National, Regional, Global Commons Security: Asia-Pacific Seminar

Week: 4, September 17Great-Power Competition and the Gray Zone

Paradoxes of the Gray Zone Hal Brands February 5, 2016

Gray, it seems, is the new black. The concept of “gray zone” conflict has generated significant

attention and controversy recently, within both the U.S. government and the broader strategic

studies community. Some analysts have identified gray zone conflict as a new phenomenon that

will increasingly characterize, and challenge, the international system in the years to come.

Others have argued that the concept is overhyped, ahistorical, and perhaps even meaningless.

“The ‘gray wars’ concept lacks even the most basic strategic sense,” writes Adam Elkus.

“Beneath the hype is something rather ooh-la-lame rather than ooh-la-la.”[1]

So what is gray zone conflict, to begin with? 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 approaches are

mostly the province of revisionist powers—those actors that seek to modify some aspect of the

existing international environment—and the goal is to reap gains, whether territorial or

otherwise, that are normally associated with victory in war. Yet gray zone approaches are meant

to achieve those gains without escalating to overt warfare, without crossing established red-lines,

and thus without exposing the practitioner to the penalties and risks that such escalation might

bring.

Gray zone challenges are thus inherently ambiguous in nature. They feature unconventional

tactics, from cyberattacks, to propaganda and political warfare, to economic coercion and

sabotage, to sponsorship of armed proxy fighters, to creeping military expansionism. Those

tactics, in turn, are frequently shrouded in misinformation and deception, and are often

conducted in ways that are meant to make proper attribution of the responsible party difficult to

nail down. Gray zone challenges, in other words, are ambiguous and usually incremental

aggression. They represent that coercion that is, to varying degrees, disguised; they eat away at

the status quo one nibble at a time.

Viewed in these terms, it becomes clear that gray zone conflict is real enough, and that gray zone

approaches are indeed prevalent in today’s security environment. Since 2014, Russia has

destabilized and dismembered Ukraine through the use of armed proxies, “volunteer” forces, and

unacknowledged aggression. In Asia, China is using gray zone tactics as part of a campaign of

creeping expansionism in the South China Sea. In the Middle East, Iran is using, as it has for

many years, subversion and proxy warfare in an effort to destabilize adversaries and shift the

balance of power in the region. These are leading examples of the gray zone phenomenon

today.[2]

Contrary to what skeptics argue, then, the gray zone is not an illusion. But if the concept does

pack a punch, it is also elusive and even paradoxical. Edward Luttwak has written about the

paradoxical logic of strategy—the fact that it seems to embody multiple, and seemingly

contradictory, truths at once.[3] In dealing with the gray zone, this basic proposition applies in

spades. The gray zone concept may seem relatively straightforward at first glance. But upon

closer inspection, it is fraught with complexities, contradictions, and ironies. These

characteristics do not make the concept worthless or meaningless. They do, however, make it

quite slippery.

Accordingly, this essay surfaces eight paradoxes, complexities, and nuances at the heart of the

gray zone idea—and at the heart of efforts to respond to gray zone challenges. The goal is not to

provide a comprehensive discussion of the gray zone concept and its defining characteristics, for

that task has been undertaken in greater depth elsewhere.[4] The goal, rather, is to throw some of

the gray zone’s central paradoxes into sharper relief, and thereby to shed greater light on a

concept that is at once deeply controversial and deeply important to debates about the future of

warfare and U.S. policy.

1. “Gray zone” cannot mean everything if it is to mean anything

One common critique of the gray zone idea is that the concept has been stretched to the breaking

point and beyond. Critics argue that gray zone theorists have lumped together a dizzyingly

diverse array of behaviors—from irregular warfare and unconventional warfare, to coercion and

compellence—under that label, and that in so doing, they have turned the “gray zone” into a

catchy catch-all that encompasses nearly all forms of modern conflict, and thus tells us nothing

useful about any of them.[5]

This is a valid critique. There is indeed a tendency for gray zone enthusiasts to define the concept

expansively; one prominent piece on the subject includes the activities of Russia, China, and

Iran—as well as the activities of ISIL and Boko Haram—within this category.[6] Yet this

approach renders the gray zone concept less rather than more useful. It makes no sense to cram

China’s expansionism in the South China Sea and ISIL’s reign of terror in Iraq and Syria into the

same analytical category. The former activity is a subtle campaign of pressure and expansion that

seems carefully calibrated not to resemble open warfare or flagrant territorial expansion. The

latter activity is unabashed, quasi-genocidal warfare that involves maneuver, combined-arms

assaults, and theatrical atrocities designed to bring as much attention as possible. In other words,

making the gray zone concept a repository for everything short of conventional, state-on-state

warfare risks turning that concept into something that is both amorphous and analytically useless.

Salvaging the gray zone concept thus requires more precisely defining and circumscribing it. A

good example is the work of Michael Mazarr. Mazarr writes that the defining features of

gray-zone conflict are that it is moderately but not radically revisionist in intent (in other words,

its practitioners want to modify the international system rather than destroy it), that it is

gradualist and coercive in nature, and that it is unconventional in the tools it employs.[7] This

definition is broad enough to include the aforementioned examples of Russian destabilization in

Eastern Europe and Ukraine, Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea, and Iranian

destabilization and proxy warfare in the Middle East—and thereby gives us a way of

understanding the parallels and linkages between these diverse activities, and the strategic

challenges posed by them. But this definition is also narrow and precise enough to give a clear

sense of what would not be included (the activities of Boko Haram and ISIL, for instance), and

thereby to enable a sharper and more analytically useful discussion of the issue. Just like a good

theory of international relations, the gray zone concept must be falsifiable—we must be able to

say what it is not, if we are to explain what it actually is.

2. Gray zone challenges are the wave of the future—and a blast from the past

Much debate over the gray zone involves the question of whether there is actually anything new

here. Proponents of the concept often focus on the perceived novelty of the phenomenon, and

there are indeed aspects that are unique to the current security environment.[8]

Cyberattacks have proven to be a potent component of gray zone challenges in areas like Eastern

Europe, for instance, and the internet has served as a useful conduit for spreading the black

propaganda and misinformation that often characterizes such challenges. Moreover, the

attraction of gray-zone approaches is heightened by core aspects of contemporary global affairs.

Nuclear deterrence between the great powers helps push coercive challenges “down” to the gray

zone, while globalization has created an economic interdependence that makes even key

revisionist powers less likely to pursue their geopolitical aims through open interstate warfare.[9]

Addressing gray zone challenges thus requires looking forward—understanding how a changing

international arena is facilitating these challenges, and developing the new tools and new

conceptual approaches needed to respond effectively.

Addressing gray zone challenges also requires looking backward, however, because the basic

approach of using tactics that fall just below traditional definitions of war is as old as war itself.

Indeed, there is a long history of actors seeking to derive the benefits of war, without incurring

the costs and risks of overt aggression—think about Soviet and Cuban-sponsored insurgency

during the Cold War, or Iranian-sponsored terrorism and subversion during the 1980s.[10] There

is an equally long history of U.S. efforts to deter and confront these activities—think of the

Kennedy administration’s emphasis on developing special operations forces for precisely this

purpose. This history presumably holds myriad insights about the nature of, and appropriate

responses to, gray zone challenges; it also reminds us that exaggerating the newness of the

phenomenon risks muddling rather than sharpening our comprehension thereof.

3. Gray zone conflict reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of the international order

In many ways, the prevalence of gray zone approaches is actually a testament to the strength of

the liberal international order that America has led since World War II. Gray zone approaches

reflect the fact that there are strong international norms against outright aggression and territorial

conquest, and that even moderately revisionist powers often hesitate to pay the costs—from

moral opprobrium, to economic penalties, to the potential for a military response—associated

with flagrantly violating those norms. In the same vein, gray zone conflict actually underscores

the fact that U.S. military power, alliances, and security guarantees—the structures that have

long served as the backbone of the international order—have generally proven quite effective in

deterring or punishing such flagrant military aggression. Indeed, these strengths of the

international system have fostered the very ambiguity and incrementalism that characterize gray

zone approaches, persuading revisionist powers—usually—to take small steps that sow doubt

about what is really happening, and that avoid more dramatic provocations that might cross

clearly established “red lines.”[11]

At the same time, however, gray zone conflict demonstrates some troubling weaknesses of the

existing order. It shows how key revisionist states can nibble away at its edges, by using

approaches that are incremental and subtly coercive in nature. It shows the limits of existing

international security structures to prevent or reverse this coercive behavior—witness the West’s

struggle to undo, as opposed to simply punish, Russian aggression in Crimea and Ukraine.

Finally, it reveals how such behavior can gradually undermine basic principles of the modern

international order. Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Chinese pressure on

maritime boundaries and U.S. allies and partners in East Asia: over time, these campaigns can

corrode key norms like non-aggression and freedom of navigation, and thus chip away at the

pillars of a stable, rules-based system. Taken individually, these activities are troubling enough

for U.S. officials; taken together, they could ultimately pose a degree of systemic risk to the

American concept of world order.

4. Gray zone strategies are weapons of the weak against the strong—and of the strong

against the weak

This fourth paradox is related to the third. Gray zone strategies have been termed “guerrilla

geopolitics”—approaches used by the weak against the strong.[12] To a degree, this is true.

Practitioners of gray zone strategies are usually not the leaders of the international order; they are

countries that feel somehow slighted or marginalized by that order, even as they may reap its

economic and other rewards.[13] Moreover, practitioners of gray zone approaches resort to

ambiguous aggression precisely because they do not feel strong enough to court the costs and

risks of conventional warfare. They presumably would prefer to avoid the moral, diplomatic, and

political costs associated with blatant military aggression; they do not wish to confront U.S.

alliance guarantees or the U.S. military head-on. As Alexander Lanoszka writes in a recent

article on Russian activities in Eastern Europe, a gray-zone belligerent “has local escalation

dominance but not necessarily global escalation dominance….Not having escalation dominance

means that the belligerent wishes to contain the conflict locally and deter external

intervention.”[14]

Yet gray zone strategies are also weapons of the strong against the weak. As Lanozska notes,

initiators of gray zone conflicts often possess local military dominance, which is crucial in

deterring the target state from responding to ambiguous provocations by resorting to overt

military force. Vietnamese leaders are acutely aware, for instance, that they will lose in an open

military clash with China; Ukrainian leaders know the same thing about a full-on conventional

conflict with Moscow. And in the same vein, targets of gray zone strategies are usually weak and

vulnerable in other ways, as well. Ukraine and the Baltic states possess large Russian-speaking

populations that are not well assimilated into national society; they suffer from ethnic and/or

linguistic cleavages that make them attractive targets for divisive propaganda and

subversion.[15] In Eastern Europe and East Asia alike, moreover, target countries often possess

underdeveloped security and political institutions that make it more difficult for them to respond

effectively. In sum, practitioners of gray zone strategies are both strong and weak relative to their

opponents, and this combination creates the distinctive geopolitical context in which such

strategies are used.

5. Confronting gray zone challenges requires both embracing and dispelling ambiguity

So how should defenders of the international system respond to gray zone challenges? In one

sense, the prerequisite is to develop precisely the sort of ambiguous tactics and tools that

revisionist actors might themselves use. Training covert proxies to operate in contested areas,

developing and employing special operations forces (SOF) that can carry out critical missions

discreetly, helping allies build paramilitary forces that can confront gray zone challenges without

seeming to escalate the conflict unduly: all of these approaches may be quite useful in checking

ambiguous aggression. Indeed, to the extent that the United States, its allies, and its partners

possess the same tools as their gray zone adversaries, they may be better placed to frustrate

coercive gradualism, and impose reciprocal costs.[16]

Yet there is nonetheless a balance to be struck here, because succeeding in the gray zone also

requires dispelling ambiguity. Instigators of gray zone conflict prize ambiguity, because it fosters

doubt as to precisely what is happening, and who is making it happen. Piercing that ambiguity is

thus central to denying gray zone belligerents the benefits of non-attribution, exposing the nature

and illegitimacy of their actions, and raising the various costs—political, diplomatic,

economic—of such activities. As just one example, consider how it was firm evidence of

Russian-backed separatists’ responsibility for the tragic downing of MH-17 over Ukraine that

cleared the way for the imposition of harsher international sanctions against Moscow.

In practical terms, dispelling gray-zone ambiguity requires establishing procedures whereby the

U.S. and other governments can quickly and publicly disseminate information on gray-zone

challenges and their origins. It also requires empowering local actors—Ukrainian or Estonian

civil society groups, for instance—that may be able to obtain this information and convey it with

even greater credibility. Gray zone approaches represent coercion under cover; stripping away

the cover can help combat or punish the coercion.

6. Gray zone conflict is aggression, but military tools are only part of the response

The foregoing points touch on a sixth issue. Make no mistake—gray zone approaches seek to

achieve the fruits of war, in the form of territorial gains, and revision of existing regional and

international arrangements. And gray zone approaches are undoubtedly aggression, in which

military or paramilitary coercion is used, and the threat of escalation to outright conflict is often

present. It follows that military tools must play a key role in any effective response. The United

States and its friends will collectively need the lower-intensity capabilities (from SOF to robust

Coast Guard capabilities) needed to combat gray-zone approaches on land and at sea.[17] They

will also need to maintain the higher-intensity dominance needed to control escalation, and to

prevent gray-zone challenges from progressing to more overt, conventional aggression.

Yet it is also worth remembering that some of the most important tools in addressing these

challenges are essentially non-military in nature. U.S. allies and partners will need to develop

well-armed, well-trained police forces, and other domestic security capabilities that can handle

“little green men” without escalating to the overt use of military force. Defenders of the existing

international system will continue to need the tools of economic statecraft used to inflict pain on

aggressors without unduly risking military conflict. (Indeed, economic sanctions have imposed

significant penalties on Russia since 2014.) They will need robust information-warfare

capabilities to combat malign propaganda and misinformation. Finally, Washington and its

friends should take steps to build more robust civil societies, combat corruption, and otherwise

address the internal weaknesses upon which gray zone approaches often prey.[18] It merits

repeating: Gray zone approaches are designed to exploit the weaknesses of a given target, and so

redressing those weaknesses, whether military or otherwise, is essential to an effective defense.

7. America is not poorly equipped for the gray zone—but it may not be fully prepared

So how is the United States set to address these challenges? In one sense, the United States

possesses an extensive and extremely powerful suite of tools it can use to meet gray zone

challenges. It possesses the ability to level powerful financial and economic sanctions, and the

diplomatic leverage to rally broad international opposition to revisionist coercion. It has

immensely skilled SOF that are well suited to operating in murky environments and training

indigenous security forces, and well-resourced intelligence agencies with significant analytical

and operational expertise. America also has plentiful experience in dealing with ambiguous

aggression dating back to the Cold War and even earlier. Granted, resources never seem

sufficient to go around, and there are always capabilities that Washington could use—or use

more of—in addressing gray zone challenges. Yet it would nonetheless be mistaken to say that

the United States lacks tools for confronting these challenges.

So why do so many observers argue that America is poorly prepared for conflict in the gray

zone?[19] The difficulty, it seems, has more to with organizational and conceptual challenges

than anything else. Organizationally, some parts of the U.S. government—such as the SOF

community—are well positioned to operate in the gray zone. But bureaucratic seams, such as

those between the State Department and the Pentagon, often make it difficult to operate

effectively in the area between peace and war, or to address challenges that are simultaneously

political and military in nature.[20] Moreover, in the past the United States has frequently failed

to retain the knowledge gained from earlier experiences with gray-zone and other irregular

challenges, meaning that today’s officials have essentially been forced to re-learn these subjects

from scratch.[21] Finally, and not least, the traditional American tendency to think in binary

terms—war versus peace, victory versus defeat—and to divide military operations into discrete

phases may limit our ability to grapple with problems that are inherently messy and ambiguous.

Adversaries understand all this, of course, which is one of the reasons why they operate in the

gray zone in the first place.[22]

Succeeding in the gray zone, then, is not simply a matter of resources.[23] It is a matter of

orienting ourselves organizationally and conceptually for the challenge.

8. Gray zone challenges can be productive and counterproductive at the same time

In light of the advantages that gray zone approaches offer, and the difficulties and complexities

involved in combating them, it can be tempting to think that America’s adversaries have hit upon

a devilishly clever strategy for undermining the international order. And to be clear, the threat is

very real. China’s coercive gradualism has strengthened its military position in the South China

Sea, and positioned Beijing to assert greater influence over that area. Russian hybrid warfare

activities have dismembered Ukraine, created another “frozen conflict” that can be intensified at

Moscow’s discretion, and cast a pall of insecurity over Eastern Europe. Iranian subversive

activities in the Middle East have further inflamed and destabilized that region, and proven

highly unsettling to American partners and allies. There is no waving away these

challenges—gray zone approaches are testing key regional orders, and key elements of the

international order writ large.

Yet it is still not clear how effective these strategies will be over time. For even if gray zone

approaches are effective in achieving their short and medium-term goals, the long-term results

are still hazier and potentially more problematic. Consider again China’s recent activities.

Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea has driven many regional countries to pursue closer

security ties with Washington, it has helped revitalize the U.S.-Philippines alliance, and it has

inspired precisely the more assertive Japanese foreign and defense policies that Beijing likely

seeks to avoid. China’s gray zone actions may be strengthening its military and territorial

position in the region, in other words, but they are also strengthening regional resistance to its

power and influence. Similarly, Russian activities have had some important counterproductive

effects. They have helped revitalize the very alliance—NATO—that Vladimir Putin seeks to

undermine, pushed the Ukrainian government closer to the West, led to economic sanctions and

diplomatic isolation, and earned Moscow a degree of international opprobrium not experienced

since the Soviet era.[24]

Does this mean that gray zone conflict should not be a matter of strategic preoccupation for U.S.

officials? Of course not, for three reasons. First, the issue of whether these strategies are, on

balance, productive or counterproductive for their practitioners will only be resolved over time.

Second, actions that are counterproductive for their practitioners over the long-term can still be

very damaging and dangerous to U.S. interests in the near- and medium-term. They can

undermine the integrity of the existing international system, raise the financial and human costs

associated with defending that system, and divert attention from other pressing issues that the

U.S. national security community must also confront. Third, and probably most important, to the

degree that gray zone challenges have so far proven counterproductive, it has been in no small

part because the United States has worked with its friends and allies to make it so.

Looking to the future, then, American officials should be careful not to overstate the ingenuity or

cleverness of gray zone strategies. Yet they should also bear in mind that their own efforts will

go far in determining whether gray zone strategies primarily bring payoffs or blowback for the

states that employ them.

[1] Adam Elkus, “50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense,” War on the Rocks, December 15, 2015.

[2] For recent discussions of the gray zone, see Philip Kapusta, “The Gray Zone,” Special Warfare Magazine, October-December 2015, 19-25; Michael Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict (Carlisle, PA: United States Army War College Press, 2015); Frank Hoffman, “The Contemporary Spectrum of Conflict: Protracted, Gray Zone, Ambiguous, and Hybrid Modes of War,” Heritage Foundation Index of Military Power, available at https://index.heritage.org/military/2016/essays/contemporary-spectrum-of-conflict/; Charles Cleveland, Shaw Pick, and Stuart Farris, “Shedding Light on the Gray Zone: A New Approach to Human-Centric Warfare,” Army Magazine, August 17, 2015; Michael P. Noonan, “American Geostrategy in a Disordered World,” Orbis, Fall 2015, 600-612; and other sources cited in this essay.

[3] Edward Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[4] As examples, see the sources cited in note 2.

[5] Elkus, “50 Shades of Gray.”

[6] Peter Pomerantsev, “Fighting While Friending: The Grey War Advantage of ISIS, Russia, and China,” Defense One, December 29, 2015.

[7] Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone, esp. 4.

[8] See John Knefel, “The ‘Gray Zone’ is the Future of War: Ongoing, Low-Level, and Undeclared,” Inverse, December 7, 2015.

[9] These two points are stressed in Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone; also Mazarr, “Struggle in the Gray Zone and World Order,” War on the Rocks, December 22, 2015.

[10] On these issues, see Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran (New York: Penguin, 2012).

[11] There are exceptions, of course—Russia’s takeover of Ukraine was not really incremental in nature. But it was nonetheless shrouded in ambiguity. Russian forces wore uniforms stripped of identifying information, and the Russian government did not acknowledge its role in the operation until long after the fact.

[12] Mark Galeotti, “How Far Will He Go? The West Should Prepare for Everything—Except for One Thing,” The European, September 9, 2014.

[13] There are exceptions. The United States arguably used gray zone approaches during the Cold War, for instance, when it undermined governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and other countries via many of the same tactics associated with gray zone approaches today. As noted subsequently, moreover, the United States and its allies might conceivably respond to gray zone challenges today by adopting gray zone approaches of their own.

[14] Alexander Lanoszka, “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Extended Deterrence in Eastern Europe,” International Affairs, January 2016, esp. 189-190.

[15] Lanoszka, “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Extended Deterrence in Eastern Europe.”

[16] For one discussion of these approaches, see Joseph Votel, Charles Cleveland, Charles Connett, and Will Irwin, “Unconventional Warfare in the Gray Zone,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 1st Quarter 2016, 101-109.

[17] On the role of SOF in particular, see David Barno and Nora Bensahel, “Fighting and Winning in the ‘Gray Zone,’” War on the Rocks, May 19, 2015.

[18] See Phillip Karber, “‘Lessons Learned’ from the Russo-Ukrainian War: Personal Observations,” July 2015, available at https://www.scribd.com/doc/274009061/Lessons-Learned-From-the-Russo-Ukraine-War#scribd; also Lanoszka, “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Extended Deterrence in Eastern Europe”; Janine Davidson, “Local Capacity is the First Line of Defense Against the Hybrid Threat,” German Marshall Fund of the United States Policy Brief, September 2015.

[19] See, as one example, Eric Olson, “America’s Not Ready for Today’s Gray Wars,” Defense One, December 10, 2015.

[20] See, for instance, Kapusta, “The Gray Zone,” 23-24.

[21] On this tendency broadly, see David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

[22] Likewise, adversaries understand the statutory and ethical constraints under which democracies operate, and seek to exploit them.

[23] See, for example, Nadia Schadlow, “Peace and War: The Space Between,” War on the Rocks, August 18, 2014.

[24] This basic argument is developed in Joshua Rovner, “Dealing with Putin’s Strategic Incompetence,” War on the Rocks, August 12, 2015; also Michael McFaul, “The Myth of Putin’s Strategic Genius,” New York Times, October 23, 2015.

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1

Special Operations Forces and Great-Power Competition in the 21st Century By Hal Brands and Tim Nichols August 2020

Key Points

• America is moving from one era of foreign policy to another: The primacy of counterter-rorism has faded, and competition with authoritarian great powers is the dominant concern.

• While special operations forces (SOF) understand that they must play a role in great-power competition, they often lack a clear understanding of what that entails.

• SOF can support great-power competition in five ways: gathering information, working with allies and partners, imposing costs, handling crisis response, and undertaking strategic raids.

• In addition, retaining competency in counterterrorism is itself a crucial contribution to great-power competition, because suppressing non-state threats is the prerequisite to allowing the rest of the American government to focus on other things.

The United States is moving from one era of foreign policy to another. Recent strategy documents, most notably the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy (NDS), make clear that the primacy of counterterrorism, which dominated US foreign policy for years after 9/11, is a thing of the past. Competition with authoritarian great powers—Russia and particularly China—is the order of the day. “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by . . . revisionist powers,” the NDS states. “It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their author-itarian model.”1

Geopolitical change, in turn, necessitates bureau-cratic change. During the post-9/11 years, the United States did not simply devote time and resources to

counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and the challenges of insecurity in the greater Middle East. It reoriented many of the institutions that make up the US government to address these challenges. Now, departments and agencies across Washington—the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelli-gence community—are having to develop or rediscover an aptitude for high-level geopolitical competition. Additionally, these agencies are replete with employees whose main expertise—arrived at through assignments, education, and experiences—is counterterrorism. Today, these institutions must find ways of making themselves relevant and effective in an intensely contested strategic environment.

Such transitions are never easy, and they pose special challenges for a key part of the US military—its special operations forces (SOF). At the political

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level, the Pentagon is being pushed to pivot toward peer competitors and long-term geopolitical chal-lenges. Yet at the operational level, senior military commanders are stretched between dealing with the continuing demands of counterterrorism and contemplating the doctrinal and resource adjust-ments necessary for competition with Russia and China. For all the talk of great-power rivalry, the reality is that SOF still holds an outsized role in the “forever wars” in which our country remains. Indeed, most of the SOF community has little familiarity with anything other than a counterterrorism paradigm focused on non-state entities. And at the tactical level, SOF units are preparing for their next deploy-ments in familiar ways with familiar training. Much has changed, and little has changed.

Within the special operations forces, discussions about the meaning and challenges of great-power competition have begun. Yet these discussions remain nascent and abstract. Put simply, special operators increasingly understand that they are supposed to be playing a role in great-power competition, but they often lack a clear understanding of what that really means.

This report seeks to advance and clarify discussions of the SOF role in great-power competition.2 The bureaucratic transition this shift requires will be challenging: Resources will have to be adjusted, roles and missions will have to be recalibrated, and the training and preparation of SOF for future deploy-ments will have to change. These adjustments will only be possible with a sharper sense of what SOF should, and should not, do in this area.

Of course, any discussion of the role of SOF in great-power competition should begin with a recognition that the SOF community is not mono-lithic. Some SOF units have traditionally focused on direct action; others were originally designed to work with partner forces. Certain units are associated with particular missions, such as airfield seizures; others are the lead actors in hostage rescue and other forms of crisis response. It follows that not every part of the SOF community will or should perform a uniform set of tasks in an era of great-power competition. The need, in fact, is for more specialization rather than more homogeneity. That caveat aside, SOF do occupy a particular, elite niche in the US Department of Defense and the US

national security establishment, so it is possible to offer some general observations about their future role.

We argue that preparing SOF for great-power competition will first require four big shifts in that community: relinquishing the thought leadership that SOF have enjoyed in the global war on terror (GWOT), acknowledging the end of America’s uni-polar military doctrine, abandoning the idea that SOF can serve principally as a deterrent capability, and frankly confronting the bureaucratic pathologies that two decades of counterterrorism have entrenched. Once these changes are made, SOF will be well- positioned to support great-power competition in five key ways: gathering information, working with allies and partners, imposing costs on authoritarian rivals, handling crisis response, and undertaking strategic raids. In addition, the SOF community should understand that retaining competency in counterterrorism is itself a crucial contribution to great-power competition, because suppressing non-state threats at a reasonable price is the pre-requisite to the rest of the American government focusing its attention on other things.

Great-power competition will be something of a cold shower for the SOF community, not least because elite military units—and perhaps the US military as a whole—will no longer have the starring part in addressing the nation’s greatest strategic challenge. It will require unwinding patterns of training and deployment that have become deeply embedded in the SOF organizational culture. But confronting these issues is crucial if SOF are to help the nation succeed in the defining geopolitical contests of the 21st century.

SOF and the GWOT

The era of counterterrorism was the era of SOF. From the outset, special operators were at the fore-front of the GWOT. Shortly after 9/11, SOF elements teamed up with CIA paramilitary forces to reenter Afghanistan, link up with the Northern Alliance, and support a concentrated effort against the Taliban. In this endeavor, they brought unique US capabilities such as precision air-delivered fires, surveillance, and intelligence collection. During the early days of the war, SOF also conducted activities to pave the way for the arrival of conventional forces. SOF

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operators reduced enemy observation posts, con-firmed that landing zones were clear of enemy forces, and assisted with the arrival of conventional ground combat elements.3

During and after the initial invasion, SOF targeted remnants of the Taliban government—which had been shattered by SOF-enabled military operations—and its paramilitary units, as well as al Qaeda elements operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This effort required adopting a counterterrorism approach in which multisource intelligence operations enabled the capture or killing of members of enemy networks, and SOF battled to unravel, destroy, or disrupt such networks. This, in essence, is counterterrorism—manhunting. And few resources were spared in this effort.

The campaign against al Qaeda in particular quickly evolved into a campaign against regional and global networks, which had the structure, resources, leadership, and inspiration to disrupt US operations and attack the West. The SOF campaign amalgamated interagency intelligence support, built international counterterrorism partnerships, relied on conven-tional forces in a supporting role, and required freedom of action to move regionally and even globally as collected threads of information identified the next individuals on the capture list. The daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 showed how proficient SOF had become in the counterterrorism fight.4

The 2003 invasion of Iraq provided different challenges. Initially, SOF concentrated on locating and neutralizing suspected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. Raids against critical nodes in the Iraqi military and command structure weak-ened their cohesion and contributed to the rapid collapse of Iraqi conventional resistance. After the fall of Baghdad, the United States began to emphasize the capture or elimination of key individuals from Saddam Hussein’s regime. Support and courier networks were identified, and high-value targets were located and captured. When the conflict in Iraq subsequently morphed into an insurgency, fueled by inter-sectarian conflict and the arrival of al Qaeda–linked forces, SOF enhanced their ongo-ing operations to attack the terrorist networks that were fueling the violence.

As the GWOT spilled from Afghanistan and Iraq into other areas—the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant,

the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere—SOF increasingly used the model they had developed to prosecute an expanding fight in new locations. And as the com-mitment of the United States to manpower-intensive forms of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency waned, SOF became even more central to American efforts, because they offered the possibility of aggres-sively prosecuting the GWOT without larger, more politically sensitive commitments of US forces.5

SOF were almost everywhere in the GWOT—and for SOF, almost everything became counter-terrorism. Even today, as the future of the forever wars becomes increasingly contested, SOF still fill a vital role. They fracture terrorist networks, pursue key members, and stifle the efforts by these non-state actors to plan, fund, rehearse, and execute attacks. With the intelligence, law enforcement, and home-land security communities, SOF remain integral to the nation’s multilayered warning and security effort. And there is little debate that, so long as the US military has a part in the counterterrorism effort, SOF will be in the lead.

Preparing for Big Changes

The world, however, has not stood still, and neither has US foreign policy. Authoritarian rivals exploited America’s period of preoccupation in the greater Middle East to develop their military capabilities and pursue revisionist ambitions. Two US presidents have now argued that the country must shift from a primary emphasis on counterterrorism to a focus on great-power competition. Given SOF’s centrality to the GWOT, this shift represents a stark and dis-ruptive change. For SOF to remain relevant in a new strategic reality, dormant capabilities must be revitalized, new capabilities pursued, and doctrinal adjustments made. All of that first requires changes in mindset and organizational culture. Four particular adjustments are needed.

First, SOF must accept a hard reality: They will not have thought leadership or be the leading edge of American strategy. For nearly two decades, special operations guided the nation’s response to 9/11. The GWOT was organized around kinetic action, with SOF spearheading the critical campaigns. These campaigns, moreover, positioned SOF at the forefront of impressive innovations: intelligence fusion, a counterterrorist targeting cycle, interagency

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task forces, partner-force operations, and precision tactical strike capabilities. Aggressive action was essential; progress was measured in body counts, the capture or killing of high-value targets, and the capture of terrain. These results were easily measured and understood by senior officers and politicians, and SOF delivered them daily.

SOF will still matter in the great-power competition, but they will find themselves in a supporting rather than a leading role.

Tactics aligned closely with strategy: Suppressing terrorist groups was a competency at which SOF excelled and became the marker of national success or failure in the GWOT. Whether this approach deliv-ered meaningful long-term progress for the United States is debatable.6 But it undeniably delivered tremendous organizational payoffs for SOF, demonstrated in the rising budget and expanding size of US Special Operations Command.7

Great-power competition will be different. Here, tactical action is, at best, a peripheral aspect of the challenge; the very idea of competition implies that the nation is not yet “at war” in the way it was during the GWOT. That means that SOF will not, and should not, have a leading role in the nation’s strategy.

In competitions that will be determined by the rate of technological innovation and the balance of economic and diplomatic influence, as much as by the balance of military power, other parts of the national security establishment—the Treasury Department, State Department, intelligence com-munity, and even obscure entities such as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States—may now be the tip of the spear. In rivalries characterized by the threat of intense, high-end military conflict, the country’s conventional capa-bilities, nuclear forces, and military alliances will play the key role in deterring and, if necessary, defeating near-peer powers. The higher stakes and greater diplomatic sensitivities of competitive relationships will push the US government to rely on non-SOF

tools, such as covert action and strategic commu-nications, to seek advantage and reduce American vulnerabilities. SOF will still matter in the great-power competition, but they will find themselves in a supporting rather than a leading role.

Second, SOF leaders must face the fact that America’s period of unmatched primacy has con-cluded and America’s “unipolar military doctrine” has become outdated. That doctrine featured a linear, phased construct for military operations, beginning with activities such as “shaping,” proceeding to decisive combat operations, and ending with stabi-lization and withdrawal of US forces. This was essen-tially a “go, win, return” strategy, optimized for conflicts with weaker adversaries and indemnified by seemingly unassailable American advantages. That doctrine also featured a clear distinction among pre-combat, combat, and post-combat activities. None of these characteristics is well matched to an era of enduring contests with powerful rivals.8

Great-power competition not only requires dealing with countries that possess peer or near-peer capabilities but also features rivals that seek to alter the status quo without triggering a full-scale military response. Only occasionally do challenges of this nature produce clear winners and losers. More often, the result is the subtle increase or decrease in US influence and the gradual strengthening or erosion of America’s position. It is hard to point to a single moment—other than the standoff at Scar-borough Shoal in 2012, perhaps—at which the United States suffered a crippling blow in the com-petition for influence in the South China Sea.9 Yet in 2020, China has undeniably dramatically strengthened its position, mostly through a series of incremental steps.10 You can win or lose great-power competition on the installment plan. SOF will therefore need a competition mindset rather than a “go, win, return” approach.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff has pointed the way, with the publication in June 2019 of Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, Competition Continuum. That document acknowledges that the US military “employs many constructs that reflect an artificial distinction” between peace and war and describes “a world of enduring competition conducted through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict.” The Joint Force will thus need to think in terms of campaigning (an ongoing activity)

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rather than campaigns (activities with clear start and end points). It must nest its activities in a broader array of diplomatic, economic, and infor-mational measures meant to strengthen American influence, and it must accept that military aspects of campaigning will represent a complementary effort rather than the main effort. SOF should also embrace this concept.11

Third, SOF leaders should jettison the idea of using SOF primarily as a deterrent capability vis-à-vis great-power challengers. Terms such as “unorthodox deterrence” have become prevalent in a SOF com-munity that is seeking to apply its strengths to new strategic problems.12 But these concepts are problem-atic because they misunderstand both deterrence theory and key tenets of SOF employment. Deterrence is most effective when the target understands the exact consequence of a desired behavior, is able to weigh the consequence against the desired outcome, and chooses whether to act based on a rational under-standing of perceived cost/benefit. SOF efforts to conceal operations, achieve moments of relative superiority through surprise, and create dispropor-tionate impact relative to the size of the force are important qualities, but they are not the qualities most needed to deter powerful rivals.

To be sure, an understanding that the United States possesses these capabilities can marginally enhance deterrence in key areas—for example, the Baltic region or the South China Sea—by threatening to raise the costs of aggressive action or otherwise introducing doubt into the minds of potential aggres-sors. But SOF are only a small part of a much larger package of deterrent capabilities—military, economic, and diplomatic—and thinking of deterrence as a core mission would be a mistake.

Put bluntly, if what the United States primarily wants is deterrence in a place like Eastern Europe, it should be thinking in terms of armored brigade combat teams rather than SEAL teams. Instead, SOF should emphasize their punitive capability and the intentional uncertainty associated with their operations. These are important SOF offerings in great-power competition, but they should not be primarily construed, taught, or trained as deterrence.

Finally, SOF leaders will have to frankly acknowledge and aggressively confront one of the most disconcerting impacts of the past two decades:

the emergence of formidable bureaucratic and insti-tutional obstacles to change.

The more deeply ingrained a particular mission set or organizational ethos becomes, the harder it is to reform, even when reform is what new circum-stances require. For example, the Navy has put aircraft carriers and the carrier air wing at the heart of its doctrine and organizational essence for several decades. That once made sense, but more recently it has made it devilishly difficult for that service to admit that carriers bearing short-range, manned aircraft are spectacularly ill-equipped for the hardest fights the United States might face. Inertia has become the enemy of strategy.

Similarly, the SOF formation is now hampered by the organizational residue of 20 years of the GWOT: capability overlap, excess capacity, and the establishment of intractable micro-economies. These pathologies have developed their own con-stituencies; leaders in the SOF establishment should expect heavy resistance to reform.

Had the GWOT ended after the initial defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001–02, the long-term impact on SOF would have been limited. Particular units would have mostly reverted to their pre-9/11 missions and capabilities. Instead, a generational GWOT transformed America’s SOF in ways that have now become deeply entrenched.

SOF units—from West Coast SEAL teams to the Europe-based Special Forces—formally or informally adopted roles beyond their doctrinal missions. In some cases, they took on responsibilities—namely, land-based counterterrorism and kinetic action—different from those for which they were initially designed. Navy SEALs de-emphasized maritime operations in favor of frequent land-based deploy-ments. Units designed for partner operations took on unilateral operations; units designed for unilateral operations took on partner operations. Additionally, SOF units permanently integrated previously periph-eral capabilities (such as intelligence, communications, mobility, and support) to reduce their reliance on adjacent or external units. These changes were often initially implemented in an ad hoc fashion, but they subsequently congealed as a result of generous, tai-lored funding and years of repetition. As the stars of American strategy in the GWOT, SOF were able to make—and have approved—ambitious requests for growth in people, resources, and capabilities.

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This horizontal expansion and overlap of capa-bilities met an operational need in the GWOT. But the longer-term organizational consequences were often negative. SOF units may be elite, but they cannot be good at everything. Leaders have found it increasingly difficult just to manage their unwieldy units, ultimately dulling the blade they hoped to sharpen. The generation of excess capacity in one mission area also creates deficiencies in others.

The recent United States Special Operations Command Comprehensive Review observed that

leaders developed within training and deploy-ment environments focused solely on COIN [counterinsurgency], CT [counterterrorism], and DA [direct action] core activities—more specifically, unilateral and foreign partnered raids and execution of the find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze (F3EA) tar-geting cycle.

That pattern came at a cost—namely, “perpetuating SOF force structure that focuses on COIN and CT while not developing SOF and SOF leaders for the full spectrum of SOF core activities and Component specific skills and capabilities.”13 Finally, an excess of SOF capability in certain areas creates ambiguity regarding “who” should do “what.” Research reveals a deep-seated identity crisis in the Green Berets—a force traditionally devoted to unconventional warfare—over what its mission is and should be.14

The GWOT also created another impediment to rapid organizational adjustment: a vast array of micro-economies that can survive only if the status quo is perpetuated. New buildings and training areas have sprung up. Equipment that might have been useful on a one-off basis has been acquired and protected. The SOF supporting establishment, which consists of both civilian officials and contrac-tors, has mushroomed. Senior leaders must accept that some costs are sunk and that some capabilities, training, and support functions will have to be dis-carded. There will not be real change in how SOF orient themselves without a determined effort to break down micro-economies that are threatened by that reorientation.

What SOF Can Do

As these intellectual and organizational challenges are confronted, SOF can make important contributions

in great-power competition. There are five key areas in which SOF are positioned to make a difference: getting information, working with allies and partners, imposing costs on authoritarian rivals, responding to crises, and conducting strategic raids. Getting Information. Great-power competition involves a continuous struggle between competent nation-state adversaries. It also features ongoing interactions in the gray zone—the murky space between peace and war. That being the case, the requirements for streams of information flowing from the “contact layer”—the front lines of the geo-political competition—will profoundly increase.15 SOF can aid policymakers in better understanding sensitive areas of the competitive environment so that Washington can more accurately evaluate policy options and geopolitical trends.

For example, SOF are often in position to observe the attitudes of foreign military forces or note an increase or decrease in popular support for a par-ticular government. SOF gather this information as a byproduct of overseas presence; these obser-vations complement other more systematic efforts the intelligence community manages. In other cases, SOF can use their capabilities for conceal-ment and infiltration to conduct unilateral recon-naissance against key facilities, peoples, or events.

Yet this will mean doing intelligence differently than during the counterterrorism era. After 9/11, SOF developed formidable intelligence capabilities, but they were tightly linked to prior and subsequent military action. One raid generated information that drove the next raid; SOF professionals focused on “targeting cycles” and “sensor-shooter optimiza-tion” as the central thrust of the intelligence endeavor.16

In great-power competition, however, the most valuable intelligence may not be actionable in the traditional manner. It may simply contribute to a better understanding of our rivals and the geopolitical battlegrounds on which we compete with them. Similarly, after 9/11, SOF generated intelligence for which they then served as the consumer. In great-power competition, SOF will collect intelligence that may not guide their own actions so much as they support a broader national strategy.

This is not to say that SOF intelligence efforts should supplant the intelligence community’s ongoing work. Instead, SOF will need to retool to better

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contribute to the strategic intelligence picture. Observation and reporting are already integral to SOF culture; the bigger challenges are organizational and bureaucratic. In particular, it will be crucial to refine the tasking and reporting channels that connect SOF to the intelligence community. The special operations world will also need to reevaluate the role of intelligence commands in the formation. These commands have been tasked with collecting, analyzing, and organizing targeting information for SOF use; certain capabilities will now need to be realigned against emerging great-power threats rather than receding terrorist challenges.

Finally, SOF will need better counterintelligence and operations security. Collecting information against great-power competitors is like the NBA, not college ball. Nation-state adversaries have repeat-edly demonstrated their effectiveness in penetrating and reporting on US activities overseas. SOF, like the intelligence community, will need to shift the way they operate to deal with this threat.

Working with Allies and Partners. The impera-tive of working with partners has often been a source of frustration for SOF during the GWOT. In the context of great-power competition, working with allies and partners is likely to be where SOF con-tribute the most. The United States enjoys a multi-tiered system of ties with friendly foreign actors—formal treaty allies, non-allied partners, and non-state and irregular forces. At each level, SOF can help the United States get the most out of these rela-tionships.

At the level of alliances, SOF elements already train with professional forces from allied nations, share lessons and innovation, and stand ready to join them in combat if the alliance is threatened. After two decades of fighting next to one another in various coalitions, these relationships are strong and resilient. In great-power competition, SOF from allied nations will form the foundation for cooperation on various military operations. This is an area in which SOF can strengthen the military linkages and working relationships that bind together America’s unrivaled geopolitical network.

At the level of non-allied partners, SOF can sim-ultaneously build US influence and improve the ability of friendly nations to resist coercion. Improving the capabilities of Ukrainian forces that are resisting

Russian aggression makes life harder for Moscow. Working with foreign militaries in regions where competition is intensifying creates channels for US political influence.17 Admittedly, working with non-allied partners in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved enormously complex over the past two decades, due to profound disparities in capabilities, culture, and—in some instances—national interests. Yet the struggle for influence in partner and non-allied nations will form a vital component of competition. So this basic undertaking is here to stay, even if particular partnerships evolve or fade over time.

Finally, SOF remain connected to non-state and irregular forces. These partnerships (for example, with the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF) emerged when the interests of the United States and the non-state entity in question were aligned. In some cases, specific partnerships may carry over into great-power competition: The SDF have utility in limiting Russian influence in northeastern Syria as well as in preventing an ISIS resurgence. In other cases, the United States will build new partnerships, perhaps with irregular forces that oppose the expansion of Russia or Chinese influence in some contested area.

Yet these partnerships will mostly remain trans-actional and time limited. That being the case, SOF will need additional training to carefully work with non-state partners and adhere to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act definition of “activities in support of predetermined United States policy and military objectives conducted by, with, and through regular forces, irregular forces, groups, and individuals participating in competition between state and non-state actors short of traditional armed conflict.”18

Imposing Costs. Gathering information and working with allies and partners can contribute to a third SOF competency—imposing costs on authoritarian competitors. Cost imposition is not, strictly speak-ing, a specific tactic, in the way that reconnais-sance or a strategic raid are. It is a result of actions that can take a wide variety of forms. Cost imposition, moreover, should not be seen as a catchall category into which SOF can cram any effort to participate. Yet because cost imposition is central to great-power competition, and because the concept has come into vogue in the SOF community, it bears discussion.19

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Cost imposition simply refers to the idea of cre-ating friction around an opponent’s activities, raising the price that opponent must pay for aggressive behavior, and otherwise imposing a competitive “tax” on actions that the United States opposes. In competitions that can last for years or decades, cost imposition is fundamental to successful strategy, because even modest costs that are imposed today can compound exponentially over time.20

It is not the SOF community’s role to offer policy advice to elected and appointed officials, much less to set the country’s political or strategic objec-tions through the options it offers.

Most of the cost imposition that the United States will pursue in great-power competition will be nonmilitary in nature, yet SOF are nonetheless well-placed to contribute to cost-imposing campaigns. Sensitive, unilateral reconnaissance activities can expose malign conduct by a competitor and thus increase the diplomatic or political costs that com-petitor must pay. Improving the defensive or intel-ligence capabilities of a partner nation that is being coerced by a hostile great power can allow that country to exact a higher price on the adversary. Quietly sabotaging the capabilities or facilities of a competitor that is engaged in gray-zone aggression is itself a form of cost imposition. If relations between the United States and its challengers worsen in the coming years, which currently seems quite likely, there may arise still other possibilities.

As these hypothetical examples indicate, debates around cost imposition are often fraught and diffi-cult. This is because activities that might impose the greatest costs on an adversary, and perhaps eventually shift the decision calculus of that adver-sary, may be beyond the risk tolerance of officials who seek to wage competition without plunging into confrontation. That is a constraint SOF simply have to live with.

It is not the SOF community’s role to offer policy advice to elected and appointed officials, much less to set the country’s political or strategic objectives

through the options it offers. Cost imposition can produce unwanted consequences, so discussions of how SOF can contribute to cost imposition require a nuanced understanding of political objectives, a realistic assessment of capabilities, and an honest appraisal of risk. Sensitive missions do sometimes fail, but the last thing the SOF community should want is to put itself in the position of having advo-cated an undertaking that fails or backfires because the community’s enthusiasm outran its capabilities or influenced its risk assessment.

With all these cautions in mind, however, SOF can constructively affect deliberations regarding how and whether to undertake particular cost-im-posing efforts. By illuminating for policymakers what options are available at a given level of risk—what Washington can do to increase the price of Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea or Russian aggression in Ukraine and what dangers accompany these actions—SOF can better inform debates about what the United States is trying to achieve and how far it should be willing to go. Crisis Response. The strategic focus on American foreign policy may change, but the reality of unwel-come surprises and fast-breaking crises will not. In the GWOT era, crisis response revolved around high-value targets, emergent threats, or other fleeting opportunities to advance US interests. In the era of great-power competition, a variety of unexpected crises could challenge the United States. Washington could face a Russian or Chinese seizure of an American vessel in disputed waters, similar to Russia’s seizure of a Ukrainian vessel in 2018.21 There might emerge a threat to US citizens or diplomatic personnel, created by internal instabil-ity or civil conflict in a region of strategic contestation among the great powers, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In other cases, the United States might confront crises that do not directly implicate Russia and China but nonetheless threaten enduring American interests—for example, a renewed nuclear crisis involving Iran or a different counter-proliferation challenge.

These crises are different than those that pri-marily characterized the GWOT era; in some cases, they will pit the United States against adversaries far more formidable than it faced in the post-9/11

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era. Fortunately, SOF culture reinforces character-istics that are broadly helpful in various crisis- response scenarios: empowered individuals and flattened decision-making structures, truncated response times, extraordinary strategic mobility, and mature tactical skills. Not all SOF units should be involved in crisis response, which should continue to be the mandate of the most elite parts of that community. But for those units that are involved, crisis response will remain a mainstay, and it will require updating and resourcing relevant capabilities. The Strategic Raid. The greatest military challenge the United States faces is the emergence of dense, sophisticated networks of anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) capabilities wielded by authoritarian chal-lengers. In 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta openly confronted the threat, directing the military to “invest as required to ensure its ability to operate effectively in anti-access and area denial environ-ments.”22 Yet nearly a decade later, A2/AD still pre-sents profound operational problems and poses a significant threat to America’s ability to defend its forward-most allies.23 Here there is a particularly important role for SOF in allowing the United States to operate in a contested environment: the strategic raid.

The strategic raid is different from crisis response, in which the need for and parameters of action are normally shaped by the enemy. A strategic raid, rather, involves a deliberate, planned effort to access a target, conduct a tactical military action, and then depart. In many cases—such as the attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran in 1980 or to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011—these raids feature high-risk infiltration, the creation of a moment of relative military supe-riority against a larger enemy force, and a planned withdrawal. In the context of great-power compe-tition, strategic raids might be used to neutralize key aspects of an enemy A2/AD network, thereby allowing a larger force to operate with increased freedom or to eliminate a target that would other-wise consume large numbers of scarce munitions—such as precision-guided, standoff munitions—that are badly needed elsewhere. The strategic raid could also offer a means of targeting key enemy capa-bilities, facilities, individuals, or vulnerabilities relatively quietly, an approach that might appeal to

American policymakers who are wary of unwanted escalation.

Strategic raids are inherently challenging, especially against peer or near-peer competitors. In addition to the significant military risks, high levels of polit-ical risk are often associated with such operations. As a result, not all SOF units will be equipped or responsible for strategic raids, which will occur less frequently than they did during the GWOT. But for precisely these reasons, the capability for strategic raids must reside in SOF. And that capa-bility will not be easily acquired or maintained: The evolution of strategic raid forces will require sub-stantial resource and training investments to meet new challenges in counterintelligence, cyber detection, and near-peer response capabilities. Absent addi-tional investment in SOF strategic raid capabilities, it will become harder for US decision makers to authorize such missions, because near-peer capabilities challenge access, shrink the moments of relative superiority, and increase the associated military and political risk.

Conclusion

SOF can contribute to great-power competition in one final area: maintaining excellence in counter-terrorism, not across the entire community, but in key parts of it. Although US counterterrorism efforts are ebbing, they have not stopped. The toxic mix of instability and radicalism in many countries in the Middle East and beyond ensures that the threat is not going away, even if America’s strategic focus is—and should be—shifting away.

Terror networks will need to be detected and countered. Imperfect partners will require continued assistance in confronting security challenges. If the United States fails to maintain an acceptable level of suppression in the counterterrorism fight, new attacks will occur, and the country will once again fail to reorient its attention and resources to more important, if less urgent, tasks. Keeping a lid on the counterterrorism problem, at an acceptable level of investment, is thus a precondition to the broader strategic shift the US national security establishment must execute. By guarding against “old” dangers, SOF can help the country focus on “new” ones.24

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So some portion of SOF must continue to manage the counterterrorism effort, even if suppression of the terrorist blight can and must be accomplished with shrinking numbers, increasing efficiencies, and the moderately higher degree of risk that accom-panies these changes. The objective will be to manage rather than conclusively defeat a dangerous threat—to prevent that threat from dangerously expanding or intensifying while managing the use of resources to avoid jeopardizing interests elsewhere.25

But the SOF mindset of “everyone gets a taste of counterterrorism” must end, so that other elements of the formation can be pulled from counterterrorism rotations to begin prioritizing core competencies for missions tailored to great-power competition. Put simply, if SOF writ large is conducting a broader variety of missions in an era of great-power competition, there will have to be a stricter division of labor in that community. The formation will increasingly need to be bifurcated between those units that specialize in “old” competencies and those that specialize in “new” ones.

Some in the SOF community argue against this move toward specialization or contend that SOF capabilities are so advanced that they should remain central to American strategy in the era of great-power competition. These perspectives reflect where SOF are in the present rather than where they should be in the future. Today, these forces are optimized for a rotational counterterrorism fight, horizontally integrated with a panoply of supporting capabilities, and filled by individuals selected, assessed, and trained for the forever wars. Tomorrow, SOF will need to develop distinct selection and training pathways, shed excess capacity and mission overlap, and reinforce and provide resources for diverse mission sets.

Most of all, SOF leaders will need to acknowledge the misalignment and disparities between counter-terrorism capacity and great-power competition capacity. The United States is entering a new and difficult strategic reality. That transition will be challenging but vital, not least for America’s spe-cial operators.

About the Authors

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Tim Nichols is visiting professor of the practice at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy and executive director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Notes

1. James Mattis, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America,” US Department of Defense, 2018, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf.

2. This report is a significantly revised and expanded version of a shorter article originally produced by Tim Nichols. 3. Henry A. Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service (New York: Penguin Books, 2013);

Gary Bertsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006); and James Mattis and Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (New York: Random House, 2019).

4. Seth G. Jones, Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). 5. Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, After ISIS: U.S. Political-Military Strategy in the Global War on Terror, Center for Strategic and

Budgetary Assessments, March 10, 2017, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/after-isis-u.s.-politico-military-strategy-in-the-global-war-on-terror/publication/1.

6. Audrey Kurth Cronin, “The ‘War on Terrorism’: What Does It Mean to Win?,” Journal of Strategic Studies 37, no. 2 (November 29, 2013), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2013.850423; Peter Feaver and Hal Brands, “Trump and Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, February 13, 2017, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-02-13/trump-and-terrorism; and David Schanzer and Tim Nichols, “Take a Deep Breath and Build a Coalition to Confront ISIS,” ISLAMICommentary, September 2014, http://islamicommentary.org/2014/09/take-a-deep-breath-and-build-a-coalition-to-confront-isis-by-david-schanzer-and-tim-nichols/.

7. Howard Altman, “SOCom at 30 Has Evolved into a Small Command with Big Global Impact,” Tampa Bay Times, April 16, 2017, https://www.tampabay.com/news/military/macdill/socom-at-30-has-evolved-into-small-command-with-big-global-impact/2320395/.

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8. Jim Mitre, “A Eulogy for the Two-War Construct,” Washington Quarterly, January 24, 2019, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/0163660X.2018.1557479.

9. Ely Ratner, “Learning the Lessons of Scarborough Reef,” National Interest, November 21, 2013, https://nationalinterest.org/ commentary/learning-the-lessons-scarborough-reef-9442.

10. Ely Ratner, “Course Correction,” Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2017, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-06-13/course-correction; and Hal Brands and Zack Cooper, “Getting Serious About Strategy in the South China Sea,” Naval War College Review, March 2018, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol71/iss1/3/.

11. US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Competition Continuum, June 3, 2019, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/jdn_jg/ jdn1_19.pdf.

12. Joe Miller et al., “Harnessing David and Goliath: Orthodoxy, Asymmetry, and Competition,” Small Wars Journal, February 7, 2019, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/harnessing-david-and-goliath-orthodoxy-asymmetry-and-competition.

13. US Special Operations Command, United States Special Operations Command Comprehensive Review, SOF News, January 23, 2020, https://sof.news/pubs/USSOCOM-Comprehensive-Ethics-Review-Report-January-2020.pdf.

14. Edward C. Croot, There Is an Identity Crisis in Special Forces: Who Are the Green Berets Supposed to Be?, Duke University, Sanford School of Public Policy, March 2020, https://sites.duke.edu/tcths_fellows/files/2020/04/Ed-Croot-Final-Paper.pdf.

15. Mattis, “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America.” 16. Charles Faint and Michael Harris, “F3EAD: Ops/Intel Fusion ‘Feeds’ the SOF Targeting Process,” Small Wars Journal, January

31, 2012, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/f3ead-opsintel-fusion-%E2%80%9Cfeeds%E2%80%9D-the-sof-targeting-process. 17. Sam Wilkins, “Does America Need an Africa Strategy?,” War on the Rocks, April 2, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/

does-america-need-an-africa-strategy/. 18. National Defense Authorization Act, Pub. L. No. 115-91, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-115publ91/pdf/PLAW-

115publ91.pdf. 19. Thomas G. Mahnken, “Cost-Imposing Strategies: A Brief Primer,” Center for a New American Security, November 2014,

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/cost-imposing-strategies-a-brief-primer. 20. T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Inflicting Cost (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1967),

https://core.ac.uk/reader/6838278; Hal Brands and Toshi Yoshihara, “How to Wage Political Warfare,” National Interest, December 16, 2018, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-wage-political-warfare-38802; and Hal Brands, “The Dark Art of Political Warfare: A Primer,” American Enterprise Institute, February 6, 2020, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-dark-art-of-political-warfare-a-primer/.

21. BBC, “Russia Returns Ukrainian Boats Seized off Crimea,” November 18, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50458521.

22. US Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, January 2012, https://archive. defense.gov/news/Defense_Strategic_Guidance.pdf.

23. Eric Edelman et al., Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission, United States Institute of Peace, November 2018, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/providing-for-the-common-defense.pdf.

24. Richard Fontaine, “The Nonintervention Delusion,” Foreign Affairs, October 15, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ 2019-10-15/nonintervention-delusion.

25. US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Competition Continuum.

© 2020 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. All rights reserved. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does not take institutional positions on any issues. The views expressed here are those of the author(s).

Russia in the Gray Zone

JULY 19, 2019 • KATHLEEN HICKS

Kathleen Hicks is Senior Vice President, Henry A. Kissinger Chair, and Director of the

International Security Program at CSIS.

In its ongoing efforts to influence world affairs, Russia is waging campaigns both bloodless and

bloody. A significant number of its tactics fall in the space between routine statecraft and direct

and open warfare, a space sometimes referred to as the gray zone. Americans are familiar with

Russia’s disinformation efforts in the United States and its use of “little green men” in Ukraine,

but they may be less attuned to stepped-up Russian political and economic coercion abroad, its

gray zone cyber and space operations, and its use of proxy forces in Syria. Its aim with these

approaches is to achieve Russian objectives at low-cost, notably by side-stepping military

escalation with the United States or its NATO allies. Although Russia’s exploitation of the gray

zone is not new, the prevalence of these tactics is more significant today than any time since the

end of the Cold War.

Disinformation, political influence, and economic and energy coercion are the core of the

Gerasimov Doctrine’s emphasis on the non-military means to achieve security goals. Russia

continues to remain undeterred and committed to interfering and influencing foreign elections.

US officials have acknowledged Russian attempts to influence the 2018 midterm elections and

identified efforts already underway to influence the 2020 election. The European Commission

recently released a report which found that Russia undertook a “continued and sustained”

disinformation campaign that targeted Europe’s recent parliamentary elections. Its efforts were

aimed at both suppressing voter turnout as well as influencing voter preference.

Russia is also using intrusive diplomacy, influence buying, and economic threats to bring

international conditions in line with its interests. The Kremlin continues to cultivate and deepen

ties with Serbia, pulling Belgrade further from seeking European Union membership and into

Russia’s orbit. Though they ultimately failed, Russia actively worked to undermine an agreement

between Greece and then Macedonia, which seemingly has paved the way for the latter to join

NATO in 2020. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, with controlling interest from Russia’s gas

monopoly, Gazprom, is designed to circumvent Ukraine. If completed as planned, it will allow

Russia to shut off gas to Ukraine while allowing it to flow to others in Europe, creating leverage

for pitting Europe against Ukraine in Russia’s favor.

Russia’s gray zone efforts are also visible in the military sphere, below the level of direct warfare

with the United States. Over strenuous US objections, Russia recently sold Turkey a

sophisticated surface-to-air missile system, the S-400. Aside from further testing Turkey’s place

in the NATO alliance, there is fear that the Russian engineers will gain access to American-made

equipment in Turkey’s existing or future arsenal. In space, Russia conducts operations against

US commercial and allied military satellites, and in cyberspace, Russia’s Main Intelligence

Administration, or GRU, has been active not only in election interference but in probing the US

power grid. Russian and Chinese cyber infiltration of US naval assets and systems is also well

documented. In the Western Hemisphere, in spite of dire economic and humanitarian conditions,

Russia persuaded Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro from stepping down and provided

support to the Maduro regime in the form of military advisers. Presenting perhaps the greatest

risk for military escalation beyond the gray zone is Russian use of disguised forces. In Ukraine,

Syria, and the Central African Republic, for instance, Russia has deployed a paramilitary

mercenary organization, the Wagner Group. Last year, US military forces successfully struck

Wagner Group positions in Syria.

The Russians may be the most audacious gray zone actor, but they have plenty of company in the

space. China, North Korea, and Iran are also engaged in many of the tactics described above.

Moreover, the United States and others in the free world themselves employ covert means to

achieve their goals albeit, in well-functioning democracies, such tactics are governed under a set

of domestic laws that ensure oversight, accountability, and overall alignment within transparent

foreign policy aims. This approach continues to advantage the United States in gray zone

competition, despite the temptation to beat authoritarians at their own game. The United States’

greatest strategic advantages for achieving its interests in the face of gray zone threats are in fact

tied to strengthening its model of governance, not abandoning it. Foremost among those

advantages from which the United States should campaign are these four:

● the power of US Constitutional tenants and individual liberty;

● a reservoir of vibrant business, media, and civil society communities;

● unparalleled alliance and partner networks; and

● significant potential U.S. government capacity and capability.

Campaigning from its relative strengths is critical, but the United States must also lessen its

vulnerabilities to Russian and others’ tactics. This includes improving its intelligence warning to

capture a broader set of indicators and better recognize rivals’ campaigns from ambiguous

patterns. Warning is useless, however, if it does not galvanize effective action. The United States

must, therefore, adopt a campaign mindset, looking to proactively shape conditions in its

favor—building from its strengths, not primarily from its fear—and respond effectively when

vulnerabilities are exploited. This requires improvements in US government policies, authorities,

and capabilities, but it also demands the government act as a trusted and reliable long-term

partner of the private sector and allies and partners, both of which are frequent targets for Russia

and others. Gaining that trust will take compelling and transparent communications and

revitalized tools of suasion, including economic statecraft and domestic incentives for businesses

and civil society.