regions or should it pursue a more restrained grand strategy? For the past 70 years, the United States has followed an expansive grand strategy of "deep engagement." 1 Its goals are ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Paul van Hooft is a postdoctoral fellow at the Security Studies Program (SSP) at MIT and a senior analyst at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS).