New gray warfare threat

Fifteen days after the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in the US in 2001, a small team of CIA intelligence and paramilitary officers arrived in the Panjshir Valley in north central Afghanistan for what was to be one of the most successful covert unconventional missions in America's history. Led by veteran CIA officer Gary Schroen, the team which included a young Farsi-speaking operations officer, a former US Marine who always wore a corduroy sports coat and an ex-Seal commando, linked up with the 15,000-strong irregular indigenous force, the Northern Alliance, and began the rout of the Taliban. They were joined three weeks later on October 17 by the first batch of 350 American special forces troops. By December 6, the Taliban had been toppled although the prize target, Osama bin Laden, escaped. This was officially termed "hybrid warfare" by the Pentagon, a non-conventional, covert attack backed by conventional air power. In the intervening years, America's adversaries have developed a new version of hybrid war known in the Pentagon as "gray warfare", acts of undeclared aggression involving a combination of subversive military action along with cyber attacks, disinformation, and political interference. The Pentagon has been forced to develop new capabilities to counter gray warfare now being orchestrated with growing sophistication by Russia, China and Iran: Russia in Ukraine, the Baltics and Balkans and western elections, China in the South China Sea and Iran throughout the Middle East. Last week Steven Walker, head of the Pentagon's Research agency, Darpa, stressed the importance of developing ways to counter this insidious form of warfare. With the Pentagon's strategy now focusing on trying to keep ahead of Russia and China in a big-power arms race, funding for countering gray warfare has to compete with key research projects such as hypersonic weapon systems. One of the challenges is in defining gray warfare. Unlike Operation Jawbreaker, the CIA-led post-9/11 mission in Afghanistan, which was completed in less than three months and was viewed as a legitimate response to 9/11, the activities launched by Russia, China and Iran are long-term and more subtle. "We need technologies and processes that can handle grey-zone activities which are not openly declared or defined," Fotis Barlos, programme manager in Darpa's strategic technology office, told me. Using artificial intelligence technologies, game theory and modelling in a programme codenamed Compass, he and his team work out what an adversary's intentions are and how they might respond if the US were to take specific action to counter their aggression. Russia, China and Iran play the gray warfare game with what has been described by senior US special operations commanders as a "finely-tuned risk calculus", expanding their sphere of influence aggressively but remaining wary of provoking a US or allied military response. "Gray zone warfare is illegitimate and involves military and other capabilities that are not claimed (by the perpetrators) but avoid tripping over the threshold that could lead to confrontation (with the West)," Kathleen Hicks, a former senior Pentagon official, said.