Countering Adversaries: Why the US Needs a National Gray Zone Strategy
As Washington shapes the historically large defense budget, national security experts argue that funding must target adversarial gray zone activities—defined by the National Intelligence Council as coercion and subversion below armed conflict—to protect global leadership and prevent escalation into kinetic war.
The Rising Threat of Sub-Threshold Conflict
Adversaries are actively waging targeted gray zone campaigns against the United States, utilizing methods that exist outside the bounds of historically legitimate statecraft. According to the National Intelligence Council, these tactics include coercion and subversion positioned squarely between peaceful interstate diplomacy and direct armed conflict. State-led activities within this realm are specifically designed to weaken government resolve, alter domestic and foreign policies, and chip away at American global leadership without triggering a traditional military response.
David Pitts, a Cipher Brief Expert, describes this current phase of ongoing competition as “endless wars.” These operations exploit the friction points of modern geopolitics, leaving democratic institutions struggling to mount a cohesive defense. Without proactive countermeasures, the United States risks ceding strategic ground to centralized autocracies that face fewer domestic regulatory hurdles in executing whole-of-state operations.
Structural Challenges in Democratic Societies
Autocracies maintain a distinct structural advantage in the gray zone. Because non-democratic states are not bound by the same domestic laws, public transparency mandates, and bureaucratic compartmentalization that govern open societies, they easily marshal whole-of-society resources. By contrast, the United States government remains largely compartmentalized.
The State Department focuses primarily on traditional diplomacy and relationship-building, while the National Security Council has faced structural hollowing. Furthermore, legal authorities restrict both the Department of War and the intelligence community from independently leading unified, whole-of-government campaigns. While the White House recently appointed the first US National Security Council Director for Cognitive Advantage, experts emphasize that cognitive advantage represents only a single facet of a much broader operational spectrum.
Historical Lessons in Political Warfare
Gray zone tactics are far from modern innovations. Historical precedents demonstrate that effective sub-threshold strategies have long been utilized to manage tensions and achieve strategic objectives without resorting to total war. The Trojan Horse operation famously deployed deception, clandestine infiltration, and the creation of internal division.
During the Peloponnesian War, Athenians utilized proxy forces fluent in the language and culture of the Helots to sow distrust and prompt mass desertions from Spartan forces, ultimately forcing Sparta to seek negotiations. Similarly, the Han Empire deployed economic and cultural engagement—including trade agreements and marriage alliances—to secure borders against nomadic powers. During the Cold War, superpowers engaged in espionage, sabotage, and proxy support to contest influence across Latin America, Korea, and Vietnam, keeping competition contained beneath the threshold of direct military escalation.
Rebuilding the Whole-of-Government Apparatus
To reverse current vulnerabilities, the United States must establish a coherent command-and-control framework. Developing effective offensive and defensive gray zone strategies requires deep expertise, adversary-specific knowledge, and sustained patience. Experts recommend dedicating a portion of the defense budget to resource these capabilities and appointing a seasoned professional within the National Security Council to integrate multi-agency actions against specific adversaries.
Achieving this level of coordination requires bridging institutional divides across the military, intelligence, economic, trade, diplomatic, and public relations sectors.
The national security community must move past procedural gridlock. By training national security professionals in creative, out-of-the-box strategic thinking, the United States can reclaim the initiative in the gray zone. The nation must publicly signal its refusal to tolerate sub-threshold attacks while executing disciplined, attribution-managed countermeasures designed to preserve long-term global stability.