THE GRAY ZONE

Defining Gray Zone Challenges

Gray zone security challenges, which are competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality, are characterized by ambiguity about the nature of the conflict, opacity of the parties involved, or uncertainty about the relevant policy and legal frameworks. They exist short of a formal state of war, and present novel complications for U.S. policy and interests in the 21st century. The United States has a well-developed vocabulary, doctrine and mental models to describe war and peace, but the numerous gray zone challenges in between defy easy categorization.

Gray zone challenges are understood as a pooling of diverse conflicts exhibiting common characteristics. Combining these challenges does not imply a single solution, since each situation contains unique actors and aspects. Overall, gray zone challenges rise above normal, everyday peacetime geo-political competition and are aggressive, perspective-dependent and ambiguous.

As the world's leading superpower and defacto guarantor of the current world order, American national security interests span the globe and intersect with numerous circumstances fitting the definition of gray zone challenges. However, many of these challenges exist independent of U.S. agency or action and do not merit American involvement (e.g. civil conflicts in Africa). Accordingly, this paper acknowledges and briefly discusses the larger construct of gray zone challenges across the world, but it focuses on the United States' national security interests and those gray zone challenges such as Russian actions in eastern Ukraine and Daesh, formerly the Islamic State in the Levant, that are relevant to America today.

Gray Zone Challenges - The new and old normal

The U.S. government can improve its ability to operate effectively in the gray zone between war and peace by reshaping its intellectual, organizational and institutional models. America's conventional military dominance and status as a global power guarantee continual challenges and incentivize competitors to oppose the United States in ways designed to nullify our military advantage. The U.S. already possesses the right mix of tools to prevail in the gray zone, but it must think, organize and act differently.

Gray zone challenges are not new. Monikers such as irregular warfare, low-intensity conflict, asymmetric warfare, military operations other than war and small wars were employed to describe this phenomenon in...