Donald Stoker Craig Whiteside
Among today’s great ironies is that, despite the fact that the United States has been at war for the better part of two decades, rare is the American policy maker who speaks adeptly about our use of military power in a coherent manner. On the one hand, political leaders attempt to avoid categorizing our air strikes and raids targeting al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in countries around the world as war, while on the other hand they conflate hostile Russian acts with some form of hyphenated war.
This article argues that the adoption of two prominent and fashionable theoretical terms and their various iterations—the gray zone or grayzone conflict (usually described as the space between peace and war) and hybrid war (often described as Russia’s new form of mixed-methods warfare birthed by General Valery Gerasimov)—is an example of an American failure to think clearly about political, military, and strategic issues and their vitally important connections. These terms, as well as the concepts arising from them, should be eliminated from the strategic lexicon.
They cause more harm than good and contribute to an increasingly dangerous distortion of the concepts of war, peace, and geopolitical competition, with a resultant negative impact on the crafting of security strategy for the United States and its allies and partners around the world. If an effort to eliminate two such commonly accepted terms and the theoretical approaches arising from them seems a fruitless effort to corral the contents of Pandora’s box, then examine the most recent U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. 1 You will not find either term in these documents even though, as we will see, both have appeared regularly in U.S. political and strategy documents for years. This demonstrates that it is possible to discuss security
This article argues that the adoption of two prominent and fashionable theoretical terms and their various iterations—the gray zone or grayzone conflict (usually described as the space between peace and war) and hybrid war (often described as Russia’s new form of mixed-methods warfare birthed by General Valery Gerasimov)—is an example of an American failure to think clearly about political, military, and strategic issues and their vitally important connections. These terms, as well as the concepts arising from them, should be eliminated from the strategic lexicon.
They cause more harm than good and contribute to an increasingly dangerous distortion of the concepts of war, peace, and geopolitical competition, with a resultant negative impact on the crafting of security strategy for the United States and its allies and partners around the world. If an effort to eliminate two such commonly accepted terms and the theoretical approaches arising from them seems a fruitless effort to corral the contents of Pandora’s box, then examine the most recent U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. 1 You will not find either term in these documents even though, as we will see, both have appeared regularly in U.S. political and strategy documents for years. This demonstrates that it is possible to discuss security
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