Beyond Direct Action: A Counter-Threat Finance Approach to Competition

The Competitive Context

China and Russia seek to advance their revisionist agendas and threaten Western security by operating below the threshold of armed conflict. This isn’t a new idea, but adversary use of economic statecraft and financial warfare specifically remain gaps in military discourse today.[1] These adversarial actions demand a response beyond “kicking doors” within the gray zone of competition – the interactions amongst state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality.[2] Such interactions elevate the importance of using non-lethal irregular warfare (IW) activities as a way to compete. The United States Department of Defense (DoD) recently released the IW Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, stressing the need to institutionalize and operationalize IW to expand the competitive space against state adversaries.[3] Counter-Threat Finance (CTF) is one such irregular tool that offers a potentially outsized return on investment.

Counter-Threat Finance offers a means to weave together a multitude of military disciplines within the Special Operations Forces (SOF) community and combine them with specific, conventional Army expertise for effect. CTF also represents a “boundary-spanning”[4] confluence of innovative ideas, unconventional warfare, economic drivers, and SOF capabilities. Integrating CTF as a proactive competition activity will deny adversaries financial access and influence derived from their coercive economic statecraft, while improving national positions of advantage. Building upon lessons learned in the decades-long Counter-Violent Extremism (CVE) struggle, a SOF-led “counter-threat finance approach” to competition expands the range of military options to shape adversarial behavior short of war.