How Can the U.S. better manage the Gray Zone?

"We have to rethink, retool, and reorient so that we are as prepared for gray zone activity as we are for traditional conflict; we’re not there yet."

View of four sailors manning a radar scope, mid twentieth century. (Photo by US Navy/Interim Archives/Getty Images)

By Dave Pitts

Pitts is a senior national security executive with over four decades of experience ranging from counterterrorism and special operations to regional and global affairs. Pitts served as the Assistant Director of CIA for South and Central Asia and was responsible for all CIA activities and engagement across South and Central Asia and for policy coordination in Washington.

This is part three in a three-part series by Cipher Brief Expert and former Assistant Director of CIA for South and Central Asia Dave Pitts, who also serves as a member of The Cipher Brief’s new Gray Zone Group. You can read parts one and two exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

“In this three-part series, Dave Pitts brings conceptual clarity to strategic competition and conflict in the gray zone.  As Dave notes, gray war is likely to be the primary mode of conflict going forward between America and its great and regional power adversaries, just as it was during the Soviet-American Cold War.  Indeed, the new gray war has been underway for some time. Gray war encompasses a range of operations from non-lethal and lethal covert action to overt, indirect (proxy) war, and from cognitive warfare to cyber operations.  It even extends into space.  Through gray war, our adversaries seek to undermine our national will and capacity to oppose them, alter the geopolitical landscape to their advantage and undermine our global influence, compromise our critical national security systems, and steal our data and technology.  Intelligence will be our first line of defense, but it is not enough.  We must act.  To date, America has been mostly reactive and on the defensive in the gray war.  That must change.”

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