Elisabeth Braw
There was a time, not so long ago when many viewed gray zone aggression as a marginal concern. Even those who paid attention to it mostly focused on cyber aggression and disinformation campaigns.
Now, it has become much more serious because we haven’t managed to deter it. Examples of hostile activity by the authoritarian axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are proliferating.
The UK faces “state-backed sabotage and assassination plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war,” MI5’s Director-General, Ken McCallum, warned on October 8. The same is true for every Western country. Defending free societies against it remains extremely difficult. But Western countries are not defenseless — or rather, they don’t have to be.
As early as 2018, when I launched RUSI’s Modern Deterrence initiative to focus on deterrence of grayzone attacks, it was clear that authoritarian states had (rightly) concluded that using aggression below the threshold of armed military violence was a cheap and effective way of hurting Western societies.
No comments:
Post a Comment