Winning Without Fighting: How the United States Can Prevail in Irregular Warfare
China is no longer just investing in infrastructure abroad—it is building narratives, reshaping norms, and promoting authoritarian frameworks to overturn the liberal international order. In September 2021, President Xi Jinping addressed the UN General Assembly and introduced the Global Development Initiative (GDI), an unprecedented effort to lead the future of the Global South. Branded as a vision for “balanced, coordinated, and inclusive growth,” the GDI garnered wide support among developing nations.
But that was only the start. Soon after, Beijing also unveiled the Global Security and Civilization Initiatives (GSI and GCI), expanding its agenda beyond economics to security and governing norms. These initiatives signal more than a rebranding of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—they represent a strategic effort to redefine the rules and norms of the international system.
Together, they form the backbone of Beijing’s grand strategy to achieve “national rejuvenation” by 2049. Instead of resorting to open conflict, China seeks to elevate itself to superpower status by developing economic and technological dependencies, discreetly extending its military influence through dual-use infrastructure, and spreading authoritarian norms abroad to shape perceptions and behavior in Beijing’s image. Meanwhile, Russia wages hybrid warfare in Eastern Europe and Africa, Iran expands its influence through regional proxies, and transnational violent extremist groups continue to thrive, further straining the liberal international order that China seeks to upend.
This is the core warning and call to action that underpins Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century. Rebecca Patterson, Susan Bryant, Ken Gleiman, and Mark Troutman deliver a sobering critique of America’s conventional strategic mindset and recommend a decisive shift. The authors reframe irregular warfare (IW) not as a peripheral tool, but as the United States’ principal strategy for outcompeting its emerging adversaries. They envision IW as far more than just kinetic action or military operations. Instead, the authors suggest adopting Seth Jones’ IW definition, which includes, “activities short of conventional and nuclear warfare that are designed to expand a country’s influence and legitimacy, as well as to weaken its adversaries.” Hence, the book advocates for a whole-of-government approach that leverages all instruments of national power. This view reflects a return to the broader strategic framework the United States employed during the Cold War, centered on political warfare, influence operations, and sustained competition below the threshold of armed conflict.
In contrast to today’s strategic culture, which narrowly views IW as military activity, the authors emphasize the need for a framework focused on the non-kinetic tools that have reemerged among America’s adversaries. For national security policymakers and leaders throughout the joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational (JIIM) enterprise, Winning Without Fighting is more than timely–it is essential.
Equipped to Win, But Unwilling to Compete in the Gray Zone
As a follow-up to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex emphasizes that irregular warfare should not be treated as a niche capability for special operations forces (SOF), but as a core competency to be understood by civilian policymakers, military planners, interagency leaders, and international partners throughout the JIIM environment. Yet, despite its advantages–unmatched SOF capabilities, deeply rooted alliances, democratic legitimacy, and adaptive tools of statecraft–the United States continues to resist adopting a coherent, long-term strategy to wage it against modern adversaries. Authors of Winning Without Fighting argue that the United States’ strategic thinking remains dangerously misaligned with the reality of a competition arena broadly defined by gray zone activities that remain below the threshold of conventional conflict. They assert that the American IW outlook must therefore go beyond kinetic military activity to best address and win in today’s multidimensional strategic environment. To do so requires American security practitioners both in and out of uniform to broaden the scope of IW, as competitor states have done, to encompass a whole-of-government approach that jointly marshals the military, economic, and informational tools of statecraft to bolster overall national resilience.
Citing Mark Twain’s quip that “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme,” Winning Without Fighting points to America’s willingness to engage near-peer competition with multiple national power instruments during the Cold War. Drawing similarities to the present era of competition and crises, authors question why the United States seems hesitant to operate across a wider IW spectrum, despite having previously leveraged it to successful strategic effect. Recognizing that the pace of institutional change across the U.S. national security apparatus is often restrained by deep-set bureaucracy and unadaptive service culture, Winning Without Fighting calls for a fundamental reorientation of how American strategists conceptualize IW.
The U.S. has grown accustomed to relying on traditional military dominance, yet struggles to embrace the nuanced political and irregular warfare strategies that once defined its long-term competition with the Soviet Union. This is largely due to an overarching strategic culture that separates the use of irregular and unconventional warfare tactics from actually being in a state of war. However, America’s adversaries [read: Russia and China] seek to avoid outright confrontation and view competition with the West as an ongoing struggle requiring integral IW approaches to erode the American-led international order over the long term. The U.S. is thus being outcompeted in the activities-short-of-war arena because its rivals are adeptly exploiting gaps in the security buffer provided by U.S. possession of an overwhelmingly superior force. To rephrase a question once posed by Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military if we’re not talking about the many and varied ways we can use it?”
President Trump’s return to the White House has revivified “peace through strength” rhetoric and centralized it within his administration’s advancement of “America First” foreign policy. Borrowed from President Ronald Reagan–whose use of the phrase coincidentally outlined commitment to U.S. military modernization necessary to counter Soviet Russia –the popularization of “peace through strength” offers a policy-directed avenue for diffusion of IW practices across America’s national security apparatus. Such implementation of IW would enable necessary strategic coordination between military and non-military national power instruments that Winning Without Fighting argues would in turn bolster America’s capacity to withstand exogenous shocks and respond to fluid demands of the operational environment.
The Frontlines of Irregular Competition
The persistent disconnect between the United States’ reliance on military force and the rapidly changing demands of the operational environment limits its ability to compete in an era defined by irregular competition. Winning Without Fighting attributes this gap to American strategic culture, such as its binary understandings of war and peace, the preference for decisive kinetic conflict, and reliance on military resources at the expense of other tools of statecraft. To realign America’s strategy with the demands of IW, the authors recommend restoring IW tools that have atrophied since the Cold War. This approach emphasizes the coordinated employment of all instruments of national power to counter non-kinetic threats and regain the initiative.
A renewed emphasis on irregular warfare expands the strategic toolkit available to policymakers. Integration of IW tools would reframe military statecraft to not only include deterrence and force projection, but also emphasize allied and partnered force capacity building, foreign internal defense, and international professional military education. Economic statecraft tools include both inducements and coercive tools, such as development finance, asset freezes, export controls, and sanctions. Information statecraft is also emphasized, focusing on strategic messaging, counter-disinformation, public diplomacy, and information operations.
The practical application of this IW toolset is especially important in regions such as the Indo-Pacific, where China’s “Three Warfares” doctrine—encompassing legal, psychological, and media warfare—has transformed the region into the front lines of competition.
Rather than relying on conventional approaches such as naval dominance and force projection, the United States must prioritize non-military tools as its principal means of competing with China. In this context, IW is not merely a supporting element of deterrence—it must serve as its foundation. For example, strategic dominance at key chokepoints, such as the First Island Chain and the Strait of Malacca, will depend not on the number of American warships in the region, but on the extent to which Washington can leverage the full spectrum of statecraft—maintaining influence, securing digital infrastructure, and shaping the strategic narrative.
The strategic logic in the Indo-Pacific holds true globally. To regain the initiative, the United States must compete in the very domains where its advantages have dulled, such as cyber and information warfare, political warfare, covert action, and strategic messaging. Winning Without Fighting brings this point into focus, offering not just a roadmap but a wake-up call to the national security establishment: IW now dominates the strategic environment, and the US is losing ground–whether it chooses to acknowledge it or not. To shift the balance, the United States must not only strengthen its IW toolset but also fortify itself from within. In this context, resilience as an instrument of power emerges as a crucial foundation that reinforces other tools of statecraft.
Resilience as Deterrence: A Fifth Pillar of Power
Given the challenging international security, in conjunction with the increased prevalence of global crises, not only do typical policy tools matter, but resilience becomes essential to national security. Resilience is not merely the ability to absorb disruption, but the capacity to adapt, recover, and sustain a coherent strategy that withstands systemic shocks. The authors argue that building resilience at multiple levels–individual, community, national, and international–has a deterrent effect. Likewise, when crises arise, societies that are resilient are able to bounce back more quickly.
Resilience in irregular warfare is fundamentally asymmetric. Authoritarian regimes like China can rapidly focus and regauge their tools of statecraft because of state-centric approaches to organizing society. Yet, they remain brittle at their core—paranoid, opaque, and vulnerable to internal shocks. But democracies, despite political dysfunction, excel at drawing up decentralized networks of strength, innovation, and legitimacy that autocracies struggle to match. While the United States has an asymmetric advantage in its tools of statecraft, China remains a step ahead.
As the 2024 DoD Report on the PRC notes, China’s civil-military fusion and growing global posture, through dual-use infrastructure and digital influence operations, continues to effectively exploit the openness of democratic societies. This is not simply an infrastructure issue at strategic strongpoints around the globe. Instead, it underscores that resilience against malign foreign actors must now be understood as an essential strategic function that applies not just to the homeland but to vulnerable allies, international institutions, and the broader rules-based order.
But the authors go further, asserting that resilience not only enables the United States to withstand disruption but also provides a pathway to influence by reinforcing democratic credibility, sustaining strategic messaging, and enabling continuous engagement in contested environments.
Resilience as a pillar of power must be applied at every level—individual, community, national, and international—and proactively integrated into American statecraft, making it more than about defense. It is how free societies outlast and outmaneuver authoritarian rivals in the irregular warfare environment. In short, resilience is central to US national security and acts as deterrence by denial—preventing adversaries from succeeding in the shadows before conflict ever begins.
Metrics That Matter in Irregular Warfare
Beyond providing a new way to understand resilience as a core pillar of national security, Winning Without Fighting challenges the JIIM community to rethink how success in IW is measured. The authors emphasize that IW demands metrics capable of assessing outcomes in terms of power, influence, and legitimacy, rather than relying solely on activity-based indicators. Conventional metrics–such as targets struck, enemy equipment destroyed, or foreign aid dollars spent–while easy to quantify, are poor reflections of success in the gray zone and often incentivize finding easy wins rather than achieving slow-burning objectives.
Winning Without Fighting calls for a new framework: An “Irregular Warfare Dashboard.” This approach prioritizes Measures of Performance (MOPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) that are rooted in the domains that truly matter in strategic competition to accurately conceptualize progress. A flexible “mosaic approach” that includes indicators such as increased trust in democratic institutions, reduced influence of disinformation, enhanced partner capacity, and alignment of local narratives with strategic messaging are a few among many metrics for accurately measuring the success or failure of a particular IW strategy.
The immediate need for this framework is not just theoretical. China’s alphabet soup of strategic initiatives is designed to reshape global norms and perceptions in Beijing’s image–multipolar, state-centric, and favorable of authoritarian norms. In this context, examples for evaluating the success of the US’s response would include metrics that determine whether partner nations are adopting China’s narrative or maintaining confidence in democratic governance, transparency, and liberal institutions.
Importantly, Winning Without Fighting avoids prescribing a universally applicable IW framework. The authors explicitly warn against the dangers of Goodhart’s Law—the idea that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Rather than proposing an inflexible dashboard, they recommend a contextual, regionally-focused approach that leverages tools throughout the JIIM enterprise, promoting a holistic view of influence and resilience.
If the United States hopes to win without fighting, it must start by redefining what “winning” even means. And that begins with measuring what matters most in long-term strategic competition.
Competing on Irregular Terms
Winning Without Fighting persuasively argues that irregular warfare is no longer confined to the peripheries of global conflict. Instead, IW has become the defining feature of strategic competition in the 21st century. Patterson and her co-authors reveal that the United States can no longer rely on conventional military dominance to maintain its global influence. Instead, success in the gray zone depends on whole-of-government approaches that leverage influence operations, shape narratives, and build enduring partnerships to outmaneuver emerging revisionist threats.
Central to meeting these challenges is also investing in resilience as a core pillar of national power. In a world shaped by cyberattacks, disinformation, hybrid warfare, economic coercion, and climate change, resilience becomes more than simply enduring disruption. It becomes a strategic necessity that underpins credibility and sustains influence. Whether through securing critical technologies, reinforcing democratic institutions, or enhancing partner capacity abroad, resilience enables the US to remain agile against its adversaries while blunting the effects of persistent irregular warfare.
Winning Without Fighting is both a critique and a call to action. It challenges the national security establishment to move beyond industrial-age assumptions and adopt irregular warfare as the defining paradigm of modern competition. The book’s message is clear: gray zone competition is no longer a future challenge—it is the reality of today’s strategic environment. The question now is whether the United States can leverage the irregular mindset, partnerships, and tools required to win.
