CONCEPT OF GREY ZONES: A DESCRIPTIVE FRAMEWORK

The term ‘grey zone’ is becoming increasingly popular in the military and strategic lexicon worldwide, and India is no exception. Accordingly, the volume of literature on this nebulous term is growing apace. However, there is yet no agreed definition for the term. Some even contest the very existence of such a zone and its logic. This essay does not intend to provide any taxonomic definition of the grey zone, at least for two reasons. One, when definitions are formulated, there is a general “tendency to reason from definitions rather than from facts,” which is not the intent of such formulations.² Two, examining the grey zone as a cluster term with identifiable characteristics, rather than a class term with a strict definition, will be of greater use for pursuing strategic advantage in this zone. The essay, therefore, endeavours to present a descriptive framework of the general characteristics of the grey zone. The endeavour will yet try to achieve the utility of a definition: that is, to enable us to understand what it is that we are studying and where it is that we are trying to compete.³

The essay is organised in three sections. The first will consider the prominent views on the subject, which essentially question the basic logic of the term ‘grey zone.’ Through an analysis of these views, it will be contended that the grounds on which the idea of the grey zone is challenged are untenable. The second section seeks to provide a description of the grey zone as a conceptual space and an operating environment between peace and war. The key characteristics of contestation in this space will be discussed. The final section will briefly present the reasons for the new-found interest in this space and therefore the inevitable necessity to gain competency in pursuing advantage within it.

Is there Strategic Sense in ‘Grey Zone’?

To arrive at a useful descriptive framework of the grey zone, a brief discussion on some of the key debates about the idea of ‘grey zone’ as being illogical is essential at the outset. Adam Elkus argues that the “grey wars concept lacks even the most basic strategic sense.”⁴ This assertion is valid in part only when too many things are grouped under the grey umbrella. Elkus rightly contests that the clubbing of Russian action in Crimea and Chinese actions in the South China Sea alongside the activities of Boko Haram and ISIS as being part of the grey wars is absurd. In other words, as Hal Brands observes, bringing every form of violence short of an all-out war under the ambit of grey wars makes the idea useless.⁵ Elkus’s observation is, therefore, more concerned with what forms of conflicts or contestations should come under the idea, not the very existence of such an idea.

Elkus also contends that ‘grey zone wars’ are simply a composite of limited wars and compellence.⁶ This contention is unsustainable because all limited wars are wars in the dyadic sense of the belligerents at least. And, as Clausewitz posits, all wars are about compelling the enemy to do our will, which is essentially a way of compellence.⁷ Moreover, Thomas Schelling himself has observed that limited wars can be a means of compellence, without resorting to an all-out war.⁸ Therefore, compellence is inherent in all limited wars. So, referring to grey-zone wars as the composite of the two reflects a misunderstanding of the concept of the grey zone and the purposes of a limited war.

In fact, the term ‘grey zone war’ or ‘grey wars’ itself is an incorrect understanding of the issue at hand. Elkus refers to grey wars as “wars in which combatants minimise the scope and scale of combat.”⁹ By using such a definition, he contends that grey wars do not represent any new stratagem and that they are just limited wars like the Korean and Falklands Wars. The contention is clearly incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, wars are classified as limited not because the scope and scale of combat are minimised but because their objectives are limited.¹⁰ Secondly, the principal character of the grey zone is that the actions in this space are below the threshold of war. Once this threshold, which is not eternal as rightly argued by many, is broken, then it may lead to either a limited or a general war and not a grey war. Essentially, the contestation is no longer in the grey zone. In other words, there can be no war in the grey zone. Instead, this zone is characterised by a level of contestation that is above the broader norms of peaceful interstate competition but below the threshold of war, both limited and general. Therefore, it is not the grey zone which is illogical; rather, it is the idea of ‘grey wars’ which lacks logic.

Another key article contesting the idea of the grey zone is by Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside. Their assumptions and assertions, however, are weak and fail to capture the essence of the grey-zone concept. The duo presents two main arguments. First, the proliferation of the term grey zone is conflating the definitive differentiation between war and peace by creating a new theory about war.¹¹ This is premised on Hobbes’s assertion that peace is the absence of war and Clausewitz’s definition of war, which encompasses the elements of instrumentality, adversarial relation and violence. Therefore, they aver that if a “state is not in an armed conflict, it is at peace,” meaning thereby, there isn’t any space between the conditions of peace and war — either one or the other.¹² The question to be asked is whether the American allies and the Soviet Union were at war or at peace during the Cold War years, and how could the war be cold if violence was seen as an essential element of the construct? From the argument of Stoker, even the term ‘Cold War’ lacks the basic theoretical sense. George Orwell, who was possibly the first to use the term in a political sense in October 1945, described the then-international political situation as a permanent state of ‘cold war’ among groups of states wherein ‘peace that is no peace’ prevails indefinitely in the absence of large-scale wars.¹³ Thus, it must be accepted that there existed and exists a condition between the extreme states of war and peace. Stoker himself recognises the term ‘Cold War’ in his article.

The second ground on which Stoker and Whiteside discount the term ‘grey zone’ is that there is nothing new about the idea. This assertion is valid, but the grounds on which it is made are untenable. Stoker, while quoting Thomas Rid, equates grey-zone actions with subversion, espionage, sabotage, and such other means that have always been part of statecraft, both in peace and war.¹⁴ The idea of competitive or subversive actions by a state below the threshold of its adversary’s red lines for war has been seen since the times of Thucydides — Athens’s defensive alliance with Corcyra, for instance. Thus, the argument that there is nothing really new about the idea is agreed to. However, the problem lies in equating the grey zone with the means mentioned above. Stoker extends his argument by saying that states always compete with each other, and such competition cannot be called the grey wars, given the general absence of violence in these endeavours. But concurrently, he calls the Russian action in Crimea in 2014 a war. This claim is inconsistent, as hardly any bullets were fired during this annexation process, and there were only six recorded casualties in Crimea directly related to the event.¹⁵ Violence evidently was absent, and so was the case with the Chinese creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea. In sum, these actions, as in the Cold War, are not representative of routine peacetime inter-state competitions. According to Stoker’s argument, the Cold War best explains the grey zone. But the Cold War was a description of the then-prevailing political situation at the system level — bipolar diplomatic and military rivalry between the nuclear superpowers. Bernard Baruch used the phrase to warn American statesmen not to believe what they see as peace.¹⁶ Stated differently, the term was not coined to describe the space between war and peace, within which the Cold War was otherwise fought at the system level.

Numerous scholars reject the idea of the grey zone on the premise that it lacks a clear definition. But so are the terms war and peace — both vague and context-dependent.¹⁷ In contesting the need for clear definitions, Morgenthau aptly points out that political concepts are, in general, vague and imprecise, so as to reflect the reality of politics.¹⁸ So, a broad description should suffice to explore the subject further. The grey zone, therefore, may be studied as a conceptual space or an operating environment that always existed between peace and war rather than as a new form of war or warfare.

Grey Zone: A Conceptual Space and an Operating Environment

While a few descriptions of the grey zone have been quite expansive to the point of being illogical, some of the relevant descriptions of the grey zone are as follows. A US Department of Defense project described the term as a conceptual space which occurs between peace and war, when actors employ activities which are above the threshold of routine competition but below the red line for large-scale military conflict while clouding direct attribution.¹⁹ A 2015 RAND publication defines the term as follows:

“The grey zone is an operational space between peace and war, involving coercive actions to change the status quo below a threshold that, in most cases, would prompt a conventional military response…”²⁰

According to John Chambers, the grey zone can be seen as “an operating environment in which aggressors use ambiguity and leverage non-attribution to achieve strategic objectives while limiting counter-actions by other nations.”²1 Brands, in his article titled ‘Paradoxes of the Gray Zone,’ argues that grey-zone conflicts involve coercive and aggressive activities which are deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of a conventional inter-state war.²²

Some common attributes can be discerned from the above descriptions and other literature. Firstly, in terms of the levels of violence, coercion or aggressive behaviour, the grey zone is situated above the general norms of ordinary inter-state competition. Secondly, the actions in the grey zone, in general, must be such that they could potentially draw a military response. Thirdly, the actions are, however, calibrated with an intention to discourage escalation to a higher level of violence as obtained in open war. Fourthly, as inferred from the three above, a grey zone is an operating environment wherein the governing constraint is to deny the adversary a viable reason for escalation to the extreme of war — absence of jus ad bellum and cost inefficiency. This constraint is met by moderating the means, scale and intensity of activities; maintaining ambiguity of intent; and, at times, non-attribution of responsibility for the action. For instance, the employment of maritime militia instead of naval grey hulls by China in the South China Sea to enforce its claim is a moderation of means; the use of state-sponsored terrorists in Kashmir by Pakistan is non-attribution; and the Russian intervention in favour of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is about ambiguity of intent — whether it was a threat to Georgia’s territorial sovereignty or help rendered to ethnic Russians. By inference, deniability of the identity of the actors is not a necessary condition to operate in this space. A corollary of these attributes is that in the grey zone there is a direct pursuit of strategic objectives by the states involved — directly or indirectly.

The grey zone can also be seen as a conceptual space when peace and war are taken as political conditions of existence, that is, the state of peace and the state of war. Accordingly, the terms ‘grey zone warfare’ or ‘grey zone operations (GZO)’ are inappropriate since they preclude a better understanding of the idea. The term warfare refers to a mechanism, method or modality of armed engagement with the enemy.²³ While the Joint Staff publication may emphasise the ‘armed’ part of the engagement, it has become common to call all forms of conflictual engagement warfare — economic warfare, psychological warfare, information warfare, cyber warfare, hybrid warfare, and so on. But all these denote a particular method or mechanism of fighting, and all can be employed within the grey zone or in actual war. The grey zone is not synonymous with hybrid warfare; rather, the latter can be a means within the former. Thus, the extent of this conceptual space is defined not by the means and modality of the competitive engagement. Instead, it is governed by the success of the deliberate attempt not to breach the assessed threshold of the adversary for war, which depends on the adversary’s capacity for escalation and its perception of the threat. So, it would be more logical to say warfare or operations in the grey zone rather than GZO or GZW.

General M. M. Naravane’s observation after the Balakot strike amplifies the above inference on the elastic extent of the grey zone. In this regard, he remarked, “For years, we were told that if and when the air force crosses the IB [international boundary], it would escalate to a full-fledged war. Balakot demonstrated that if you play the escalatory game with skill, military ascendancy can be established in short cycles of conflict that do not necessarily lead to war.”²⁴ In other words, the concept of the grey zone is all about playing the escalatory game, even with conventional assets, such that it does not lead to war.

The grey zone, when viewed as a conceptual space, a mental construct, helps in three ways. One, as a framework to examine the relationship between actors and their actions in this zone of strategic competition. Two, it provides a prism to analyse the behaviour of adversaries, both in action and preparation. Three, it helps accommodate both contrary and complementary relationships between dyadic and system-level inter-state behaviour. For example, Russia, while increasing its forex reserves to USD 630 billion by 2022 from around USD 500 billion in 2014, reduced the reserve’s dollar volume. In addition, its gold reserves also saw a threefold increase since then.²⁵ It also, by means of developing pipeline infrastructure and competitive pricing, enhanced the European Union’s energy dependency on Russian gas from 29 to 32 per cent in this period.²⁶ From a simple peace-and-war binary construct, these actions are peaceful — legally and nominally, as Stoker would call them. However, through the lens of the grey zone, these could also be studied as preparations to insulate the Russian economy from further sanctions, a defensive measure to enable offensive actions in the future — the Ukrainian conflict. While Russia and Ukraine are undoubtedly at war as a dyad, at the system level the conflict is in the grey zone between the West and Russia, wherein China, Iran and North Korea are also playing their part. Similar is the case with China’s development of a maritime militia and the enactment of the ‘Land Border Law’ — peaceful at the individual-state level, but these are means and acts of challenging the status quo in the grey zone at system and dyadic levels of interaction.

Having discussed the general description of the idea, what then are the actions and assertions that cannot reasonably be seen as part of the grey-zone umbrella? One aspect that is incorrectly brought under the grey zone is the acts by terrorist groups and non-state actors when they are acting without state sponsorship. As Brands remarks, some grey-zone enthusiasts have brought in ISIL, Boko Haram and the Syrian conflict under the ambit of the grey zone.²⁷ This, however, is wrong, to say the least. With such non-state actors, escalation is not a limiting concern for nation-states, nor are the actors avoiding escalation through ambiguity of intent. States invariably consider these groups unlawful and are more than willing to employ force — both unilaterally and multilaterally. The readiness with which Israel declared war on Hamas is the most recent case in point. Essentially, the grey zone gains relevance only in reference to the extremes of peace and war, seen as conditions of white and black. Thus, the idea of the grey zone is state-centric, and non-state actors become part of this only when they are employed as proxies by other states.

Furthermore, contrary to the views of some of the key Western publications, the grey zone is not the reserve of revisionist states alone. Michael J. Mazarr argues that strategies in the grey zone are being employed forcefully and persistently by revisionist states because they have an urgent need to change the status quo. And he then adds that status-quo powers such as the USA may also employ such strategies.²⁸ This claim by Mazarr is debatable for two reasons. One, since the contention by the revisionist powers is in the grey zone, the so-called status-quo powers do not have a rational choice to escalate the conflict to a state of war. So, the latter will also preferably employ such strategies. Two, even to maintain the status quo, states need to expand, if not territorially, at least in other ways^.29 Therefore, almost all states are revisionist in some form — Mazarr himself groups India alongside Iran, Brazil and Turkey as key revisionists. Thus, the grey zone remains a zone for all to play: the ruling and the rising, the weak and the strong.³⁰

Lastly, it will not be useful to see any and all forms of inter-state competitive ventures as part of the grey zone. Some of the works on the subject include bribery of state officials, lobbying, economic coercion and media manipulation as part of the grey zone.³¹ Some others have argued that the grey zone is mainly non-military in nature.³² Such expansive inclusion of activities leads to poor explanatory capacity. And Stoker rightly posits that such a view of the grey zone may also lead to unwarranted conflict escalation and dull strategic decision-making.³³ A way to limit this scope is by looking at only those actions that, in general, should necessitate a response by the use of force in a traditional sense, but there is a lack of clear justification (by the test of proportionality and necessity) and also a degree of cost inefficiency in escalation. For instance, the breach of the median line by China along the Taiwan Strait or the Russian annexation of Crimea are both clearly military in nature, necessitating a response by force. However, the former may not offer a clear casus belli, and the latter demands an eviction war, which clearly has a negative expected utility. Nonetheless, the grey zone, as a conceptual space, can help weave together a large set of seemingly unrelated actions as part of a single strategic object, either predetermined or opportunistic. The counter-response then is not conflict escalation, as Stoker professes, but measures to make the likely objective unattractive. Deterrence by denial is a good example.

Another question that needs to be addressed is: if the means employed in the grey zone are not new, then why should there be a new term? There is indeed no agreed term to describe this space within the binary view of war and peace.³⁴ Some allude to calling it ‘political warfare.’ But this term itself is redundant, as all warfare is political.³⁵ Frank Hoffman and others find the terms hybrid threats and unconventional warfare to be suitable alternatives.³⁶ However, as the term ‘warfare’ denotes the method of fighting, all wars have more or less been hybrid in some form.³⁷ Unconventional warfare, again a reference to the mechanism of fighting, may include irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare and such other means. The Indian Army’s 2018 Land Warfare Doctrine alludes to seeing state-sponsored terrorism and insurgency as being unconventional.³⁸ Thus, there isn’t a term which conceptually describes the space between peace and war.

The Indian Army calls the situation along its borders, coupled with counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations, a ‘No War No Peace’ (NWNP) scenario, wherein the extremes are war and peace.³⁹ But if the extremes are seen as white and black, then metaphorically NWNP is clearly the grey. However, the acronym NWNP clearly denotes an operating environment more from a military sense. For instance, the concept of ‘NWNP deployment’ along the Line of Control makes better sense than ‘grey zone deployment.’ Hence, the term grey zone is more apt to indicate the competitive space between war and peace — both as a conceptual space and as an operating environment — although such a space has always existed, and the means being employed in it are not all completely new.

Understanding the Grey Zone: A Necessity

In addition to being a better expression of the space between war and peace, the increasing intensity and prevalence of contestations in the grey zone have also been a cause for the new-found interest in this space. There are a few key reasons for this phenomenon. Firstly, as Brands contends, the nuclear overhang compels adversaries to keep escalation below the threshold of an open war, particularly between nuclear powers.⁴⁰ On the contrary, nuclear sabre-rattling helps to compete in the grey zone with impunity, as the adversary cannot rationally escalate the conflict.⁴¹ Quite naturally, President Putin has been warning of nuclear escalation to dissuade NATO from any direct involvement in Ukraine. Secondly, the growing economic interdependence has made a full-blown inter-state war a less attractive option, given the collateral costs.⁴² Conversely, this interdependence is being leveraged by states to protect themselves from any serious retaliation against their activities in the grey zone. The world’s dependence on China’s manufacturing capacity and Beijing’s assertive behaviour in the South China Sea are cases in point. Thirdly, the tools available to compete in the grey zone are more numerous, and are effective as well; cyber and outer space are some key examples.⁴³

Fourthly, the price of declaring war has become prohibitive due to the costs associated with jus in bello and domestic legal implications.⁴⁴ In addition, territorial aggression has become immensely costly due to institutional regulations, defensive technologies and media visibility.⁴⁵ Fifthly, endeavours in the grey zone can be pursued indefinitely, while war must be put to an end favourably before the culmination point of any one of the contestants. As General Rupert Smith eloquently argues, in the new paradigm of war amongst the people, military operations are one among all other activities of the state, in contrast to the so-called industrial-age wars, wherein it was the primary activity. Thus, these contemporary conflicts are, by character, timeless.⁴⁶ Given the cost efficiency of acting in the grey zone and the opportunity to enter and exit the competitive endeavour with relative ease, the grey zone is an attractive space for protracted contestations.

Despite this popularity, no decisive outcome can be sought within this space; rather, only relative advantages may be progressively secured. These advantages, cumulatively, may become substantial over time. For Mazarr, strategic gradualism and measured revisionism are defining aspects of contestations in the grey zone.⁴⁷ These characteristics, however, are more driven by constraint and less by intent. In other words, as Schelling argues, if an actor competing in the grey zone tries to accomplish a larger objective at once, he may trigger a war.⁴⁸ A live example of this is the variance in the scope of the international response to the Russian venture into Crimea in 2014, as against the later operations against Kyiv. In the latter instance, the Kremlin tried to bite off more than the tolerable limits of the grey zone as perceived by the West. Therefore, the need to study the opportunities and limits of pursuing advantage in the grey zone is a strategic necessity.

Conclusion

In sum, the essay has sought to argue that the idea of the grey zone is not illogical; rather, it is only a truism that a space exists within the spectrum of peace and war. However, it is rightfully contested by many that putting almost all forms of contestation under the umbrella of the grey zone will be absurd. While examining the different descriptions of the grey zone, the common theme revolves around the level of violence being necessarily below the threshold of war. It was also highlighted that a given political situation may be seen as peace or war at one level, and the same may fall within the grey zone at another level of examination. It was then argued that the grey zone is neither a type of warfare nor is it synonymous with hybrid war. The discussion also brought out the reasons for the increasing frequency of conflicts within the grey zone, although only limited advantages can be secured in this space rather than any decisive outcome that otherwise is possible in an open war.

Whether one agrees or not with the description of the ‘grey zone’ as presented in this essay, the growing popularity of contestation in the grey zone poses a unique challenge for conventionally superior states. Elkus, Stoker and others have observed that countries such as Russia, Iran and China are exploiting this space to make strategic gains without being subjected to due penalty because their revisionist actions are seen as being in the grey zone. In other words, Stoker argues that the American acceptance of such ideas enables these revisionist states to act with impunity.⁴⁹ However, such behaviour is nothing but the pursuit of asymmetric advantage, which is probably as old as warfare itself. Because the US enjoys supremacy in the conventional military domain, others shall not contest the US in that domain. Nonetheless, as brought out in the foregoing argument, even conventionally superior states may prefer competing in this zone, given the associated cost-efficiency. So, it is likely to be a preferred zone of competition for both China and Pakistan. Therefore, rather than rejecting the existence of the grey zone, states may consider developing capacities to fight well in that space, while militaries need to think and train to operate efficiently in it. Concomitantly, retaining and strengthening capabilities to fight across the spectrum of warfare is indispensable, of which the grey zone encompasses only a fair share. Notwithstanding the logic of the term ‘grey zone’ in particular, caution is necessary against formulations of new terminologies which neither enhance the understanding of nor increase attention to a given set of challenges.