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Endless Warfare – Part I
How Gray-Zone Tactics, Cognitive Warfare, and Asymmetric Strategies Are Reshaping Global Conflict
On 28 February, the United States and Israel began a campaign against Iran. The strikes were precise, lethal, and decisive from a conventional standpoint. Despite these destructive attacks and Iran’s significantly weakened military capabilities, it did not surrender or collapse; Iran is fighting a different war.
Iran’s objectives are not to win on the battlefield—an impossible outcome against the U.S. and Israel—but to ensure the survival of the regime; create regional and global political, diplomatic, and economic chaos that shapes U.S. decision-making; and end the war on terms favorable to Tehran. Iran views this as an opportunity to turn these attacks into a long-term strategic advantage.
Iran’s arsenal of terrorist surrogates and partners, drones and missiles as weapons of coercion in the Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere, cyber capabilities, cognitive warfare, an empowered and battle-hardened IRGC, and transactional relationships with Russia and China have allowed it to believe it can still achieve these goals—improbable as they seemed in the early days after the U.S. and Israeli strikes.
Ultimately, Iran may not succeed, but it has already shaped the war in ways that complicate U.S. strategy. Much as we are learning from Ukraine’s adaptive, asymmetric resistance to Russia’s invasion, we are likewise drawing lessons from the clash with Iran. Changes in modern warfare aren’t just academic issues; they are playing out in real time.
This is not conventional war for Iran; it is a continuum of full-spectrum pressure and attacks both above and below the threshold of open conflict. For Iran, this is about pursuing regional dominance through surrogate networks and control of vital resources and sea lanes. Even when this round of fighting ends, Iran will almost certainly resume its gray zone campaign and its long war against the U.S. and its partners.
In Washington, where “forever wars” are a political liability, U.S. leaders tend to see engagements with Iran as finite in time and objectives where conventional military power ultimately prevails.
In contrast, Iran sees its struggle against the U.S. as existential and unending, where winning is measured less by battlefield victory than by political, economic, and coercive leverage and the ability to shape the decision space of its adversaries.
For Iran, this is about securing freedom of action regionally and globally, constraining adversaries, and expanding political, economic, and military advantage. Iran’s gray zone and asymmetric posture reflect this strategy. Iran has been preparing for this moment for decades. For Tehran, this is Endless Warfare.
Endless Warfare
For the purposes of this article, Endless Warfare refers to a calculated and persistent state of confrontation that operates both below and above the level of open warfare in which preparation for the next conflict is always underway. It is never formally declared, has no clear starting or end points, and provides our adversaries viable alternatives to conventional warfare.
At its core, Endless Warfare is a long-term strategy to prevail through cumulative gains and exhausting the strategic resolve of an adversary.
Navigating the Threshold.
Below the threshold of open conflict, the gray zone is a space of ambiguity, plausible and implausible deniability, and persistent, incremental aggression where weaknesses and gaps are identified and exploited. The gray zone—and gray warfare—allow adversaries to conduct operations to advance their own national interests, attack and undermine their adversaries, and set the conditions for a future war without triggering a military response. Preparation and setting conditions in the gray zone enable asymmetric warfare and fuel an endless cycle of conflict.
Above the threshold of open conflict, asymmetric warfare becomes the counterpart to gray warfare for militarily outmatched countries, such as Iran. The tools are the same. For Iran, asymmetric warfare is not a desperate last resort but a long‑planned survival strategy: a deliberate way to impose costs, buy time, and pursue broader regional objectives against a militarily superior United States and Israel.
Beyond countries like Iran, Endless Warfare is also the strategy for Russia and China. Although their strategic approaches differ, both countries are engaged in a continuum of full-spectrum pressure and attacks against the U.S. Their goal is the slow erosion of American relative power, autonomy, and influence across multiple domains and reshaping the existing world order in their favor.
China’s Approach to Endless Warfare
For China, patience is a strategic weapon. While Beijing does not use the term “Endless Warfare,” its doctrine of protracted, whole-of-society warfare that can last decades or generations reflects that it emphatically embraces the underlying thinking. For example:
Mao Zedong emphasized wearing down a stronger adversary through time, space, and political mobilization rather than seeking decisive battles.
Unrestricted Warfare, the influential 1999 doctrinal work by PLA colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, calls for extending conflict beyond traditional military operations into economic, technological, legal, psychological, cyber, space, and information domains. In this framework, “war” is reframed as permanent competition across all instruments of national power.
China’s official “Three Warfares” doctrine—public opinion, psychological, and legal warfare—formalized in 2003, focuses on shaping the battlefield before and often instead of kinetic conflict.
As Elizabeth Economy details in Foreign Affairs, “China is executing a patient, multi-decade campaign to dominate the “new frontiers of power”—deep seabed, Arctic routes, space, cyber protocols, and financial infrastructure. This is not episodic aggression but a continuous effort to set conditions, rewrite rules, and erode U.S. advantages below the threshold of open conflict.”
Michael Pillsbury also persuasively argues in The Hundred-Year Marathon that China’s approach centers on a long-term strategy of “winning without fighting” — drawing on traditions of extreme patience over decades or generations, inducing complacency in competitors, and pursuing the patient displacement of American primacy over decades or generations.
China’s activities in the South China Sea, cyber pre-positioning in critical infrastructure, and expansion of global port access reflect a strategy focused less on immediate confrontation and more on a persistent approach to reshape power and influence order in China’s favor. In short, Beijing’s strategy is built for a marathon of protracted competition to weaken American primacy and expand China’s own political, economic, technological, and military influence.
Russia’s approach to Endless Warfare:
In contrast to China’s patient, multi-decade campaign, Russia is a committed global disrupter on a permanent war footing against the West.
This posture is driven, in part, by Russia’s long-standing obsession with defending the homeland—a besieged fortress mentality—the conviction that Russia is existentially threatened and surrounded by enemies seeking its destruction. Russia considers the U.S. and NATO first among those enemies.
According to CEPA, Russia sees warfare as “continuous and ubiquitous” and believes that true lasting peace with the West is impossible—only temporary pauses in confrontation exist. This worldview and deeply embedded ideology of Endless Warfare by other names have resulted in persistent and evolving gray zone attacks against the West across political, economic, cyber, informational, and social domains.
Russia often appears less concerned about the success or failure of individual operations than with generating disruption, uncertainty, cognitive impact, and strategic effects over time.
As RAND has noted, “All of the many thousands of hostile and often costly interactions between Western and Soviet states or Russia since the 1917 revolution have taken place in the so-called gray zone short of war.” This long-standing reality makes the gray zone a continuous challenge…” This reflects that Endless Warfare by other names is long-standing Russian strategy.
Mechanisms of Endless Warfare
Persistent Gray Zone Attacks:
The gray zone is where great power competition increasingly plays out every day—below the threshold of open conflict and often below the threshold of credible deterrence.
Russia and China employ persistent gray-zone attacks because they have calculated that the strategic gains outweigh the risks and that the likelihood of provoking decisive retaliation remains low.
As argued in earlier work on China’s Gray War on America, strategic defeat in the gray zone—or through gray warfare—emerges not through decisive military power, but through the cumulative loss of relative power, autonomy, and influence across multiple domains of national power.
Russia and China’s gray zone attacks against the United States reflect this strategy. Their objective is not necessarily to directly confront and defeat America through conventional military power, at least not as a primary strategy, but to decisively, even patiently, weaken American at home and abroad over the long term—the framework of Endless Warfare.
Russia’s gray-zone campaign in Europe illustrates this approach. Russia seeks to disrupt and dissuade support for Ukraine while weakening and fracturing NATO—a combination of immediate operational goals and long-standing strategic objectives. For decades, Russia has penetrated institutions, organizations, and networks across Europe, shaping conditions for future conflict. This access provides Russia with the leverage, reach, and insight necessary to conduct a broad spectrum of persistent disruptive activities over the long-term below the threshold of war.
The same approach increasingly extends to the United States. Russia has conducted cyber intrusions; penetrated critical infrastructure; stolen sensitive government, corporate, and personal information; cultivated strategic access, and employed influence operations and other gray zone tools intended to impose costs and create long-term strategic advantage.
Russia’s broader efforts to confront U.S. actions globally through disruption in Syria, across Africa, in the Arctic, and throughout other contested regions—while compelling the United States to respond across multiple theaters and placing sustained stress on allied unity—reflect an approach intended not to engage the United States militarily, but to gradually erode America’s capacity to sustain long-term global competition.
China’s gray zone campaign against the United States has included the penetration of critical infrastructure networks, industrial-scale theft of intellectual property, the compromise of sensitive personal data on millions of Americans, persistent cyber espionage directed at government, defense, and commercial sectors, and influence operations intended to exploit social and political divisions and erode confidence in American institutions. These activities are designed not merely to achieve immediate impact but to gain an advantage over time that will be difficult to reverse.
Cognitive warfare:
The most pervasive adversary activity in the gray zone—and one of the central drivers of Endless Warfare—is cognitive warfare. Our adversaries use cognitive warfare to influence individuals, groups, and societies at the cognitive level—not only through traditional information and influence activities, but also through political, economic, technological, and societal pressures that can influence or disrupt cognition itself.
We should not see cognitive warfare as merely another challenge in the information domain; we should recognize it as a new frontier of power—a deliberate effort to subvert how free societies know, deliberate, and decide.
The ultimate objective of cognitive warfare is to undermine America’s decision autonomy—our ability to accurately perceive global events, to trust the knowledge we have and the information we receive, and to make confident, independent decisions free from external manipulation or coercion.
Adversaries use persuasive disinformation, weaponized narratives, AI-enabled deepfakes, synthetic realities, coercion, intimidation, and other evolving tools to erode trust in institutions, amplify social and political division, manipulate public perception, and increase uncertainty at every level of society: private citizens, business leaders, military commanders, and policymakers.
In the cognitive domain, truth is a strategic asset—precious, powerful, and fragile, and cognitive warfare is a contest for that truth and knowledge.
Cognitive warfare does not need to result in major actions or decisions that directly benefit an adversary to be effective. It succeeds when our decisions become slower, more hesitant, more internally contested, or result in inaction or false choices due to erosion of resolve, coercion, or intimidation.
Proxies and Surrogates
The use of proxies and surrogates offers countries options to the potentially devastating consequences of direct conflict. Proxies and surrogates add essential capability, deflect attribution, and externalize the burden and consequences of Endless Warfare.
Iran has built one of the most developed proxy and surrogate networks in modern conflict. This network allowed Iran to indirectly attack Israel, intimidate regional states, serve as a spoiler in Syria, attack U.S. forces in Iraq, and disrupt international shipping—all while largely keeping itself at arm’s distance. This network also served as a defensive shield, helping dissuade attacks from Israel or the West, and advanced Iranian strategic interests for decades.
Yet surrogacy in Endless Warfare is evolving as modern conflict evolves.
In Endless Warfare, surrogacy is increasingly defined not by the hierarchy or control associated with traditional surrogate relationships, but by the persistent pursuit of strategic outcomes by multiple actors against a common adversary.
In this evolving form of pragmatic surrogacy, adversaries do not necessarily need formal coordination if their independent actions against a common adversary are mutually beneficial.
For example, China and Russia do not share identical strategic objectives. Russia is not a traditional surrogate, but it is also not an equal partner in the relationship. China provides economic, diplomatic, and broader strategic support that helps Russia sustain its war in Ukraine. In turn, Russia takes action to impose costs on the U.S. and it allies and that generates strategic outcomes that benefit China’s broader Gray War against America—consuming U.S. war reserves and resources, diverting attention from the Indo-Pacific and other global priorities, stressing domestic and allied resolve, and exposing potential military vulnerabilities.
Similar dynamics are visible in the Middle East. Iran pursues its own regional ambitions and is not subordinate to either Moscow or Beijing. Yet Iran’s persistent confrontation with the United States can benefit both Russia and China—including increased Russian fossil fuel revenue, discounted energy flows to China, strategic observations relevant to Taiwan, depletion of U.S. military reserves, diversion of U.S. strategic attention, and challenges to U.S. influence in the Middle East.
Russia and China may also benefit from pragmatic surrogate behavior by a much broader range of countries. Rather than build surrogate structures, both countries increasingly persuade, incentivize, induce, or coerce states into actions that strengthen their broader competitive position against the United States. Continuous purchases of Russian energy, participation in alternative financial systems, diplomatic shielding, sanctions evasion, strategic infrastructure access, or agreements providing future military utility can all favor Russia and China while disadvantaging the United States.
Because much of Endless Warfare occurs in ambiguous spaces below the threshold of traditional war, this pragmatic surrogacy may become one of the most effective and scalable mechanisms available to America’s adversaries.
Weaponizing Negotiations.
Negotiations do not necessarily represent the end of conflict; in Endless Warfare they often represent the continuation of it by other means—a new phase where strategic advantage can still be lost or gained.
It is a mistake to assume that entering negotiations means that an adversary will approach them in good faith to seek genuine resolution.
In their negotiations with the U.S., Russia and Iran both posture to seek concessions in advance, set maximalist demands they know are unacceptable, slow diplomatic processes, complicate U.S. decision-making, and erode allied political will and resolve. Most importantly—our adversaries use negotiations to gain time to reconstitute, make adjustments on the battlefield or in the gray zone, and strengthen their overall political and military position.
Russia’s approach under Vladimir Putin particularly reflects a negotiations strategy that is not a bridge to peace, but another instrument of conflict and Endless Warfare.
This pattern was clearly visible after the 2008 war with Georgia. The six-point ceasefire agreement brokered by French President Sarkozy was meant to restore peace and secure Russian withdrawal. Instead, Moscow used the negotiations to consolidate control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, formally recognize their “independence,” establish permanent military bases, and evade full compliance with the deal.
The same playbook was repeated in the Minsk process after the 2014 intervention in eastern Ukraine. Russia exploited agreements designed to reduce hostilities to freeze the conflict on terms favorable to Russia, preserve leverage, buy time for rearmament, and weaken Western cohesion.
Today, Russia engages in talks to end the war with Ukraine while maintaining military pressure on Ukraine, insisting on maximalist demands, and using the process to weaken Western unity and improve its battlefield position. For Putin, negotiations are rarely about ending the conflict—they are about advancing it by other means.
In the logic of Endless Warfare, negotiations are less about compromise and resolution than about deception, gaining time, shaping perception, extracting concessions, and improving strategic position for the next phase of conflict. An agreement by an adversary to participate in negotiations may not be a diplomatic victory; just a new phase of conflict.
This article has focused on defining Endless Warfare and how our adversaries employ it. Part II will discuss approaches to countering this emerging reality of modern conflict.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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