![]() He was also a fan of naval history, and turned to the past in search of methods to counter German activities. ![]() ![]() The president had been assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920, and had an idea for how the sea service could be used to aid the Allies and to thwart German plans to sever the Atlantic sea lines of communication without actually going to war with Germany. His chief tool in this enterprise was the U.S. population in the mid – to late 1930s, Roosevelt knew that unconventional measures might be needed. Given the antiwar, isolationist stance of the majority of the U.S. Once war broke out in 1939, the president sought to aid Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and other states fighting Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. strategic interests in case of eventual war with Germany. Like Winston Churchill, Roosevelt recognized the aggressive and duplicitous nature of the Nazi regime and was determined to prepare and protect U.S. Both of these examples informed Roosevelt’s thinking as he looked for ways to counter the growing naval power of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Another example cited by Stavridis was the “ Q-ship” of World War 1, which was a merchant ship armed with naval weapons and manned by a naval crew with the mission of luring complacent submarines seeking an easy victory into the range of its guns. One example of such activity from the age of fighting sail was the privateer : A civilian ship with a civilian crew authorized to conduct warlike actions by a nation perhaps not interested in being directly linked to those missions. Roosevelt’s “little gray ships” effort is a good example of how a nation can aggressively use conventional seapower short of war to achieve its strategic ends.įormer NATO Supreme Commander Admiral James Stavridis further defined gray zone warfare in the naval context as “ maritime hybrid warfare” in which sailors without uniforms might operate warships disguised as merchant vessels and conduct warlike acts without attribution. All of these goals were accomplished short of actual war. Roosevelt used the Navy, Marines, and the Coast Guard to drive German naval forces from the western Atlantic Ocean, secure the overseas possessions of Allied nations conquered or menaced by the Nazi regime, and provide material aid to the Allied cause. Roosevelt was an active and enthusiastic practitioner of the art of gray zone warfare in the period just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the United States was not yet officially a belligerent in World War II. While analysts tend to view gray zone warfare as a modern innovation, a departure from an older and more traditional form of waging war, it was in fact readily familiar to previous generations. ![]() Special Operations Command White Paper as “competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality.” These examples constitute ‘gray zone warfare,’ defined by a 2015 U.S. Both nations engage in a process known as “ salami slicing ,” gradually pushing the limits of the boundary between war and peace to achieve potentially warlike national objectives short of conducting actual hostilities. In the South China Sea, China has been accused of claiming sections of international waters as extensions of its own territory and occupying and fortifying uninhabited islands as it would sovereign territory. In 2014, Russia’s invasion of the Crimea was famously characterized by “little green men'”taking control of key Ukrainian infrastructure, disrupting Ukrainian communications, and in some cases trying to get Ukrainian troops to switch to Russian allegiance. ![]()
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