"Whispers From Wargames About the Gray Zone" Topic

"The U.S. Department of Defense is not getting its money's worth from its extensive investment in wargaming, and it will continue to fail to even as it tries to use it to greater advantage. In 2015, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work called for a revitalization of wargaming in the defense community to help contend with the scale and pace of disruptive change in the world. That call has subsequently been echoed in various ways in professional journals and online forums and has been embedded in recent U.S. Navy capstone documents. Wargaming can be a powerful tool for exploring complex problems and for education, but it is easy to miss some important messages that wargames send. If the Defense Department is to fully realize the value of games, it must become sensitive to their deeper, more subtle signals. As an example, we will examine how games provided advanced but mostly unheeded warning of what has become known as "gray zone" warfare.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has gradually become aware of gray zone operations. These consist of actions that are hostile but do not cross potential redlines that would trigger armed conflict, especially among major powers. Widely known examples include Russia's use of "little green men" to seize Crimea and to foment rebellion and separatism in Ukraine, and China's construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea. The advent of such operations seems to have caught the U.S. security community by surprise, but in retrospect, wargames conducted throughout the U.S. armed forces were providing advanced warning at least as early as the 1980s. We simply failed to perceive or heed them…."
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