In summer 2022, following international condemnation of its crackdown on the Hong Kong independence movement and internal unrest fomented by the global economic slowdown, the Communist Party of China sought to turn its people’s attention outward through international confrontation in the South China Sea. After reigniting popular resentment over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its actions in World War II, China reasserted its claims to the Senkaku Islands and its 2013 air defense identification zone.
These assertions were punctuated by “patriotic citizens” disabling and capturing two Japanese surveillance drones in a cyber attack. A fleet of Chinese trawlers rapidly surrounded the Senkakus, escorted by the Shandong carrier battle group that just happened to be conducting exercises in the area. U.S. forces in Japan, already overstretched, found their combat readiness suddenly degraded when members of the command triad on two destroyers became embroiled in embarrassing public incidents ashore. Though foreign agents were suspected to have been involved, the well-publicized footage and social media campaign sparked widespread protests against U.S. presence and resulted in both ships remaining in port until investigations could be completed. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force was left to respond to the incursion alone.
Though entirely speculative, the preceding account assumes only that U.S. adversaries continue the same gray-zone strategy they have been perfecting over the previous decades.
China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia each would stand to lose in a direct military confrontation with the United States. To accomplish their goals, therefore, they must operate below the threshold of military action while still pushing hard enough to effect a change to the status quo. The strategies and tactics they employ are described as gray-zone operations. It is difficult for the U.S. Navy to respond effectively to such operations, which occur over years or even decades and sporadically increase in belligerence—but never to a level that justifies a kinetic response.
Gray-Zone Ops and Naval Strategy
Gray-zone operations seek to revise the status quo through a series of smaller changes—sometimes referred to as salami slicing—and often feature plausible deniability and skillful use of propaganda. Actors in the gray zone may disguise their intentions, make use of proxy forces, stage newsworthy but contrived events, and exploit nonmilitary capabilities (e.g., international arbitration or sympathetic reporting) to hinder an effective response.
Gray-zone operations likely are here to stay, and if it seems gray-zone operations will remain far from U.S. shores, it is only because U.S. adversaries have been relatively restrained. The growing capability to effect changes to the status quo without provoking military action threatens each of the Navy’s essential functions listed in A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower:3
- All domain access. Whether the Navy cedes control of a contested area because of a traditional military defeat or because it would cost too much—politically or diplomatically as well as financially—to stay, the effect is the same. A country that asymmetrically neutralizes a U.S. unmanned vehicle, for example, challenges the Navy to leave the area or pay the diplomatic “price” of confrontation.
- Deterrence. Gray-zone operations move the “goal posts” incrementally and gradually, they make it politically and diplomatically difficult to draw a red line past which a military response is ensured or clearly justified. Since the certainty of effective military response is essential to deterrence, reducing that certainty degrades the Navy’s deterrent capability.
- Sea control. Because sea control requires naval presence and effective partnerships, gray-zone operations that increase the cost of U.S. presence can enhance an adversary’s position either by making such presence untenable or by eroding the credibility of U.S. naval alliances.
- Power projection. As with sea control, an adversary could certainly threaten the Navy’s ability to project power by weakening its partnerships and forward deployment capability. A few well-placed and well-publicized false narratives (for example, of criminal behavior by sailors) could erode relationships decades in the making.
- Maritime security. An adversary that wants to weaken U.S. maritime security has a variety of options that do not traditionally meet the threshold for military action. For example, Venezuela could easily (and deniably) support drug cartels by providing facilities to launch smuggling vessels. Iran could use “rogue civilians” to close the Strait of Hormuz while dissuading international response to its “domestic” matter. Either scenario erodes U.S. national security without obvious nonmilitary courses of action to resolve it.
Building a Gray-Water Navy
The prescription for countering the gray-zone threat is neither simple nor straightforward. At a minimum, changes will have to be made to force structure, tactics, and strategic use of propaganda. The Navy’s ships, submarines, and aircraft are designed for sustained combat operations against one or more peer navies, and while to be prepared for such a war isn’t any less important today, it does not address the activity the Navy is being called on to counter.
The most glaring deficiency is the Navy’s inventory of ships, which is insufficient for ensuring freedom of navigation across the globe. The service cannot hope to deter encroachment in the South China Sea or Black Sea without sustained presence, but even destroyers are too large, valuable, and expensive to patrol in enough circles to provide the required level of force projection.
One solution would be to stand up a “foreign coast guard,” a force of lightly armed patrol craft designed to provide presence in depth at significantly lower cost. These ships would not need to be lethal or even battle-hardened; they would not be expected to fight a war. Rather, they would serve as a tripwire: From the Chinese perspective, it is just as dangerous to kinetically engage a U.S. patrol boat as a U.S. destroyer. Another recent suggestion is to procure frigates that could take on missions currently assigned to destroyers at lower cost, freeing the destroyers to increase the Navy’s surface deterrence.4
An updated force structure should be complemented by revised operating patterns. Cheaper and smaller combatants would require less port husbandry and force protection. A hypothetical Black Sea squadron could comprise a dozen patrol craft able to call at ports little larger than a marina. At sea, their basic communications equipment would allow oversight by shore-based command in the event of an unforeseen situation.
Most important would be the patrol crafts’ presence. Six could be deployed at a time; even in pairs, that represents flying the flag an order of magnitude more often than currently possible. Positive interaction with allied or friendly navies could be more frequent and informal, and at the same time, the crafts’ movements would be less predictable. Combatant commanders could deploy their assigned patrol craft wherever in their area of operations they felt it most necessary to counter maritime gray-zone operations.
New ships and tactics, however, will not be sufficient to prevent adversaries from realizing success using gray-zone operations. The Navy must become adept at creating and conveying a narrative. This does not mean extolling the Navy’s virtues (or concealing its vices). Rather, the focus must be on quick and concise responses to the actions of other states. If a Russian and U.S. warship collide, the Navy cannot afford to be silent for two weeks while an investigation is conducted. By the time the results are announced, the international public already has heard the Russian narrative and moved on. U.S. footage (and commentary) must dominate the news cycle, even as events are unfolding if necessary. This would not require any additional expenditure—the service already has a capable public affairs staff—but the Navy must elevate public affairs and its representation in foreign press to the same importance as carrier strike group scheduling and exercises with foreign navies.
Even as the Navy keeps a weather eye toward gray-zone operations, it cannot successfully counter such operations alone. The United States must be prepared to oppose all actions that threaten national security, regardless of magnitude, and that will require an immense reserve of political will. Resisting adversarial salami-slicing tactics will fail without public support for the added expenses of an active foreign policy.
The Bottom Line
U.S. adversaries see the opportunities in gray-zone operations. By gradually increasing pressure on U.S. presence in an area, raising the costs of such presence, and spinning a positive or ambiguous narrative, they can create freedom of action without risking a kinetic confrontation. As adversary playbooks build on recent successes in Georgia, Crimea, the Spratly Islands, the Senkaku Islands, and Syria, new and more creative capabilities will emerge. The Navy needs to act now to counter the emerging threat of gray-zone operations by developing an effective counter-gray-zone force and strategy of its own.