The Reality of Modern Warfare Effective communication is vital for any team to achieve its goals, which is amplified as a team extends from team to country. The challenge becomes daunting when considering the cultural diversity between organizations and individuals in the melting pot of our country. One problem with communication is the inability to define fundamental terminology that can … Read more The post Clarifying Language for Victory appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.
The Reality of Modern Warfare
Effective communication is vital for any team to achieve its goals, which is amplified as a team extends from team to country. The challenge becomes daunting when considering the cultural diversity between organizations and individuals in the melting pot of our country. One problem with communication is the inability to define fundamental terminology that can be used to frame common ground to facilitate understanding across diverse organizations and people. Another problem with communication is that terminology, once established, can take monumental efforts to effectively update in the face of common practice. On other occasions, terminology is established with the constraints of cultural bias, which can fail to communicate the threat. The point of this paper is to explore the need to update concepts of Irregular Warfare, gray zone activities, and introduce regular warfare to ensure effective communication for a combined national defense effort.
The armed forces have been the focal point of national defense for centuries. The United States (US) has consistently demonstrated the ability to field exquisite game-changing capability that would deter any rational actor from engaging in conventional warfare. Nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, stealth technology, and precision weapons are but a handful of capabilities that prevented a major adversary from irresponsible escalation. Adversaries must therefore adapt outside of military pursuits to realize their ambitions. These adaptations come in the form of statecraft, economic power, subversion, coercion, disinformation, and deception aimed at military and civilian targets.
The reality of 21st century strategic competition, coupled with the limitations of legacy perspectives, resulted in the US Department of Defense (DoD) developing the Joint Concept for Competing (JCC) in 2023 and in the process updating the US military’s definition of irregular warfare (IW). According to the JCC, IW can be defined as “A form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” The JCC’s fresh perspective – enables the joint force to collaborate with interagency, multinational, and other interorganizational partners to be successful in strategic competition.
This paradigm shift paves the way for the US to update its perception of warfare by using an adversary’s (both state and non-state) perspective of warfare. In the process, the JCC implies that the defense of our nation is no longer the sole responsibility of the armed forces. The DoD, and its respective services, must realize their respective limitations in defending against IW, while civilian agencies and civil societies must assume their responsibility to take an active role in national defense against adversary IW efforts.
While the definition may be clear to military professionals, it is potentially opaque to the civilian population that is required to defend against hostile IW operations. The potential need to seek further definitions for clarity demonstrates the lack of utility for the IW definition beyond military professionals. For example, the DoD’s definition of asymmetric begins with a characterization of military operations. The DoD defines asymmetric as “In military operations the application of dissimilar strategies, tactics, capabilities, and methods to circumvent or negate an opponent’s strengths while exploiting his weaknesses.” Many of these concepts fall into what are considered gray zone activities, or GZA.
When considering GZA, there is disagreement regarding a precise definition. Clementine Starling, however, offers that “the gray zone describes a set of activities that occur between peace (or cooperation) and war (or armed conflict). A multitude of activities fall into this murky in-between – from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, and disinformation campaigns.” Arun Iyer notes the irony that open and transparent societies are a strength, yet they provide the means for competitors to operate against those societies in the gray zone. However, I submit that the GZA name incorrectly implies an area of uncertainty. This perception of uncertainty is the result of a culture that perceives war in a binary state – where a country is either at war, or at peace. This is in contrast to the reality that adversaries are surreptitiously conducting non-kinetic warfare against the US across multiple domains to prevail before kinetic fighting is needed, or to set victory conditions for an upcoming kinetic war of their choosing.
Fundamental Questions
The conventional capability of the US encourages adversaries to seek indirect approaches. As the IW annex to the 2020 National Defense Strategy asserts, “Their intent will be to achieve their objectives without resorting to direct armed conflict against the United States, or buy time until they are better postured to challenge us directly. The purpose of competition is not only to gain military advantages, but also to defeat adversaries’ strategies, shape their perceptions, and deny their strategic objectives in the pursuit of national interests.” Remember, gaining military advantage is a way, not an end in itself. The US should gain, or maintain, military advantage to deter armed conflict and establish the conditions necessary to prevail in a crisis or armed conflict. Creating these conditions should not rest solely on the military.
Clausewitz notes, “War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried out with other means.” Further, he states that, “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.” War, from a traditional sense, is the violent struggle among state and non-state actors to compel an enemy to accept an unfavorable outcome. Tradition, however, does not always reflect the realities of the modern world. Reflected of the preference for tradition over reality, the DoD fails to define warfare, regular warfare (RW), nor non-violent warfare.
Two questions remain, however. First, if IW is “a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities,” what is RW? Secondly, how do policy makers communicate the danger of IW and GZA operations to non-military professionals?
Communicating Irregular Warfare
Every graduate of Joint Professional Military Education is taught that the destruction of the enemy’s military force is not the unquestionable pathway to victory. The idea of attacking the enemy outside of direct action is not new. Sun Tzu provides an array of concepts that speak of a pathway to victory that is not unique to RW. Consider the following statements:
Warfare is a path of subterfuge. Be subtle, subtle even to the point of formlessness; be mysterious, mysterious even to the point of soundlessness: Thus, you can control the enemy’s fate. Therefore it is said that victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. Tire them while taking it easy, cause division among them while acting friendly. Attack where they are unprepared, emerge when they least expect it.
The Chinese way of warfare incorporates deception, shaping conditions before direct action, creating internal hostility (which reduces the enemy’s capability to operate and distracts it from recognizing the emerging threat), attacking points of weakness, and using surprise. These sage words, and others by Sun Tzu, focus on weakening an adversary’s government, economy, and civil society before engaging the adversary’s military forces.
The US’s civil society must recognize the existence of non-violent warfare, which is Sun Tzu’s preferred way to wage warfare, and by extension, potentially China’s preferred way to approach war today. This is problematic because of the historical trend of victory when one competitor adopts a simplistic interpretation of Clausewitz’s definition of victory, but they are competing against an adversary inspired by Sun Tzu. This competition leaves no room for uncertainty – what one state considers nebulous activity between peace and war (GZA) is simply non-kinetic warfare to another. Thus, the GZA fails to normalize the characterization of circumstances, which prevents policy makers and citizens from understanding the nature of Sun Tzu’s path to victory. For this reason, American society must be educated on the perceived vulnerabilities that Sun Tzu-inspired adversaries will exploit, and we should be responsible to find solutions that mitigate, or prevent, the risks to the US’s national security.
A Path Forward
The first step is clear – eliminate GZA as a term. Ambiguity in communication is a challenge, not an asset, to clear understanding. Furthermore, the definition of IW should be revised to further promote clarity. For this paper, GZA is considered a subset of a revised definition of IW, thereby simplifying the communication of warfare across the elements of national power.
To that end, if it is acceptable to consider RW as direct action against the enemy’s fighting force, then IW exists to attack the adversary’s government, economy, and civil society to degrade or render the adversary’s military forces irrelevant. Thus, IW should be redefined as the action taken against an adversary’s non-military elements of national power – the diplomacy, information, and economic elements of DIME (diplomacy, information, military, and economy). These actions are made to weaken an adversary’s political and public will, as well as their economic resources, both of which are critical requirements for the use of military force. From one perspective, this collects the diplomacy, information, and economic aspects of DIME and acknowledges how it supports the military. This is an important note because many of the US’s current adversaries have a comprehensive view of national power that extends beyond the US’s traditional view of national power (DIME). China, for instance, employs coercion and subversion to attack their adversaries’ governments, economies, and civil societies, with the intention of rendering those adversaries unwilling, or unable, to oppose Chinese strategic interests and objectives. This is “warfare without armed conflict;” or to win strategically without fighting militarily. This idea is foreign to the traditional American way of war.
Given that RW consists of direct action against a military force and IW is direct action against the non-military elements of power, there will be some exclusion and some overlap of weapons and forces. For example, cyber warfare may be used to strike at both military and non-military centers of gravity. Thus, cyber warfare could be a subset within both RW and IW. Economic sanctions could be considered an act of IW. From a force perspective, military-on-military engagement is clearly RW. Yet, military forces that are contributing to efforts to build military-civil relationships through humanitarian assistance to undermine or prevent adversary influence are engaging in IW.
Time Sensitive Change Requirements
The US must find a way to communicate the reality of 21st century warfare to every citizen so that the US can maintain the opportunities for its citizens to live the American Dream. To be clear, the following recommendations are not that the US should model itself after China, or ancient Sparta, for that matter. Rather, the intent is to advocate for the US to educate targeted members of its society, civilian agencies, and senior civil servants on the methodologies that China is employing across the DIME while creating the language and policies to facilitate effective deterrence that are aligned with the US’s strategic interests and priorities.
Without clear communication the required defense against adversary IW efforts will be insufficiently pushed to the military to handle in its entirety. In failing to educate the rest of the US civil society in IW, the US misses an opportunity to provide a characterization for a way of war to those who are unfamiliar with Sun Tzu, and who might otherwise be oblivious to the constant Chinese attacks across DIME.
To be sure, anyone who has read the Sun Tzu’s Art of War will recognize that the US has been under attack since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, if not longer. However, because there is not a clear departure from binary concepts of peace and war, many people simply fail to understand that China is working to win before going to war, or preferably, to deter US intervention altogether. This binary perspective has led Westerners to invent the “gray zone” concept, which effectively fails to convey the dangers of what some believe are isolated incidents.
The usage of RW and IW maintains the correct level of potency to address kinetic and non-kinetic offensive operations against the country. Conceptually, RW works directly against military forces. This is a concept that is intuitive. As already stated, IW works directly against the political, diplomatic, economic, and informational elements of national power that enable an adversary’s government, economy, and civil society to function effectively in a crisis or armed conflict. The updated IW concept provided in this article provides an easily articulated area of interest. The consolidation of GZA and IW, the update of the IW definition, and the addition of RW will allow policymakers to clearly articulate the reality of contemporary warfare, thus allowing those outside of the military to take on the responsibility of defending against adversary IW operations.
As stated in the JCC:
Deterring an adversary from competing in a particular area is a perfectly valid strategy in strategic competition. Equally, the more competitive the United States shows itself to be, the greater the likely deterrent effect it will have upon adversaries.
The reality is our adversaries have evolved to a point that the United States is no longer afforded the luxury of a binary concept of war. As the need to compete requires the participation of those outside of military professionals, the DoD and the joint force must find a way to effectively communicate the different domains of warfare.
The first step of this process is to distinguish RW and IW in a meaningful way. The national leadership must then provide the means for collaboration across society and stress the importance of non-military agencies being active in their role to defend the nation against IW campaigns. To assist with this, joint professional military education should become a requirement before an individual can compete for high-grade general schedule (GS) government employment and executive-level leadership positions.
The potential methods for an adversary to conduct IW is beyond capability and capacity of the military. Therefore, appropriate civilian government and non-government organizations must be prepared to deter and if needed prevail against select adversary IW operations. This paper does not suggest a nationwide call to arms, but rather calling for clarifying language for victory against adversary countries and appropriate multi-agency/organization collaborative efforts for defense. The warfighter is more than capable of conducting forward RW and IW operations and the responsible citizen is uniquely suited to deter or prevail against adversary IW operations within the US to protect their American Dream.
The post Clarifying Language for Victory appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.
