News & Briefings

By Clementine G. Starling and Alyxandra Marine Today, the US Joint Force grapples with an array of security challenges that transcend traditional boundaries and cut across theaters and domains. US competitors—China and Russia—conduct military, information, economic, cyber, and diplomatic ...

What has also become commonplace is that kinetic operations - which by themselves have become increasingly complex - are combined with non-military strategies aimed at undermining the security of an antagonist. The combination of military and non-military instruments and strategies is done not randomly but in a synchronised way to achieve synergistic effects. In other words, it is this synchronised fusion that optimises the results. The bottom line is that a particular country can potentially unleash physical force against an adversary to achieve certain goals. But if the use or threat of conventional or unconventional force is combined with and/or preceded by a degree of subversive tools such as cyber-attacks and disinformation, the overall damage inflicted on the antagonist can be optimised.