The author of this piece, Adam L. Silverman, PhD is a senior subject matter expert and consultant at Helios Global, Inc specializing in low intensity warfare and cultural considerations for strategy, policy, and operations. He served as a Senior Fellow in the Center for Special Operations Studies and Research at US Special Operations Command’s Joint Special Operations University in 2015.
The United States in the 21st century is confronted by different threats and challenges than it and its allies and partners were in the 20th century. While some of the 20th century challenges and threats still exist, such as the recent reemergence of extremist nationalism, fascism, and totalitarianism often wedded to extremist politicized religion, other threats and challenges are specific to the second and third decades of the 21st century. While the US, its allies, and its partners still face the challenges and threats that arise from traditionally defined interstate war, as well as low intensity warfare utilizing the full spectrum of asymmetric, irregular, and unconventional strategies and tactics, it also faces a new form of warfare. During the second decade of the 21st century, the United States was confronted with a 21st century form of war and warfare.
At the senior leader colleges, as well as both the professional literature on war and the academic literature about conflict within the discipline of International Relations, war is described as having an unchanging nature. It has been, is, and will always be rooted in the simple drivers that Thucydides described in his history of the Peloponnesian War. The nature of war is rooted in fear, honor, and interest. The character and characteristics of war, however, change and evolve over time to reflect the changes in societies in regard to what are considered existential threats that require a military solution, as well changes of technologies that allow state and non-state actors to deliver kinetic power to inflict enough pain so that one’s adversary yields.
21st century war and warfare reflects these shifts. There is, unfortunately, still far too much interstate war, civil war, revolution, insurgency, and terrorism; however, a new form of war and warfare in the 21st century has developed. This new warfare was developed by states that are unable to match the military might of the United States, but that seek to achieve their strategic objectives through the application of all the other elements of national power. While the United States has been mired in ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a number of areas across southeast Asia and Africa in the war on terror that began shortly after the 9-11 attacks, the US’s opponents and competitors have been observing, learning, and adapting. They have accurately observed that the United States cannot be matched in the military delivery of lethal force at the tactical and operational levels of war. However, they have also observed that far too much of the United States national security and foreign policy focus has been on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, southeast Asia, and Africa in pursuit of victory in the war on terror. These adversaries and competitors have cracked Sun Tzu’s paradox on martial effectiveness: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”.
Recognizing that they cannot subdue America by utilizing military power, the US’s adversaries and competitors have instead changed the way that they make war. Rather than attack the US, its allies, and its partners directly using military power, America’s adversaries and competitors have instead been waging war against them for the better part of a decade by utilizing some or all of the other forms of military power. Some of these uses of national power, the weaponization of the non-military elements of diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and legal power (the DIMEFIL), are new and novel. Some, such as the Russian active measures subversion campaign that was directed at the US during and since the 2016 presidential election and Britain during Brexit, are old tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that are finally able to be effectively operationalized because technological advancement are finally mature enough to support US adversaries’ concepts and doctrine.
The US’s adversaries and competitors, recognizing that they cannot match America’s military power, have begun to weaponize other elements of their national power to wage a 21st century form of war against the US, its allies, and its partners. To use a Clausewitzian formulation, America’s adversaries and competitors have recognized that war is politics with other means. And these other means are the weaponization of the remainder of the DIMEFIL other than military power - the weaponization of diplomatic, information, economic, financial, intelligence, and legal power.
This 21st century form of war and warfare is not simply isolated subversion operations within the gray zone between peace and war between state actors, and by some non-state actors against state actors, below the level of war. Rather, the US’s adversaries and competitors, recognizing that they cannot match the US in the use of military force have elevated the other elements of national power, weaponized them, and are using them to wage a sustained war against the US, its allies, and its partners.
Different adversaries and competitors are utilizing this 21st century form of warfare differently. Russia’s focus has been on taking advantage of the technological innovations that make it possible to fully operationalize the influence tactics, techniques, and procedures developed by the Soviet Union’s security and intelligence services during the Cold War and proliferated through the Communist International (COMINTERN). They have then added to this now technologically actuated toolkit economic warfare waged through a number of post-Soviet oligarchs who straddle the line between legitimate business and organized crime coupled with a weaponized diplomacy intended to undermine and ultimately bring down the post-World War II and post-Cold War international rules based order.
The Russians themselves recognize that these actions, using all elements of national power other than military power or with only limited applications of military power, are actually a new form of war and warfare. In an early 2015 speech at Russia’s Academy of Military Sciences, then General-Lieutenant Andrey Kartopolov calls this 21st century type of war and warfare “new type war.” Kartopolov’s delineated his new-type of war as:
- “Indirect Hybrid Methods:
- Pressuring the enemy politically, economically, informationally, and psychologically
- Disorienting the political and military leadership of the state victim, spreading dissatisfaction among the population
- Preparing armed opposition detachments and sending them to the conflict region
- Diplomatic and Propaganda warfare:
- Covertly deploying and employing special operations forces, cyber attacks, and software attacks, conducting reconnaissance and subversive acts on a large scale, supporting the internal opposition, and employing new weapons systems”
Only once the indirect hybrid methods and the diplomatic and propaganda warfare have been successfully utilized to set the theater of operations would there be a shift to what Kartapolov calls “classical methods of waging war”. This shift to classical methods of war only takes place if necessary to liquidate any remaining pockets of resistance.
China’s approach is different than Russia’s. The PRC uses its economic power to promote their diplomatic power and efforts within and throughout the Belt and Road Initiative. To do this, the PRC utilizes front companies backed by state-owned enterprises to conduct industrial espionage and sabotage, as well as lawfare and economic subversion to gain control of key technologies or economic and business sectors to advance their strategic objectives. These economic and legal initiatives are then subordinated to the Belt and Road diplomatic initiative to extend China’s reach throughout Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. Contrary to Putin’s approach, Xi’s is subtle and seeks to work within existing international institutions and structures to advance the PRC’s interests and to eventually displace the US as the global hegemon.
Russian and Chinese influence activities regarding climate change provide an excellent example of their two different approaches to waging 21st century warfare by applying elements of national power other than military power against the US. Putin’s information warriors have been major promoters of the conspiracy theories that climate change is a hoax. And since climate change is a hoax, they argue that the US should not do anything about it because there is nothing to do anything about. For all the tangible damage that climate change is actually doing to parts of Russia, Putin is gambling that it can be managed profitably through increased access to petroleum, minerals, the Arctic, and despite the evidence to the contrary, the transformation of large parts of Siberia into agricultural land.
Putin’s climate change gambit is to use influence operations against Americans to make it impossible for the US to both undertake any significant domestic mitigation efforts or to lead global efforts to manage, mitigate, and reverse the effects of climate change. By doing so, the intention is for Russia to manage climate change and to profit off of it through remaking Russia’s human geography. By changing the places, specifically Siberia, into a more clement climate, the objective is to transform Russia into an agricultural, petrochemical, and mineralogical powerhouse by relocating Russians to the newly arable areas to farm and work in the petroleum and mineral extraction industries.
China’s approach is different. China has moved very quickly to develop the emerging green technologies that will be needed to manage, mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. China has taken the opening that was partly created by Russia’s misinformation campaign against the US on climate change to rapidly move to become the leader in green and renewable technologies. They have done this through both internal development and by using economic warfare and lawfare to identify promising green and renewable technological developments by American and other countries’ corporations, steal them via industrial espionage, or leverage financial and legal power to takeover these companies.
China has used its own human geography - its people, places, and things - in pursuit of cornering the market on green and renewable technologies. It uses its people to either develop and produce these emerging technologies or to steal them. The PRC then leverages its large manufacturing sector to produce them. By doing so it is exploiting the opening created by America’s inability to move forward on climate change issues to ensure that the US, as well as other states, will have to either buy or license these technologies from China. China’s objective is to create further economic leverage over the US and other states as the effects of climate change continue to expand.
The Problem
US strategic documents all recognize great power competition. The term is prevalent in every US strategic document released since the 2017 National Security Strategy and nests the concept within the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s concept of “great power armed conflict”. These strategic documents also all recognize the threats from foreign intelligence services. As the newly released National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States: 2020-2022 states:
Foreign intelligence actors—to include nation-states, organizations, and individuals—are employing innovative combinations of traditional spying, economic espionage, and supply chain and cyber operations to gain access to critical infrastructure,2 and steal sensitive information, research, technology, and industrial secrets. They are conducting malicious influence campaigns using cyber operations, media manipulation, covert operations,
and political subversion to sow divisions in our society, undermine confidence in our democratic institutions, and weaken our alliances. Foreign threat actors have become more dangerous because, with ready access to advanced technology, they are threatening a broader range of targets at lower risk.
The authors of The National Counterintelligence Strategy also recognize that all other elements of national power have been activated and weaponized against the United States:
“Russia and China operate globally, use all instruments of national power to target the United States, and have a broad range of sophisticated intelligence capabilities. Other state adversaries such as Cuba, Iran, and North Korea; non-state actors such as Lebanese Hizballah, ISIS, and al-Qa’ida; as well as, transnational criminal organizations and ideologically motivated entities such as hacktivists, leaktivists, and public disclosure organizations, also pose significant threats. Additionally, foreign nationals with no formal ties to foreign intelligence services steal sensitive data and intellectual property.”
Given their focus specifically on counterintelligence, the authors of The National Counterintelligence Strategy can be forgiven for not elevating this threat to actual interstate and low intensity warfare waged against the US by adversary and competitor states and hostile non-state actors. But that is actually what they are describing: a war that is (international) politics with other means. The other means being all non-military elements of national power or their non-state actor equivalents. The US’s other recent strategic references are the proposed 2021 budget just released by the White House. The authors of this document also reference great power competition, rooting the national security focus of the budget back to the 2017 National Security Strategy. However, what the President and his administration seek to fund or defund tells us far more about how the actions of America’s adversaries and competitors are understood (or not) at the most senior levels of the US government.
The recently released budget proposal focuses on funding either more of or improvements to the warfighting equipment that the US has been funding and/or trying to improve for the past several decades. The funding focus is squarely within the 20th century understanding of war and warfare where military power is utilized to inflict pain on one’s adversaries until they can no longer bear that pain and battlefield victory is achieved. While it is important for the US to maintain its military superiority, in both personnel and material, maintaining this military superiority provides little utility against the attacks that have most seriously damaged the US, its allies, and its partners over the past decade. Just as personnel is policy, what one is and is not willing to fund is also policy. The newly released budget proposal includes a 21% cut to the Department of State even though the US’s adversaries and competitors increasingly use diplomatic power as a weapon against America, its allies, and its partners.
This strategic disconnect between how America’s senior national security, defense, and foreign policy leadership understands war and the actual reality of the 21st century warfare being waged against the US, its allies, and its partners that deemphasizes the use of military power by instead relying on the other elements of national power, leaves the US, its allies, and its partners exceedingly and increasingly vulnerable. Different elements of the US’s national security, defense, and foreign policy community have identified these 21st century forms of warfare, but they have not been able to recognize the forest for the trees. The US is not simply facing a Russian active measures campaign utilizing cyber power to deliver influence effects. Nor is it facing a Chinese economic espionage and lawfare campaign to gain control of key technologies and sectors while advancing Chinese national interests through the diplomatic and development efforts of the Belt and Road Initiative.
The US, its allies, and its partners are also not merely facing a cyberwarfare campaign from the DPRK or a terrorism campaign and psychological operations campaign by ISIS and other extremist politicized Muslim groups. The US, its allies, and its partners are also not facing an unprecedented threat by the economic power of the wealthiest American and multinational technology, information and retail corporations, corporations in other sectors such as ownership of water rights, as well as the high net worth individuals who own and control those companies. Companies and individuals with net worths that are greater than the gross domestic product of the vast majority of nation-states. Rather, the US, its allies, and its partners are facing a new form of interstate and low intensity war and warfare that incorporates and encompasses all of these problem sets and where the lines of effort - from hostile nation-states, peer competitors, allies, hostile non-state actors, corporations, and high net worth individuals - are focused on subverting and degrading all elements of national power other than military power to achieve the strategic objectives of the US’s adversaries and competitors.
The 21st century war and warfare that the US is currently confronted with includes influence operations, cyber operations and cyber warfare, lawfare, economic and industrial espionage, but it is greater than the sum of these parts. All of these activities, as well as related ones, are combining the elements of national power while deemphasizing or avoiding the use of military power and directing them in coordinated, sustained attacks against the United States, its allies, and its partners. 21st century war and warfare seeks to inflict pain on the US by utilizing the elements of national power other than military power as strategic lines of effort to attack the US, its allies, and its partners to achieve adversary and competitor strategic objectives. Unfortunately, the national security, defense, and foreign policy leadership in the US have identified the trees, but through too narrow a focus are missing the forest. This can be clearly seen in The National Counterintelligence Strategy where the authors accurately identify the threats but are unable (or unwilling) to recognize that they are not discreet or semi-discreet threats and challenges, but lines of effort and operation in a non-kinetic 21st century form of war and warfare.
The Solution
In order for the US to appropriately counter the 21st century war and warfare being waged against it, it needs to recognize the actual reality of the new character and characteristics of war in the 21st century. Rather than approaching influence operations, subversion, economic and industrial espionage and theft, lawfare, hostile intelligence operations, and cyber operations against the US government and the American private sector as discreet counterintelligence problems, it is necessary to identify them for what they are: operational lines of effort in a largely non-kinetic form of 21st century interstate and low intensity warfare. America’s national security, defense, and foreign policy leadership needs to adjust their focus so that they can recognize this new form of 21st century war and warfare instead of just focusing on them as separate discreet operations, when they are really carefully concerted lines of effort in a much larger sustained campaign. This is certainly how the Russians understand what they are doing – using all the elements of national power combined with an understated threat of military power as line of effort to prosecute a war against the US, its allies, and its partners.
In order for the US to get back to the left of boom in regard to this new form of 21st century war and warfare it first needs to formally conceptualize what this new form of war and warfare is. It will then need to develop new concepts and doctrine to combat this specifically 21st century threat, as well as to shape how the US will generate not just the future military force to deal with this new form of war and warfare, but also generate the intelligence and resources, as well as the policies and strategies to counter and prevail against this uniquely 21st century threat. Such conceptual and doctrinal development will provide the framework to develop new strategies, policies, and tactics, techniques, and procedures to successfully combat the changed character and characteristics of 21st century war and warfare.
Until then, however, the US needs to take steps to undertake immediate triage to stabilize the operating environment, prevent further damage from being inflicted, and create the time and space to do the hard, slow work of conceptual, doctrinal, strategic, and policy development. To do this the US has the ability to adapt existing strategies, as well as tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and deploy them to combat and counter the 21st century form of war and warfare that is being waged against it. The steps that can be taken immediately have been delineated by my colleague Ian Conway’s work on gray zone conflict. I am adapting them as a starting point to counter and combat the DIE-FIL based lines of effort and operation of 21st century war and warfare:
A net threat assessment across all lines of effort of 21st century war and warfare. The purposes of this assessment would be to: (1) take stock of the state and non-state actors appearing to use the elements of the DIME-FIL other than military power - the DIE-FIL - as TTPs domestically and abroad; (2) catalog the TTP in use (agnostic of actor); and (3) analyze the potential effects of the TTP on both the government and American civil society. Given the continually morphing nature of actors and specific TTP, this initial assessment would be best recognized as a living document, with an expectation for continual refinement as new tactics, actors, and motives emerge.
Create a multidisciplinary red team analysis of US vulnerabilities to the DIE-FIL based lines of effort and operations of 21st century war and warfare should be conducted. Based on the net threat assessment (above), the U.S. government should select the actors of greatest strategic, operational, and tactical concern. For each selected actor, the red team would then conduct an analysis of critical US vulnerabilities, across the whole of society. To best leverage the use of the red teaming construct, the red team itself would then determine the best DIE-FIL based TTP to exploit identified vulnerabilities, along with their desired effects and measures of effectiveness. Finally, the red team would develop a campaign plan for each actor using using DIE-FIL based TTPs to wage 21st century war and warfare to demonstrate the previously identified vulnerabilities.
A gap analysis should be conducted of US government and society capabilities to recognize and respond to the range of the DIE-FIL based lines of effort and operation being directed against the US. This step bears many similarities to the post-9/11 efforts undertaken at the Federal, State, local, and tribal levels to identify gaps in domestic capabilities to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from terrorist events. Planners and liaisons will need to conduct extensive outreach at all domestic levels to adequately catalog existing detection, prevention, and response resources. Participants should be encouraged to look broadly throughout their respective communities and networks to understand where they can draw on expertise from existing resources.
A needs assessment of the policy, economic, fiscal, educational, political, and socio-cultural tools that need to be developed to bring the whole of the United States to an adequate state of readiness in the context of 21st century war and warfare. Just as occurred during the early stages of the Global War on Terror, all aspects of American society should take stock of where the resources available to them fall short, where policy and doctrine needs to be developed, authorities created or modified, funding allocated or redirected, and where training and education deficiencies need to be addressed.
Adopting and adapting these suggestions for combating the DIE-FIL based lines of efforts and operations being utilized by America’s adversaries and competitors in their 21st century war and warfare campaigns against the US will not win this new form of war. It will, however, create the strategic time and space necessary to adapt concepts, doctrine, policy, and strategy so that the US can generate the capabilities it needs in personnel, material, and tactics, techniques, and procedures to ultimately win these 21st century wars.
Read more expert-driven national security perspectives, insight and analysis in The Cipher Brief
