Ubiquitous technical surveillance and the renewal of irregular warfare

Unrestricted warfare prompts the questions, “Does a single ‘hacker’ attack count as a hostile act or not? Can using financial instruments to destroy a country’s economy be seen as a battle? Where is the battlefield?” The answer is: Everywhere. 

The United States certainly strives to maintain its relative technological advantage and commensurate capacity for precise and effective military power projection as an instrument of statecraft when it chooses to do so. Yet what lies beyond this normative comfort zone – characterized by precision strikes, commercialized cutting-edge tech, and centralized control – is the growth potential for irregular warfare, and thus, a form of warfare which yields stable, consistent, scalable, and effective strategic effects. 

The face of this growth potential in irregular warfare is signature reduction, the gray zone counteroffensive to the operational condition of ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) in unrestricted warfare. Whereas UTS persistently and pervasively challenges cross-dominance in strategic competition spaces, signature reduction offers a scalable counteroffensive which yields freedom of maneuver within it. 

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