Special ops general says autonomous systems are key to countering ‘gray-zone’ tactics

WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — The U.S. military must expand its approach to autonomous systems by creating affordable, distributed networks that help allies confront adversaries’ coercive “gray-zone” actions, the commander of Special Operations Command Pacific said Thursday.

“Being the stronger conventional military is necessary, but it’s not sufficient,” Army Brig. Gen. Michael Rose said during an address at the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium held recently on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, and hosted by the Global SOF Foundation.

“[W]e should not be thinking about autonomy solely as a new generation of weapons,” he said.

Among those weapons are the remotely piloted MQ-9 Reaper drone has a range of over 1,000 miles is used for surveillance and precision strikes, and smaller loitering drones, such as the Switchblade 600, which are one-time use “kamikaze” weapons.

Autonomous weapons systems give U.S. forces the ability to outfight adversaries, but irregular warfare can use autonomy to outthink them, Rose said.

This means moving beyond asking how many autonomous systems will help win a future war and instead asking how they can help shape today’s competition, he said.

The Defense Department defines irregular warfare as campaigns by state and non-state actors to assure or coerce other groups through indirect or asymmetric activities. Irregular warfare can create dilemmas and increases risks and costs for adversaries. It can be employed in times of peace or in concert with conventional war.

Rose argued that American dominance in conventional warfare has created a paradox in which irregular warfare becomes of prime importance.

“The better we become in conventional war, the more likely our adversaries are to avoid fighting us that way,” he said.

“It changes how the adversaries will compete with us. They look for seams. They operate below thresholds. They exploit ambiguity. They use proxies, information, economic coercion, cyber capabilities, maritime forces, and other asymmetric approaches to achieve objectives without presenting us with the conventional fight for which we are prepared.”

These so-called gray-zone activities fall below acts of war but above routine peacetime diplomacy. Gray-zone tactics are usually incremental, using ambiguity, plausible deniability and military proxies.

For example, boats with China’s commercial fishing fleet sometimes swarm and harass Philippine ships in disputed areas of the South China Sea.

“Our adversaries campaign every single day,” Rose said. “If we only show up periodically with an exercise or a deployment or a high-end platform, we’re essentially competing intermittently against adversaries who are competing persistently. Autonomy offers us an opportunity to change the paradigm.”

Rose asked the audience to consider the benefits of the presence of autonomous systems during gray-zone coercion by an adversary.

“The activity is deliberately ambiguous,” he said. “Attribution takes time. By the time we understand what happened, the adversary has already shaped the narrative.”

Rose proposed an alternative scenario, in which “the environment is populated with a distributed network of autonomous systems” that belong to the United States, its allies and partners.

Those systems detect the adversary’s activity, analyze and document it, then share it across a network “and we expose it,” he said.