News & Briefings

TAMPA, Fla. — Modern competition rarely begins with open conflict. Instead, it unfolds in the gray zone, the space between peace and war, where influence, access and perception shape outcomes long before force is employed. That reality framed discussions at the 2025 SOF & Irregular Warfare Symposium, December 10 and 11, 2025, at the Chester H. Ferguson Law Center in Tampa Florida, where military leaders, senior defense officials and academic experts examined how the United States is adapting to strategic competition short of armed conflict.

“Information technology is expected to make a thousandfold advance over the next 20 years. In fact, the pace of development is so great that it renders our current materiel management and acquisition system inadequate. Developments in information technology will revolutionize-and indeed have begun to revolutionize-how nations, organizations, and people Interact. The rapid diffusion of information, enabled by these technological advances, challenges the relevance of traditional organizational and management principles. The military implications of new organizational sciences that examine internetted, nonhierarchical versus hierarchical management models are yet to be fully understood. Clearly, Information Age technology, and the management Ideas It fosters, will greatly Influence military operations in two areas – one evolutionary, the other revolutionary; one we understand, one with which we are just beginning to experiment. Together, they represent two phenomena at work in winning what has been described as the information war – a war that has been fought by commanders throughout history.” – Force XXI Operations

The solution to maritime logistics challenges may not be a purely military one but, rather, one pulled from the playbook used by ghost fleets, smugglers and other illicit networks. Mobility, sustainment and logistics are the heartbeat of warfare because they are among the most important core functions that enable and empower operations, combat or otherwise. In other words, these functions help convert a nation’s resources into kinetic combat power. A military cannot fight effectively without the ability to move forces and maintain continuous resupply in an operational theatre. But in any war the unexpected and the overlooked can be relied on to assert themselves in ways that challenge commanders to think creatively about complex problems. In a future Indo-Pacific war, how can the United States military and its partners execute effective logistics in an environment which will almost certainly be contested from garrison to combat?

In 1982 Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 32. It was eight pages long. It named the enemy. It defined the threat. It laid out the global and regional objectives. It integrated diplomatic, informational, economic, and military power. It told the commanders and the agencies how to act, what to prioritize, and where to accept risk. It directed a political warfare strategy that ran from Central America to Europe to Asia. And it put America on the final glide path to winning the Cold War. It was the gold standard because it was a real strategy. It was executable. It was focused. It had an enemy. It had a theory of victory.