Francis Picabia, “Machine Tournez Vite” (1916–1918). Ink, watercolor, and shell gold over a 19th-century lithograph. Many believe the West, and the United States in particular, is in retreat: from Asia, from Europe, from the overextension
of its own imperial logic. The evidence seems overwhelming: America's
"forever wars" ending in humiliation, Europe's industrial base hollowing
out, China's Belt and Road Initiative reshaping global trade routes,
while BRICS+ nations slowly construct alternative financial
architectures beyond Western control.
Yet
foreign policy documents reveal a different trajectory entirely. Let’s
consider this single line from the U.S. Army's Unified Network Plan 2.0,
published quietly in early 2025:
"The
initial Army Unified Network Plan (AUNP) was published… to address the
changing character of war from episodic and regional to transregional
and global."
Let those words settle: From episodic and regional to transregional and global.
This
simple phrase constitutes a strategic directive of the highest order.
The urban landscapes of Kyiv, the straits of Taiwan, the deserts of the
Sahel, and the Arctic ice floes transform from separate conflicts into interconnected nodes
within a vast, planetary system of applied pressure. No fanfare
accompanies this declaration. No press release, no congressional
briefing. Yet it marks a rupture as profound as any since 1945: the
abandonment of discrete, bounded interventions for continuous,
simultaneous engagement across every domain.
The
implications become clearer when examining recent statements from US
leadership. During the October 2025 NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels, Secretary Pete Hegseth articulated the underlying logic:
"Peace
through strength. You get peace when you are strong… The world is
seeing that we have a peace president who seeks peace through standing
by those who stand with the United States and for peace."
Beneath the peace rhetoric, however, lies a “proposition” of hegemonic alignment with the United States, or face the unleashing of military strength. The message targets "the world"; every nation must choose subordination or confrontation.
This planetary engagement system operates through multiple designs. The Pentagon calls it Multi-Domain Operations,
a doctrine forged in the recognition that American air dominance can no
longer be taken for granted, supply lines will be severed, and static
bases can become death traps. Thus, soldiers must operate in dispersed,
autonomous cells, seizing fleeting advantages with electronic jammers
and long-range missiles, capabilities once confined to separate
services. DARPA terms it Mosaic Warfare:
decentralized command, disposable platforms, effects assembled in real
time from pools of manned and unmanned systems. A system where
fragmentation and impermanence are key to survival and lethality.
Now remember, in Weaponizing Time – Part I, we traced
the psychological substrate driving this transformation: a social
group-bound obsession with mastering historical time and territories,
ensuring the future remains legible only through supposedly Western categories.
That obsession has migrated from ideology into military doctrine
itself. Western power elites experience rising multipolarity as an existential threat to their civilizational identity and to their social role (with all of its material implications), built on premises of supremacy.
As I wrote previously:
"The
feeling of time running out accelerates imperial statecraft. Where the
metropole once feared territorial enclosure, it now fears sovereignty by
other means: development banks with their own standards, lithium
nationalization, energy corridors that bypass favored hubs, payment
systems that ignore the dollar. The pointillist empire of bases meets a
world busy rerouting the map."
Now, strategic ambiguity and multi-domain logic supply the administrative infrastructure
for a 21st-century "savage war" where whole societies are cast as
civilizational threats, rendered fair game through sanctions that
collapse wages and medicine imports, through tech denial lists that
strangle industrial lifecycles, through media campaigns that fix an
enemy's identity as inherently hostile. This essentialism licenses a
strategy that must believe in the barbarism of its targets to justify permanent pressure, or worse.
A short video from NATO's Allied Command Transformation, introduced under the auspices of Florence Gaub's Strategic Foresight division,
lays bare the mood of the moment. Gaub, a frequent guest on German talk
shows and no stranger to inflammatory Russophobic commentary, embodies
the transatlantic security elite's fusion of technocratic fluency and
civilizational panic. The video itself pulses with a strange mix of urgency and glee:
"We
have a pretty good idea of what the future of war looks like... We will
have to be ready to fight in cities, in space, in the cyber domain, in
the Arctic, and on the high seas. We have to relearn the language of
deterrence. We expect the outlines of this future to emerge from 2030
onwards. We are in a race against time...
And while all parties concerned—NATO and its adversaries—are aiming for
short wars, reality often has the last word. For NATO, this means we have no time to lose. Tomorrow starts today. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take this foresight to war fight."
What
kind of challenge is this? The tone borders on the ludic, as if war
were a design problem, a simulation to be optimized. Yet the temporal anxiety reveals itself: "no time to lose," "race against time." Elite panic about closing windows drives the doctrines.
NATO's Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 supplies the strategic justification:
"Pervasive competition is unfolding and spreading into new domains through all dimensions at all times."
Again: At all times. The very notion of episodic peace, of interludes between wars, is declared obsolete.
Taken
together, these papers and reports eventually become budgets and battle
plans, and then, self-fulfilling prophecies. A feedback loop tightens:
the more the West militarizes every domain, the more its rivals respond
in kind; the more rivals adapt, the more the West escalates. Yet, behind
all of this lies a hollowed-out industrial base, aging populations, and
a social contract in tatters.
The Western ruling strata's grand project becomes delay:
to stretch the plateau of managed chaos long enough to preserve a
hierarchy that can no longer justify itself through prosperity,
innovation, or consent.
The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 and NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 constitute confessions of elite strategy that reveal three interconnected phenomena: the abandonment of traditional warfare constraints, the institutionalization of the ruling strata’s anxiety, and the construction of what I call the permanent attrition economy.
Strategic Ambiguity, Multi-Domain Operations, and Mosaic Warfare function as synergistic doctrines
serving a singular purpose: maintaining indefinite low-intensity
conflict that exhausts adversaries while masking domestic decline, and
while preparing for high-intensity conflicts. Unlike previous imperial
strategies that sought decisive victory, these approaches deliberately avoid resolution.
This is likely because resolution would end the profit streams and
strategic justifications that sustain them. And partly, because
everything is built on the premise of a permanent existential threat
that doesn’t know or understand peace.
This analysis proceeds through several interconnected arguments. First, contemporary military doctrine represents spatial fix mechanisms,
David Harvey’s concept of how capitalism addresses overaccumulation
crises through geographical expansion and restructuring. Second, these
doctrines emerge from the ruling strata’s civilizational anxiety
about losing “racial” and hierarchical supremacy, as well as their
social role and economic and political power to rising non-Western
powers. Third, the material contradictions
inherent in these strategies, particularly Western deindustrialization
and dependency on adversary supply chains, could make them self-defeating.
The evidence base draws from official planning documents, strategic
analyses, and the institutional networks that produce them.
The transformation from “episodic and regional” to “transregional and global”
warfare represents something unprecedented: the militarization of
planetary existence itself. Every domain — land, sea, air, space, cyber,
and cognitive — becomes contested terrain. Every infrastructure system
becomes dual-use. Every commercial relationship becomes potential
leverage. The Westphalian system of bounded conflicts between sovereign
states gives way to permanent, everywhere engagement.
Western
elites face choices they cannot accept: compete through better policies
and socio-economic models, or accept diminished influence in exchange
for domestic renewal. Instead, they have chosen to militarize competition itself,
treating economic development, technological advancement, and
diplomatic cooperation by non-Western powers as military problems
requiring military solutions.
Understanding this transformation requires analyzing both the institutional networks that produce these doctrines and the material contradictions
that limit their effectiveness. For example, Germany’s role as a
framework nation reveals how European industrial capacity is
subordinated to US strategic priorities while maintaining illusions of
autonomous leadership (see Part III). The Army Unified Network Plan’s
dependence on commercial technologies controlled mostly by strategic
competitors exposes the near-impossibility of the entire enterprise.
Through the analysis that follows, a portrait of ruling elite anxiety emerges that seeks to channel itself through strategic innovation.
This ruling class would rather risk civilizational collapse than accept
a multipolar world in which Western supremacy becomes one option among
many rather than the only legitimate organizing principle for human
society.
In Weaponizing Time – Part I,
we traced how Western power elites experience the developing process of
multipolarity as a civilizational injury as well as a threat to their
role and power in the world. In essence, it is about stretching the
plateau of managed chaos until some external rupture restores room to
maneuver. Strategic ambiguity is the operational expression of that delay
and the management of this hegemonic crisis. It blurs intent so
thoroughly that adversaries must prepare for every scenario, all the
time.
Several purposes drive it. Psychologically,
it aims to corrode confidence, to make leaders doubt their actions, to
tire publics of readiness drills and threats, and to hedge planners
against phantoms. Economically, it compels continuous mobilization and, at selective moments, dangerous relaxation:
surge for one rumor, offers of peace and ceasefires, stand down for the
next, expend funds and attention on decoys and contingencies. The
result is a constant state of guesswork that exhausts material and mental resources, fractures diplomatic focus, and paralyzes long-term planning.
Consider the various mechanisms such as:
Sanctions that are announced broadly, enforced selectively, then layered. Secondary penalties applied to some firms but not others.
Weapons decisions, Taurus, ATACMS, Tomahawk, are teased, delayed, re-signaled, parcelled in tranches.
Phantom threats
like leaked plans for troop deployments that never materialize, B-52
sorties over the Sea of Okhotsk, carrier strike groups sailing above the
Arctic Circle, sudden, unannounced, then gone. As the CSIS (Center for
Strategic & International Studies) notes, these are examples of “dynamic force employment”, where surprise is supposed to work as a deterrent.
A psychological theater of attrition warfare emerges.
The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy condensed the method into an interesting instruction for operational unpredictability:
“Be
strategically predictable, but operationally unpredictable… our dynamic
force employment, military posture, and operations must introduce
unpredictability to adversary decision-makers… maneuver competitors into
unfavorable positions, frustrate their efforts, preclude their options
while expanding our own.”
The rationale followed in the same breath: a more lethal, resilient, innovative Joint Force plus an alliance architecture to sustain influence and the “balances of power”. Failure, the document warns, risks diminished influence, frayed alliances, and reduced market access. Effectively, ambiguity is framed as a macro-stabilizer for the fragile state of Western hegemony.
RAND (2018) proposed a crisp definition, operational unpredictability = adversary uncertainty about how the United States would fight, and argued that the most promising path is to develop and demonstrate multiple credible courses of action (COAs) that require different enemy counters. Crucially, they noted that such unpredictability “does not have to be hidden”,
it must be demonstrated. Public exercises, new weapons, leader
statements: all feed the fog. What’s more, adversarial planners take a
course of action seriously only if “there is clear and public political or military leadership support.” Ambiguity, then, is also performative. It requires spectacle.
Ultimately, the RAND study notes that one of the goals is to make an adversary “assess that the costs of preparing for conflict would be higher or the likelihood of adversary success may be lower.”
Another CSIS article (2020) openly acknowledges that this “operational unpredictability” is partly a response to stretched U.S. capabilities. With a finite force, surprise becomes a force multiplier. The report points to “bomber rotations and sorties, naval deployments, [and] exercises” that are “shorter and followed unexpected routes,”
such as the deliberate deployment of a carrier strike group above the
Arctic Circle or B-52 flights into the Sea of Okhotsk. These movements
attempt to be signals of omnipresence designed to force a rival to
defend every front at all times. Lastly, allies are invited to contribute, though the planning horizon remains deliberately opaque.
Taken together, the doctrine, the research, and the movement pattern paint a picture: keep adversaries guessing about the American way of war, demonstrate several viable plays, and vary which one appears on any given day.
It helps to separate strategic ambiguity and operational uncertainty:
Strategic ambiguity
lives in diplomacy and public signaling: conditional statements,
proposals for peace or ceasefires, floating options, quiet media leaks
about weapons or timelines, unofficial statements from sources close to
decision-making elites, and even social media posts. It shapes
perceptions of intent.
Operational uncertainty is engineered before and during armed interventions of some sort: alter embarkation points, vary axes and timings, mask logistics, and introduce novel COAs that force the other side to split counteractions.
The two concepts aim to create uncertainty across different spheres of foreign policy.
A prime case study in this layered application of ambiguity is the evolving U.S. posture toward Venezuela. In 2025, the U.S. deployed
its largest naval force to the Caribbean in decades, ostensibly for a
“war on drugs.” Soon after, strikes targeted small boats at sea,
murdering fishermen. Then the narrative shifted: the mission was no longer about cartels, but regime collapse. “The priority now is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government figures,” reported the Financial Times, quoting insiders who described Trump’s strategy as one of “keeping people off-balance.”
This is strategic ambiguity in its purest form: a deliberately
unsettled and escalating threat, leaving a sovereign government to
wonder not if it will be attacked, but how and when.
On
the media front, articles and social media posts, as well as the Nobel
Peace Prize to opposition figures like María Corina Machado, who parrots the White House line on international media, are another layer of the strategy. The goal is controlled instability —a proof-of-concept for hybrid coercion in the Western Hemisphere.
Another
example on the operational level is a recent high-intensity exchange,
specifically between Israel and Iran. A CSIS report explains how modern Western warfare seeks information-driven shock. Strikes are designed to rupture the opponent’s belief that battle networks will function under fire. The goal is to fracture perception. The side that injects uncertainty into decision loops, erodes trust
in systems, and makes leaders feel personally vulnerable can shape
outcomes well before any significant deployment of brigades.
This approach is often justified by framing rivals as the original architects of “grey zone” hybrid warfare. As a 2016 Small Wars Journal article lamented, the U.S., as the “bulwark of the global international system,” found itself “hamstrung by its very adherence to rules that simply did not apply to everyone else.”
The irony is staggering. The U.S. pioneered covert coups, Gladio
networks, and sanctions-as-siege. Now it feigns outrage when others
develop sovereign alternatives, payment systems that bypass SWIFT,
energy corridors that ignore U.S. hubs, and development banks with
non-dollar lending. To the U.S. elite, sovereignty itself is hybrid warfare.
The solution, as touted
by proponents like Jerry Hendrix (current Chief of the OMB Shipbuilding
Office and Deputy to the Associate Director for Defense at the Office
of Management and Budget), was to re-embrace the “strategic ambiguity”
of Eisenhower and Reagan, to “inject uncertainty of outcome into diplomatic dialogue to destabilize a nation’s enemies.” The message to the world is a simple, coercive binary:
align unconditionally with U.S. interests and be granted
predictability, or pursue sovereign independence and face relentless,
engineered uncertainty.
The
method carries hazards acknowledged in the technical literature. RAND
flags cost, effectiveness trade-offs, and threat-perception spikes. The SFA23 foresight warns that EDTs (Emerging and disruptive technologies: AI, autonomous systems) increase strategic surprise and unintended escalation, especially when decision times compress and cognitive battle intensifies. Ambiguity can steady a deterrence ladder; it can also harden enemy threat lenses and provoke compensating risks.
Another
danger lies in nuclear posture: tactical nukes are reintroduced not
just for deterrence, but to signal that escalation thresholds are
unknowable. Yet this logic collapses under its own civilizational lens
of supremacy. If hegemonic ruling strata
genuinely believe adversaries are “barbarians” incapable of rational
calculation, as Part I exposes, then ambiguity loses its logic. Why
signal subtly to those who cannot read signals? The result is a drift
toward preventive clarity: explicit threats, red lines, and ultimately, war.
In sum, ambiguity functions as the management system of empire in decline,
a tool for buying time, dispersing risk, and staging coherence amid
exhaustion. It stabilizes through confusion, stretches deterrence
through illusion, and converts limited means into the appearance of
global reach. Yet, the risk is that each turn of unpredictability
demands new layers of coordination to sustain the illusion of control.
Out of this dependency emerges the next doctrinal phase of Western military thought: Multi-Domain Operations.
Where ambiguity is temporal, MDO is spatial and systemic —a blueprint
for organizing conflict across land, sea, air, cyber, and space.
The bridge from ambiguity to application runs through the doctrine of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).
Where ambiguity manipulates time, MDO rearranges and uses space. It
systematizes what the 2018 National Defense Strategy called for:
strategic predictability for allies, operational unpredictability for
adversaries, by giving the Joint Force a grammar for acting across land,
sea, air, cyber, and space without waiting for a single decisive
theater to formally open. In essence, MDO represents the formal
codification of a profound, almost existential, shift in the American —
and, by extension, Western — way of war: the abandonment of victory for
the management of perpetual global pressure.
The doctrinal arc that produced Multi-Domain Operations began in the early 2010s:
Air–Sea Battle emerged
as a remedy to growing anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) threats, layered
defenses of long-range missiles, sensors, and electronic jammers
designed to hold U.S. forces at a distance. Its logic was largely
technological and kinetic: disrupt, destroy, defeat the adversary’s A2/AD network through precision strikes and superior integration of naval and air assets.
That concept evolved into the Joint Operational Access idea around 2016, which acknowledged that no single branch could penetrate layered denial alone and shifted focus from dismantling specific enemy systems to defeating the adversary’s overall operational design and intent. It was an operational approach: a method to make strategy executable across services,
By 2016–17, the Army articulated Multi-Domain Battle, and the language soon widened into Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). The shift in vocabulary signaled a change of scale and purpose: competition,
gray-zone maneuver, political warfare, and electromagnetic deception
gained equal significance with classic combat. The new term captured a
wider field of activity, warfare conducted far from any traditional
frontline, and even including cyberspace and space itself.
The Army’s doctrinal capstone, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028,
names the new challenges: Peer competitors have layered long-range
missiles, cyber intrusions, jammers, space sensors, and other systems
into integrated A2/AD architectures. These create what TRADOC calls “layered stand-off”:
concentric rings of effect that can deny access to forces across land,
sea, air, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum. In practice, a
layered stand-off can turn static bases, supply convoys, and even
aircraft carriers into exposed nodes within a dense kill web, a network
of sensors, shooters, and communications that provide targeting and
effect at range.
As
a solution on the battlefield, MDO assembles a kill web’s opposite:
sensors, shooters, and maneuver elements are fused quickly via data
links to create ephemeral corridors of relative advantage. However,
MDO’s operational solution to these challenges follows a cadence that
starts before any armed conflict: compete — penetrate — disintegrate — exploit — consolidate — return to competition on favorable terms.
Within this evolving context, the aim is a sequence of interventions
that keep the adversary off balance and reopen fleeting windows of
advantage. Read as doctrine, this is attrition by multiple means:
continuous pressure intended to make defense and recovery costly,
time-consuming, and politically unsustainable.
The
envisioned battlefield, if one considers the armed portions of the MDO
cadence, is one of brutality and isolation. In a 2016 speech, then-Army
Chief of Staff General Mark Milley described the scenario:
“On
the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or
three hours, you will be dead... being surrounded will become the norm.”
He
described a world where static bases are annihilated, supply lines are
severed, and soldiers, often cut off from command, must purify their own
water and 3D-print their own parts. In this vision, the Army’s
traditional role is inverted. “Land-based forces now are going to have to penetrate denied areas to facilitate air and naval forces,” Milley declared. “This is exact opposite of what we have done for the last 70 years... The Army — yes, the Army — we’re going to sink ships.” The reverse of a half-century of U.S. practice.
In
essence, this doctrine is one developed for survival and sustained
pressure to stifle and reverse competition in a world without safe
areas, where every domain is perceived as a potential front line.
Indeed, it is this perception of threats that has led to these
doctrines.
The MDO is a direct response to what military analysts termed and perceived as the “Gray Zone”, a conceptual space defined by this US Army War College report, Outplayed (2016), as “purposeful resistance to the American-led status quo.” The report continues:
“New,
however, are the number of actors simultaneously empowered to resist
U.S. influence effectively, the variety of routes and vectors from which
they can threaten harm to core U.S. interests, and, finally, the
volatility of an international system under persistent seismic pressure
from the competing forces of integration and disintegration.”
In
this framing, adversaries like Russia and China were not merely
pursuing independent foreign policies; their actions, whether economic
partnerships, information campaigns, or diplomatic relationships, were
interpreted as inherently adversarial “grey zone” warfare, deliberately
designed to operate just below the barrier that separated pre-war
activities from full combat operations.
Indeed, the rationale for the MDO is spelled out in this Breaking defense article as follows:
“Russia
and China do not recognize a state of peace, the way US law, doctrine,
and culture do. Traditional US military planning goes from peace to war,
and then we work our way methodically up the ladder of escalation. But
Russia and China view conflict as a continuum.”
This characterization of the "Gray Zone" is an expression of the civilizatory lens of supremacy.
The underlying logic pathologizes any form of development or
international engagement that is not subservient to the US-led order. It
operates on the premise that the only legitimate state behavior is
alignment with Western interests. This is the intellectual foundation
that allows the entirety of geopolitics to be redefined as a "military
problem." By framing multipolarity itself as a "gray zone" threat, the
doctrine of Multi-Domain Operations receives its moral and strategic license: the entire world becomes a battlespace, and every independent actor a legitimate target.
Yet beneath the MDO lies fragility. A 2023 Hague Centre for Strategic Studies report, Breaking Patterns, delivers a sobering verdict: European armies, in particular, suffer from mass shortfalls
that no amount of networking can compensate for. Technology, the report
warns, is not a panacea. The U.S. knows this. Yet MDO persists because
its design serves ruling elite interests. It guarantees horizontal convergence: contracts for radar, cyber, orbital communication systems, AI, and now global network infrastructure. It enables below-threshold action: drone strikes, cyber sabotage, and information warfare. It facilitates occupation without territory: control over data flows, financial circuits, and supply chains, all while avoiding the costs of formal empire.
By
designing a state of permanent, below-threshold conflict, it ensures
the war economy hums indefinitely, a self-justifying engine of
expenditure that tries to cover the deindustrialization and social decay
at home. MDO is the gospel of a hegemony that abolishes peace, and that
can only offer the managed chaos of endless, global “competition”.
MDO provides the operational logic for composing effects across domains. To scale the MDO, it needs a unified network that moves data, authorizations, and situational understanding across theaters at speed. Here, the Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 steps forward. The plan describes a world now “multidomain, persistently contested” and demands a data-centric approach that “brings the global network and common data requirements to theaters.”
The next section looks at the AUNP 2.0 and shows how the network forms doctrine into planetary occupation by other means.
The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 (AUNP 2.0),
released in 2025, quietly codifies that the battlefield is now
planetary. This document, couched in the lexicon of information
technology, states that its purpose is to
“address the changing character of war from episodic and regional to transregional and global.”
In
other words, the United States Army no longer conceives of war as a
succession of discrete campaigns limited by geography or duration, but
as a continuous condition distributed across every domain, every
network, every hour.
In its own language, the plan aims to “unify Army networks with common standards, systems, and processes,” creating a single digital architecture capable of “bringing the global network and common data requirements to theaters.”
It is the logical extension of Multi-Domain Operations: if MDO provided
the ideas for simultaneous warfare across land, sea, air, cyber, and
space, AUNP 2.0 provides the digital nervous system that allows those
dispersed actions to think and act as one.
The plan’s stated rationale is deceptively pragmatic. In an era of “persistently contested information environments,”
it argues, static command posts, data centers, and even fiber-optic
backbones are as vulnerable as forward bases. To survive, the network
itself must become mobile, adaptive, and self-healing. Hence, the
emphasis on agility in what the document calls DDIL conditions: denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited bandwidth environments.
Under this premise, AUNP 2.0 folds every Army network into a Common Operating Environment (COE) and Common Services Infrastructure (CSI).
These systems provide what in civilian terms would be cloud and edge
computing: globally distributed data processing that links sensors,
shooters, and decision nodes in real time. Artificial intelligence and
machine learning are woven through the design to “enable data-driven decision-making capabilities across the force.” The ambition is planetary coherence:
to ensure that, for instance, an intelligence feed from Syria can
inform a strike in the South China Sea. In the report’s words, it allows
a commander to “effectively oversee distributed forces from any location worldwide.”
The result is what the plan itself calls “global, cross-domain maneuver”: the world treated as a single integrated theater.
Such
a technical architecture enables the core strategic shift from the
episodic to the persistent. The AUNP explicitly mandates a move to “Zero Trust” (ZT) security principles, succinctly defined as “never trust, always verify.”
In a Zero Trust architecture, every data request, whether from a
general at the Pentagon or a soldier in a forward trench, is treated as a
potential threat. This mindset perfectly mirrors the assumption of
pervasive competition, aka hybrid warfare, at all times.
This plan centralizes the network itself as the primary terrain of warfare. “Common standards, systems, and processes” now mean more than technical uniformity as they produce interoperability as hegemony.
Every allied system that plugs into the network must conform to U.S.
encryption, data structure, and command logic standards. In other words,
through this digital infrastructure allies will weave their militaries
into a US-led technological ecosystem from which they cannot decouple
without surrendering their own operational capacity.
Mexican economist and geopolitical theorist Ana Esther Ceceña has described U.S. power as a “global occupation”,
not territorial in the classical sense but infrastructural, exercised
through logistics, finance, and communication networks that overlay
rather than replace sovereignty. AUNP 2.0 reflects this line of thought.
Control now depends on the ability to route data, decide what connects,
and determine whose systems remain interoperable.
In this sense, the AUNP 2.0 transforms connectivity into a form of jurisdiction. It organizes the planet into a single operational domain, one in which data itself becomes a governed substance. To possess situational awareness across continents is to hold the command prerogative everywhere at once. The plan’s architecture turns the network into the empire’s territory and interoperability into its law.
The plan’s core assumption —permanent contestation —creates its own justification. A “persistently contested information environment” is not only a description of future conflict but a mandate to engineer systems that are always on,
always alert, always engaged. In building a network designed for
uninterrupted readiness, the Army institutionalizes the very condition
it fears: a world of constant low-level confrontation. The border
between peace and war dissolves.
This perpetual vigilance, in turn, fuses with Multi-Domain Operations. AUNP 2.0 is the material substrate of MDO’s doctrine of compete, penetrate, disintegrate, exploit, and consolidate.
The cadence requires uninterrupted data flow; the network guarantees
it. The result is a feedback loop: global connectivity enables global
contestation, and global contestation justifies ever-expanding
connectivity.
AUNP 2.0 calls itself “data-centric,”
but what it really describes is a form of planetary command cognition.
The network’s sensors, analytic engines, and human operators form an
integrated decision ecology in which perception, analysis, and strike
capacity collapse into simultaneity. Within this system, information
becomes weaponized awareness, structured by hierarchies of access.
Whoever owns the network owns the tempo of global time.
In this architecture, persistence replaces presence.
Bases can be withdrawn, flags lowered, yet the connective tissue
remains, fiber, satellite, software, through which coercive power
circulates invisibly. The world becomes an occupied bandwidth, and the
network becomes the permanent garrison.
Even
as MDO and the AUNP 2.0 extend the architecture of hybrid and gray-zone
operations below the threshold of declared war, the Army’s unified
network also furnishes the combinatorial logic for what comes next: Mosaic Warfare.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envisions a
battlespace composed of “tiles” of effect—sensors, loitering munitions,
decoys, jammers—each small and autonomous, yet linkable through shared
data standards and instantaneous orchestration.
The
network renders these fragments interoperable across distance; it
decides when, where, and how they briefly assemble into a local
configuration of force. The next section examines Mosaic Warfare as the
operational corollary to the Unified Network: a doctrine of distributed
lethality that both depends on and intensifies the infrastructural
occupation traced above.
Mosaic Warfare first took shape in circles around DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA)
around 2017, institutions that have long served as incubators of the
operational imagination of the American empire. Out of their
laboratories and conferences came the proposal to abandon the
traditional notion of war as the orchestration of large, self-contained,
multi-mission systems, and to think instead in terms of innumerable
small, interoperable fragments, what DARPA researchers call tiles.
Each tile can be a sensor, a loitering munition, a jammer, a decoy, or a
shooter. None of these fragments is impressive by itself; each is
fragile, limited, expendable. Yet when connected through shared data
standards and real-time orchestration, they can be combined into a
fleeting mosaic, a local, temporary, and context-specific kill web.
This,
at least, is the vision: that the battlefield of the future will
resemble an intricate digital tapestry woven moment by moment out of
dispersed components, each contributing a sliver of lethality to an
emergent whole. Where the twentieth-century military dreamt of unit
cohesion, the twenty-first century dreams of recomposition. The linear
“kill chain” that once guided the process of detection, targeting, and
destruction is replaced by the “kill web,” a mesh that continuously reshapes itself under fire, recombining paths of action as others are severed.
The appeal of such a system lies precisely in its promise to replace mass with complexity.
Mosaic warfare emerged as a conceptual response to an uncomfortable
strategic reality: the United States could no longer assume air
superiority, uncontested supply lines, or technological advantages
sufficient to offset adversary numbers. Rather than address this through
expanded industrial production —an option foreclosed by deindustrialization —defense planners chose to weaponize complexity itself.
The 2020 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments report framing the concept identified the operational challenge: U.S. military design “reflects
an attrition-centric view of warfare in which the goal is achieving
victory by destroying enough of the enemy that it can no longer fight.” This approach fails against great powers possessing “long-range sensor and precision weapons networks.” The proposed solution abandons attrition for decision-centric warfare that imposes “multiple dilemmas on an enemy”
rather than destroying their forces through superior numbers. When you
cannot outproduce adversaries, you attempt to out-think them, making
each engagement a cognitive puzzle.
DARPA’s own officials describe
it this way: The battlefield, they argue, must be populated with cheap,
modular systems that can be recombined at will—a drone that scouts
today may become a communications relay tomorrow, a decoy the day after.
Human commanders provide broad intent; algorithms assemble task forces
out of whatever is nearby and networked. The orchestration is
instantaneous and, ideally, untraceable. The army becomes a living
network of interchangeable nodes, operating according to a combinatorial
logic that rewards agility.
The relationship between AUNP 2.0
and Mosaic Warfare, while not explicitly stated in official documents,
is evident in the technical requirements. Mosaic demands ‘seamless coordination across complex webs’
of distributed systems, impossible without the unified standards,
data-centric architecture, and persistent connectivity that AUNP
provides. When DARPA describes Mosaic as MDO ‘but faster,’ and the Army positions AUNP as the infrastructure ‘enabling MDO,’
the dependency becomes apparent even if unstated. Without the Unified
Network, the mosaic would collapse back into fragments. But with it, a
sensor in Africa can cue a strike in the Pacific, while analysis runs in
Germany or Colorado. It is, in effect, the operationalization of the
global nervous system described in the previous section.
At
the rhetorical level, Mosaic Warfare is presented as the epitome of
resilience: a distributed force that cannot be decapitated, that
survives by dispersing faster than it can be struck. Yet this resilience
is itself paradoxical. Dependence on digital interfaces and machine
coordination introduces new vulnerabilities. In this sense, Mosaic
Warfare is an architecture of both paranoia and dependence: it extends
the command network to every node precisely because it cannot trust any
node to stand alone. Moreover, its underlying assumption —that
adversaries are brittle, centralized, and incapable of adaptive
recomposition —betrays the same civilizational lens of superiority that
underpins the larger strategic worldview.
Its
economic logic mirrors this dependence. The mosaic replaces the
monumental procurement of the Cold War—the carrier, the bomber, the
missile silo—with a continuous procurement of modular parts, software
upgrades, and data services (as well as the data storage and rare earths
needed for them). It is the financialization of war in literal form:
violence as a subscription model, endlessly updatable, endlessly
improvable, endlessly consumable. Attrition becomes affordable, even
desirable, because what is destroyed can be replaced in the next
production cycle.
There
are, of course, limits. The faith in universal connectivity remains
more aspirational than real. The seamless interoperability that DARPA
envisions runs against the inertia of incompatible systems and the
chronic insufficiency of industrial output. Expendable drones still need
factories, and those factories still depend on global supply chains
vulnerable to the very conflicts they enable. Yet these contradictions
are precisely what make Mosaic Warfare such a revealing artifact of the
age: it is both a symptom and a doctrine. It is a response to scarcity
that imagines infinite recombination —a fantasy of control born of
self-inflicted structural exhaustion.
If
Mosaic Warfare represents the tactical expression of this emerging
world order, then NATO’s internal planning turns that logic into
policy. The next layer is administrative. It is in this bureaucratic
zone, in alliance concepts, and national enablement plans that such
networked lethality becomes a material reality and ultimately,
continental governance.
Germany occupies a particularly symbolic place in this design. It serves as both conduit and capacitor: a logistical hub for transatlantic mobility,
a data node in NATO’s digital nervous system, and the industrial core
around which European interoperability is organized. Through initiatives
like Operationsplan Deutschland, the country is
being woven into a global command fabric. Part III will examine this
transformation, binding the continent into the wider architecture of
permanent contestation.
Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
(1990): “Technology is not the sum of the artifacts. Technology is a
system. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new
words, equations, and, most all, a mindset.”
The
operating system is now visible. Strategic ambiguity operates as a
temporal weapon, trying to compress the perceived adversary’s decision
cycles while extending Western strategic latitude by creating deliberate
uncertainty, both on the military as well as on the diplomatic level.
The Army Unified Network Plan 2.0 constructs a planetary information
infrastructure, treating every digital interaction as potential military
terrain. Multi-Domain Operations codifies permanent engagement across
domains as a doctrinal baseline, assuming that adversaries do not
understand the concept of peace. On the battlefield, Mosaic Warfare
tries to substitute technological complexity for industrial capacity
that deindustrialization destroyed.
Each
element appears technical, defensive, and maybe even innovative.
However, assembled, they constitute infrastructure for what the U.S.
Army explicitly terms “transregional and global”
warfare, the militarization of planetary existence. Ultimately, these
processes constitute a grand, desperate spatial fix for a hegemony in
decline: an attempt to resolve insoluble economic and political
contradictions through the militarization of all space, digital and
physical.
Last
but not least, one could argue that this is an occupation of
connectivity itself. The “interoperability” so prized by planners is the
mechanism of this enmeshment, locking allies and infrastructures into a
US-centric technological ecosystem from which decoupling could mean
operational suicide.
Lastly,
all of this architecture requires physical space and cognitive
justification. Networks need nodes. Doctrines need believers. On planet
Earth, global systems need continental hubs.
Part III will examine both dimensions:
Germany as network node: How the Operationsplan Deutschland,
Joint Support and Enabling Command, Rheinmetall’s privatized logistics,
and the 56th Theater Multi-Domain Command transform European territory
into essential infrastructure for US-coordinated operations Germany
hosts but cannot control.
NATO’s psychological reasoning:
How the Alliance’s own “Four Worlds” scenario planning embraces
“Pervasive Competition” as inevitable. Elite anxiety, in essence, was
written down into a doctrinal document.
The
machinery documented in Part II operates somewhere, justified by
something. Part III examines how implementation proceeds, who profits
from permanent mobilization, and what cognitive frameworks prevent
ruling elites from choosing alternatives that material conditions
increasingly demand.
If
this mapping of the West’s operational architecture clarifies the scale
of the project we face, then the task of understanding it becomes all
the more urgent. This should not be a niche debate for security
specialists alone. It is a framework that seeks to organize our
collective reality. Your critical engagement is what makes independent
analysis possible.
Leave a comment — corrections, counterpoints, sources, or leads for future work are always welcome.
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