Sean Monaghan & Tim McDonald
While the theory and practice of military campaigning has been refined for centuries, there is no dedicated guidance on how to design and implement campaigns to counter hybrid threats for modern security practitioners across government. Meanwhile, existing military planning guidance is not suited for planning complex, non-military counter-hybrid campaigns.
This paper by Sean Monaghan (CSIS) and Tim McDonald (Pardee RAND) develops an alternative approach to campaigning against hybrid threats based on systems thinking principles. Their key innovation is to characterise grey zone competition as a complex adaptive system. This allows the central tenets of military operational planning to be refined based on systems logic. The result is a series of principles for campaigning
in the ‘grey zone’ between peace and war, augmented by a guide to action based on three functions: understand, act, and adapt. The authors illustrate this approach and provide real-world context through example campaigns.
By applying systems thinking to grey zone competition, the transatlantic community can move away from a narrow, limiting military-centric doctrine towards a systems approach to countering hybrid threats in a complex world.
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