Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents is a series that provides primary source documents and expert commentary on various topics relating to the worldwide effort to combat terrorism, as well as efforts by the United States and other nations to protect their national security interests. Volume 141, Hybrid Warfare and the Gray Zone Threat, considers the mutation of the international security environment brought on by decades of unrivaled U.S. conventional military power. The term "hybrid warfare" encompasses conventional warfare, irregular warfare, cyberwarfare, insurgency, criminality, economic blackmail, ethnic warfare, "lawfare," and the application of low-cost but effective technologies to thwart high-cost technologically advanced forces. This volume is divided into five sections covering different aspects of this topic, each of which is introduced by expert commentary written by series editor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr. This volume contains thirteen useful documents exploring various facets of the shifting international security environment, including a detailed report on hybrid warfare issued by the Joint Special Operations University and a White Paper on special operations forces support to political warfare prepared by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, as well as a GAO report and a CRS report covering similar topics. Specific coverage is also given to topics such as cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, the efficacy of sanctions in avoiding and deterring hybrid warfare threats, and the intersection of the military and domestic U.S. law enforcement.

Geopolitical competition is increasingly playing out in the space beyond diplomacy and short of conventional war, sometimes referred to as the gray zone, which is forcing the United States to confront the liabilities of its strengths. This report assesses current U.S. government actions to deter, campaign through, and respond to competitors’ gray zone tactics. Using the campaign planning framework established in By Other Means Part I, it also provides recommendations aimed at ameliorating U.S. liabilities and building on its asymmetries to improve U.S. national security in the presence of rivals’ gray zone approaches.

National security threats facing the West are fundamentally changing. In this book, Elisabeth Braw offers the first sustained analysis of how new tactics in the gray zone between war and peace dangerously weaken liberal democracies. She discusses the breadth of gray-zone aggression and presents strategies for better defense against it.

Gray zone warfare, also known as irregular warfare, political warfare, hybrid warfare, asymmetric warfare, and unconventional warfare, is increasingly becoming the norm. It is a significant concern today, threatening U.S. national security as well as the security of U.S. allies and partners. Despite its population's immense capacity for creativity and innovation, the United States is losing this war. The Department of Defense (DoD) has historically led the gray zone war fight with assistance from other Federal agencies. However, it cannot require other agencies to engage, and it cannot be aware of all of the effective tools available across the whole-of-government, nor can it know how its proposed way forward may conflict with approaches made by other agencies. This monograph provides an assessment of the gray zone tactics used against the most active U.S. adversaries, and builds the case for requiring U.S. Federal agencies to request that the Deputy National Security Advisor convene a National Security Council/Deputies Committee (NSC/DC) meeting whenever any Federal agency deems a gray zone approach to an international issue is appropriate. It also recommends that a standing National Security Council/Policy Coordination Committee (NSC/PCC) for gray zone solutions be developed, with sub-NSC/PCCs for each of the most active adversaries so that experts can be quickly assembled in times of crisis.

The United States is being confronted by the liabilities of its strength. Competitors are finding avenues for threatening U.S. interests without triggering escalation. Their approaches lie in the contested arena between routine statecraft and open warfare—the "gray zone." The United States has yet to articulate a comprehensive approach to deterring competitors in the gray zone. A concrete and actionable campaign plan is needed to deal with the gray zone challenge; in order to do so, the United States must identify and employ a broad spectrum of tools and concepts to deter, and if needed, to compete and win contestations in the gray zone.

With a renewed emphasis on national and homeland security, the United States is once again seeking to balance the needs of the state with both the rights of its citizens as well as those of other nations. This book represents an interdisciplinary approach to the legal dilemmas borne out by the war on terror-against the specific background of Afghanistan, Iraq, and this new kind of conflict. It is a strong contribution to a broader debate visible since 9/11, which will remain in the public eye for the foreseeable future. It addresses the overlap between religion, ethics, armed conflict, and law, within the context of the current conflict. While many issues in areas such as intelligence, reconciliation of civil liberties, dealing with terrorist threats, and the permissible bounds of interrogation, treatment of prisoners and laws governing armed conflict have long standing precedents under domestic and international law, this war has challenged even long standing legal interpretations. The contributors to this volume explore those precedents and contemporary challenges to them. Now that traditional wars between nation states are no longer the rule, the terrorist threat has gained credence (popularly, terrorism and its claimed breeding ground in failed states), linked in practice to issues of intervention on the territory of states harboring such groups. In military circles the idea of armed struggle between modern military forces and what were formerly called guerillas has now largely been replaced by asymmetric warfare and the concept of intelligence and preventive action interchangeably within U.S. borders and overseas. Opposing views contemplate that different-and presumably lower-legal standards may apply in internal armed conflicts. Such legal issues are visible under current circumstances of asymmetric warfare in conjunction with questions about prisoner status and detentions, including the permissible bounds of interrogation versus torture following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq but also the treatment at the Guantanamo Bay facility of alleged Al Q'aeda captives from Afghanistan. All of the contributors in this book explore the changing circumstances against which these contentious new legal issues now unfold. The experts strike no consensus. Indeed, one of the work's many strengths can be attributed to the fact that the many facets of the ongoing debate are represented herein.