During the Cold War, the national security community had one defining challenge—containing the Soviet Union. After 9/11, attention turned to counterterrorism. Today, the nation faces a vast array of threats. Increasingly, these are “gray zone” activities—coercive or subversive actions below the threshold of armed conflict.
Recent cyber intrusions into U.S. critical infrastructure attributed to People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russian cyber actors, attempts by Iran and Russia to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and ransomware attacks against U.S. healthcare providers by Russian cyber criminals are leading examples of this dangerous trend.
FBI Director Christopher Wray says the PRC dangerously “combines cyber means with traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression,” but he’s quick to add that “China is not the only adversary we’re up against, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are all determined to use cyber means to take aim at things we all hold sacred—our freedoms, prosperity, and democratic norms.”
Malign activities in cyber, economic, information, legal, military/security, and space domains all fall under this umbrella. They either violate global norms or exploit normative gaps. They’ve become weapons of choice for U.S. adversaries who often fail to discriminate between civilian and government boundaries and see instead one contiguous target-rich battlespace. These threats undermine democratic institutions, threaten critical infrastructure and economic resources, and subvert international order. They can only be countered by thoughtfully and comprehensively applying all elements of national power in partnership with allies.