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A “gray-zone” conflict is something like an incipient insurgency. French Army officer, Algerian War veteran, and counterinsurgency theorist David Galula notes that an incumbent government finds it hard to cope with “cold revolutionary war” because it remains unclear whether there will be a hot revolutionary war.

Many often cited American plans for how to defeat China simply assume that nuclear war can be avoided. The most often cited of these is the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle (ASB) plan. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) gives a detailed account of how an ASB-style war with China would unfold. In the opening “blinding campaign,” the U.S. attacks China’s reconnaissance and command-and-control networks to degrade the PLA’s ability to target U.S. and allied forces. Next, the military takes the fight to the Chinese mainland, striking long-range anti-ship missile launchers. Given that this is where the anti-ship missiles are located, it is only logical that the U.S. would target land-based platforms. And to go after them, one needs to take out China’s air defense systems, command control centers, and other anti-access weapons. In short, ASB requires a total war with China. This often cited and influential document does not speak to the question about what is to follow victory.

Sean Stackley, the current acting secretary, is widely respected in and around the Pentagon, but his non-permanent status will make him hesitant to make any big decisions that could hem in a permanent Trump selection, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. As the Navy looks to grow it's going to need to make trade-offs about what the service is not going to buy anymore, and once a program is canceled or significantly altered, those decisions can be tough, if not impossible to reverse.  "A holdover is just not going to be comfortable making big decisions on behalf of the new administration," Clark said.  That's going to quickly be important, since the Navy is getting ready to roll out its 2018 budget and is already well into compiling its 2019 budget, Clark said.

Even as NATO heads of state prepare to discuss Russia and global terror at their annual summit this month, a deeper issue is haunting America’s allies around the globe: their relative military and economic decline over the past two decades — and the increasingly sharp geopolitical challenges this poses for the United States.

Deterring aggression in the “gray zone” is hard. The keeper of an existing order—an order such as freedom of the sea—finds itself conflicted. That’s because gray-zone aggressors deliberately refuse to breach the threshold between uneasy peace and armed conflict, justifying a martial response. Instead they demolish the status quo little by little and replace it with something new.

“We need to reevaluate how [the U.S. armed forces] fight,” David Johnson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said at the AUSA conference. He asked what key capabilities are needed to keep above the brigade and offered that things like electronic warfare can’t be fielded at the brigade level.