OPERATING ON THE MARGINS: SOF IN THE GRAY ZONE

The result was the formation of the United Nations and in particular Article 2(4), which prohibited “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”8 This article gave the world a clear “red-line” that, once OPERATING ON THE MARGINS 4 SOF IN THE GRAY ZONE I N T R O D U. [...] Given the vast economic and military power of the United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many scholars and policy- makers argued the global order had entered an era of unipolarity, where the Americans sought to balance a distaste for imperial behaviour with the desire to expand commercial enterprises and protect human rights abroad. [...] Last, the use of technology is maximized to target specific audiences and create a maximum effect.5 The gray zone encompasses “deliberate multidimensional activities by a state actor just below the threshold of aggressive use of military forces.”6 The gray zone can crudely be described as the region around the intersection of war and peace. [...] The matrix of competition expresses a paradigm that can shape not only military and non-military operations and activities, but the utilization of all instruments of Alliance power, including SOF, by providing a fulsome comprehension of the scope, scale and strength of oppositional activities through time.13 The implications of this exploration of the changed character of war lead to three conclus. [...] At the centre of deterrence is the military preparedness of the nation and the overt willingness to use military power such that an adversary decides that the risk of carrying out a particular course of action is not worth the potential consequences.