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Fueled by technological innovation - particularly in digital media-based technology as well as cyber operations, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning - today’s competitive landscape is more complex and dynamic than before. These strategies of strategic competition in the sub-conventional domain may not be entirely new, but the tools that enable them have transformed the strategic significance of the unconventional battlespace and the coercive power of hybrid warfare. Through broad, sub-conventional influence campaigns and the engagement of digital proxies, these states hope to advance their interests without clear attribution or risk of escalation. 2 Both Russia and China, on the other hand, have felt compelled to challenge institutional structures and avoid direct traditional military competition, while pursuing asymmetric approaches to competition “below and beyond” traditional one-upmanship in the conventional military domain.
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interests, and its domestic political commitments to a free press and open internet have limited both the need and ability of the United States to compete aggressively in the gray zone.
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And yet, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, America’s conventional military primacy, its ability to utilize the institutions and alliances of the liberal international order to advance U.S. government actions, both real and imagined, have fed perceptions of a United States bent on shrinking Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence and shaping regional balances of power on favorable terms. Moreover, from the Color Revolutions to Stuxnet, U.S. Cold War history is littered with such cases from election manipulation to state-sponored rebel insurgencies.
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Of course, these countries are not strangers to information warfare, propaganda, and deception, or even using proxy and covert warfare as tools of strategic competition (nor is the United States). The increasing use of hybrid warfare and gray-zone tactics by China and Russia reflects the view that their strategic aims are best achieved through coercive means below the level of direct conventional military interaction. Indeed, increasingly sophisticated sub-conventional tactics such as disinformation and weaponized social media, the blurring of nuclear-conventional firebreaks, and the continuing diffusion of global power to regional nuclear states are adding new challenges and additional complexity to crisis management even as an increasingly competitive and contested security environment fuels greater coercive risk-taking among nuclear-armed states, in particular, the United States, Russia, and China. Unlike traditional concepts of escalation, which suggest linear and somewhat predictable patterns from low-level crisis to all-out nuclear war, 1 escalatory pathways in this new era of strategic competition will be less predictable. Flash forward and today’s global pandemic crisis offers a glimpse into how a toxic mix of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and digital technology can complicate effective crisis management, fuel competition and rivalry, shift blame, and sow mistrust. Instead, Kennedy stood “eyeball to eyeball” with Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev during the 13-day standoff until cooler heads prevailed. A targeted campaign to weaponize social media, turn elements of the American public against the president, and undermine the institutional authority and credibility of America’s deterrent did not arise because the technology to do so in real time did not exist. A chorus of pre-established online trolls messaging a Soviet-orchestrated storyline and all-caps Twitter threats would likely have come next. Had these events taken place today, the signaling almost certainly wouldn’t have stopped - or started - there. Kennedy made clear that any nuclear attack from Cuba would be construed as an act of war, and that the United States would retaliate in kind. In a televised address, President John F. 24, 1962, the United States raised its alert levels to defense readiness condition (DEFCON) 2, for the first - and thus far only - time in its history.