During the final stretch of the 2024 American presidential election, the Department of Justice seized 32 web domains linked to ‘Doppelganger,’ an aggressive Russian disinformation campaign to influence American voters. Meanwhile, China has continued to exploit the US sanctions regime to promote its own currency, the renminbi, as a viable alternative to the dollar. And while wildfires and winter storms ravage expansive regions of the country—not long after Hurricanes Helene and Milton had exposed glaring deficiencies in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) planning and budget—forecasters and politicians alike grapple with an increasingly grim future defined by extreme weather and climate change. What do these challenges have in common? According to the siloed US national security enterprise, perhaps not much. But that assumption betrays a critical lack of vision. In reality, Americans are under siege every day, often by forces that they neither perceive nor understand. The United States is at war—not kinetically, but instead on the intangible battlefields of internet chat groups, currency exchanges, security cooperation agreements, and natural disaster responses. As the 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) warns, the contemporary security environment is best described as an era of strategic competition and transnational crises. And the simultaneity of these challenges will be a defining feature of American foreign and domestic policy in the 21st century. How should the US government conceive of this new “Great Game” in which it is uncomfortably enmeshed? How does one measure a state’s relative position in the ongoing geopolitical clash? And what does ‘winning’ mean in this environment? These questions serve as the primary impetus for Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century—a new book by Rebecca Patterson, Susan Bryant, Ken Gleiman, and Mark Troutman which establishes a holistic vocabulary and strategic framework for outcompeting America’s adversaries. In a modern era of ‘irregular’ challenges that often fall below the traditional threshold of armed conflict, the United States must employ a more expansive toolset of non-kinetic and cost-effective means, drawing upon American advantages and undermining enemy weaknesses. Strategic Drift Today’s threat landscape is daunting. A renewed era of strategic competition—featuring revisionist autocratic actors such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and violent extremist organizations—is at the forefront of national security concerns. But Winning Without Fighting also adopts the idea, which underpins the 2022 NSS, that the world has entered an “age of crises” or a “world of the polycrisis.” Indeed, the concurrent threats posed by the increasing (and often mutually-reinforcing) effects of climate change, health crises, mass migration, and the introduction of disruptive technologies will challenge the resilience of all national governments, consuming increasing amounts of economic and military power to counter them effectively. Experts may debate whether strategic competition or transnational crises pose the more significant problem, but the United States must manage both. However, America is strategically adrift. The US government, having failed to secure meaningful military success in any recent conflict, has determined the best way to succeed is to double down on preparing for a large-scale conventional operation while neglecting to recognize that its adversaries are already waging an asymmetric war using all instruments of power. As a result, America’s leaders often pursue a narrowly cast military-, technology-, and deterrence-centric strategy—instead of a more appropriate whole-of-society approach leveraging both kinetic and non-kinetic tools of military, economic, and information statecraft, as well as national resilience. At best, this flawed construct inadequately employs the necessary tools of competitive statecraft and produces suboptimal strategic outcomes; at worst, it could precipitate strategic defeat. Strategic Culture This dependence on overwhelming military force is rooted deep in American strategic culture. Relying on the work of Colin Gray and Tom Manhken, Winning Without Fighting argues that American strategic culture suffers from a binary conception of war and peace incompatible with the gray-zone style of competition in which it is currently enmeshed. This binary also extends to the definition of war itself, which Americans conceive of solely as military conflict—in contrast to the more holistic Chinese view of warfare, which also encompasses economic and informational competition, and to Russian strategic culture, which prefers authoritarian governance and strategic depth in the form of a well-controlled near abroad. And while military power remains necessary in a world that features a stalemated ...
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