HARMING THE HEGEMON

How Loopholes & Lack of Strategy Leadership Put US Global Dominance In Peril.

How do you hurt the country with the largest, most technologically advanced, well-funded, and lethal military that has ever existed in the history of the world?

Incrementally.

In irregular warfare, salami tactics use small, gradational steps to overcome opposition. Independently, these small aggressions are insignificant, so much so that they can even go unnoticed. The cumulative effect of these small actions, usually effectuated over long periods of time, is what enables catastrophic, irreparable damage.

Salami tactics are the opposite of shock and awe, but they are as effective and often more enduring: ?Water and wind erosion are salami tactics that literally move mountains. Most important, they allow the attacker to achieve their objective while staying under the threshold of punishment. ?While ‘death by a thousand papercuts’ tactics is not the American way of war, salami tactics are an effective a battle strategy that has been used throughout the ages by our adversaries. Playing the long game has always been an integral part of Chinese and Russian warcraft.

The major threat actors have learned that cyberpower is better suited to long-game subversion rather than brute force. Especially when cyber salami tactics are focused on civilian critical companies and institutions. Additionally, they have also discovered a significant loophole to exploit: The role of the DoD in defending and countering civilian-focused cyber aggression.

The Posse Comitatus Act prevents the Army and Air Force from fighting in the homeland or otherwise involve themselves in civilian issues. Another law, 10 U.S. Code § 275 - Restriction on direct participation by military personnel, similarly restricts the Navy and Marines. The National Guard can be exempted, but only to quell civilian unrest. But again, the attackers hacking into critical companies every day are adversary nation state militarized cyber combatant commands.

As it stands, no one is in charge of defending the civilian sector. (Reminder: DHS has no warfighting authorities).

The DoD is responsible for the nation’s security in and through all warfighting domains. But the Fort/Pentagon’s aversion to thinking wholistically and strategically about adversary cyberpower projection sets conditions for protracted cyberconflict where the adversaries not only have asymmetric advantage but also escalation dominance.

In plain English: The bad guys are taking our lunch and holding all the cards.

Meanwhile we argue the merits of a cyber force, try to reconcile the unreconcilable “cyberspace is a warfighting domain, but only for greyzone activities” conundrum and debate the legality conducting greyzone offensive activities in civilian bluespace. (Don’t even get me started on CMMC).

Times of geopolitical upheaval like we’re seeing today are particularly fraught with powerplays. And the decades of relentless cyber aggression has made us weaker.

Remember, the major threat actors (Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran) have a compelling motivation to hurt America. With the exception of North Korea, these countries have all been global hegemons at someone point in their history. From their viewpoint, the power to shape global events, to control markets, to influence culture, technology and science has been usurped by a brand new upstart country. The U.S. was barely 175 years old when it assumed the global hegemon position. This is an indignation the Axis of Authoritarians don’t suffer gladly.

Russia gave the world Tchaikovsky, China made the first compass and gunpowder, Iran invented calculus….and the U.S. countered with Elvis, McDonalds and social media content creators. You can see how arriviste America with garish taste, no history and puerile values are an affront to the centuries of rich culture, conquests, inventions, and storied historical pasts of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

The reigning hegemon’s values become, by default, global values. However, there is only room for one hegemon at the top of the world order. In order to advance, America has to descend. It has to be weakened.

And the best way to achieve that ends is via relentless, incremental, imperceptible degradation of the pillars that support our economy and government.

Irregular warfare is the adversary's dominant type of warfare. We are not prepared. We are preparing for a war in which we are armed and experienced, not the war that's actually happening.

Instead of fighting the fight that fits our weapons, we need to make weapons and create strategy to fight the fight.