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. The political opposition might confine itself to nonviolent protest rather than take up arms. Reluctant to deploy force to crush what might be peaceful political movements, governments commonly succumb to indecision and paralysis. Governments' succumbing is precisely the point for practitioners of this murky approach to warfare: it annuls a stronger enemy’s material advantages.
Analysis