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30 August 2024

Perspective: Irregular Warfare in Strategic Competition and Gray Zones, Prosecuting Authoritarian Subversion and Exploitative Use of Corruption and Criminality to Weaken Democracy

David M. Luna

The geo-political challenge of irregular warfare (IW) in gray zones is increasingly more complex. These challenges are related to how our military adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are manipulating chaos, instability, and insecurity including, for example through co-option and coercive economics, and by:
  • Weaponizing corruption including election interference through illicit financial flows to support pro-authoritarian candidates that advance malign influence operations by exploiting governance gaps to secure friendly policies and win new anti-West friends, while harming US national interests;
  • Leveraging criminal networks, state-sponsored armed and violent proxies, diasporic communities, and professional super-fixers (enablers) to achieve military objectives, including to spread democratic backsliding, and to destabilize the national security interests of the United States and those of our democratic allies; and
  • Advancing revisionist and revanchist policies to construct their vision for a multi-polar world, exploiting gray zones from small islands in the Asia Pacific region to fragile democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Europe.
I assert, that we remain unprepared for irregular warfare. China, Iran, and Russia continue to seek to undercut US influence, degrade American relationships with key allies and partners, and exploit the global environment to their advantage including by leveraging, and exploiting—as instruments of competition—strategic corruption, illicit vectors, criminal activities, economic coercion, malign influence operations, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, insurgency, sabotage and subversion through asymmetrical and clandestine efforts.

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