Gray zone: defining the space in between

Chapter 2 notes that by 2010 or so, increasingly assertive Chinese and Russian challenges in the international environment have highlighted gaps in U.S. defense concepts and doctrines. These were challenged by activities with deliberately ambiguous intent or attribution, generally staying below the threshold of armed conflict. While the types of activities - the use of proxy actors, military deception, broadcasting propaganda or manipulating information - have long histories in international relations, terms such as “asymmetric conflict,” “unconventional warfare,” “irregular warfare,” and “hybrid warfare” that were used to describe the same events, tap into some, but not all, of the challenges with which U.S. policy makers were grappling. The chapter goes into considerable detail to definite the emerging characteristics of gray zone conflict used throughout this volume. It concludes that the U.S. must begin to think about the national security environment in a broader way to account for actions that do not rise to the level of military confrontation but over time present themselves as fait accompli against which in most cases an armed response would appear disproportionate and escalatory.