Shedding Light on the Gray Zone: A New Approach to Human-Centric Warfare
Shedding Light on the Gray Zone: A New Approach to Human-Centric Warfare by Lt. Gen. Charles T. Cleveland, U.S. Army retired, Lt. Col. Shaw S. Pick and Lt. Col. Stuart L. Farris, Army Magazine
At the same time the world is less inclined to go to war, weak governments are failing and the tools of warfare are far cheaper and accessible to both states and nonstate actors. This confluence of forces is enabling our adversaries to find sanctuary in weakly governed spaces where they can leverage technology to increasingly challenge us in a “gray zone” between what we have considered peaceful interstate political competition and open war. Perhaps the single most important characteristic of contemporary gray zone conflicts is that they will occur among human populations living under varying levels of effective governance and security.
Given this reality, we must revisit our understanding of the security environment and ask difficult questions about the efficacy of our current approaches. Further, the concept of winning must be fundamentally re-examined in the context of a future environment in which conventional wars will be supplanted by population-centric conflicts and asymmetric challenges to U.S. power…
