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While the U.S. military remains frozen in a WWII mindset of high-intensity conflict, America's rivals are rewriting the rules of global engagement. From Russian warplanes buzzing British ships in Ukrainian waters to China's near-daily incursions into the airspace of its neighbors, America's adversaries are embracing aggressive tactics that fall short of provoking an international military response. This is known as gray-zone warfare.

In the inaugural episode of Hudson's new video series, The Take [[link removed]], military expert Bryan Clark [[link removed]] gives his take on how the U.S. military can respond to gray-zone operations by adopting a decision-centric approach to warfare. Each 2-minute video in the series offers a succinct look at a complicated but critical issue facing policymakers.

To learn more about decision-centric warfare and what the Department of Defense (DoD) can do to address gray-zone warfare, read Implementing Decision-Centric Warfare: Elevating Command and Control to Gain an Optionality Advantage [[link removed]] by Bryan Clark [[link removed]], Dan Patt [[link removed]], and Tim Walton [[link removed]], and stay tuned next week for the release of the authors' follow-up report on the future of warfare.

Watch The Take [[link removed]] Read the Report [[link removed]]

Key Takeaways

From Implementing Decision-Centric Warfare: Elevating Command and Control to Gain an Optionality Advantage [[link removed]] by Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Tim Walton.

1. Decision-Making is the New Battleground

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) concept of System Destruction Warfare and the Russian military’s New Generation Warfare are representative of the new approaches being employed against the United States and its allies. Both concepts share a focus on information and decision-making as the main battlegrounds for future conflict. They direct attacks on an opponent’s battle network electronically and physically to degrade its ability to obtain accurate information while introducing false information that erodes the opponent’s ability to orient.

2. Speed Up or Fall Behind

Without dramatic reforms to DoD’s requirements and force development processes, the U.S. military risks falling behind adversaries in the competition for decision-making advantage, thereby threatening its ability to protect U.S. interests and allies against great power aggression…. DoD’s force design changes or command, control, and communication (C3) initiatives will need to go further for the U.S. military to sustain an optionality advantage against peer adversaries that have already made the leap to decision-centric warfare and have a home field advantage from which to employ it.

3. AI-Driven Forces are the Future of Warfare

The Mosaic Warfare concept, developed by DARPA, is based on the idea that disaggregated manned and autonomous units guided by human command with AI-enabled machine control could use their adaptability and complexity to prevent adversaries from achieving objectives while disrupting enemy centers of gravity to preclude further aggression… A U.S. military force built on the Mosaic Warfare concept would complicate the opponent’s decision-making, narrowing its options and imposing a potentially insoluble set of dilemmas.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Watch The Take [[link removed]] Read the Report [[link removed]] Go Deeper Read [[link removed]]

Fix the Pacific Deterrence Fund—and the Deeper Problem It Reveals [[link removed]]

The Pentagon’s plan to deter China is rightly coming under fire, argue Bryan Clark [[link removed]] and Dan Patt [[link removed]] in Defense One. Members of Congress and national security experts are criticizing the plan's lack of missile defense, interoperability, and training investments. More importantly, the new defense budget fails to address a more important underlying problem: Combatant commanders cannot properly organize and integrate forces in theater to tackle their most challenging operational problems.

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Chinese Misbehavior in the Indo-Pacific [[link removed]]

Speaking with Vago Muradian on the Defense and Aerospace Podcast, Patrick Cronin [[link removed]] examines one of China's latest disruptive gray-zone tactics: dredging the seabed surrounding Taiwanese islands. When night falls, Chinese sand-dredging ships surround Taiwan's Matsu islands and remove sand from the sea floor, damaging the maritime environment and impacting the islands' economy. The U.S. and our allies should support Taiwan in building defenses that would impose costs on these Chinese dredging ships.

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It's a Gray, Gray World [[link removed]]

Writing in the Naval War College Review, Nadia Schadlow [[link removed]] takes on critics who reject the concept of gray-zone operations. This criticism, Schadlow notes, does not hold up to a reality in which China is strategically acquiring key technologies from U.S. firms in bankruptcy, building artificial islands in the South China Sea, and pressuring European nations to adopt Chinese telecommunications infrastructure. The gray zone might sit uncomfortably between war and peace, but that is due to our narrowly defined constructs of war and peace; our competitors are more flexible.

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