Abstract
The Indo-Pacific’s ‘battle of wits’ precedes any ‘battle of metal.’ Irregular warfare campaigns preempt Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) convergence by contesting sustainment, weaponizing escalation, reconfiguring theater geometry politically, and imposing decision friction—degrading access, authorities, alliances, and logistics before crisis. Second Thomas Shoal and Galwan clashes reveal adversaries conditioning terrain without war. JADO assumes stable enablers it lacks, creating a ‘glass jaw.’ The Joint Force must treat irregular warfare denial, pre-delegated authorities, sustainment design for persistent harassment, and ethical-cognitive resilience as primary campaign tasks in competition to make convergence competition-proof.
Background
In the Indo‑Pacific today, the most decisive struggle is unfolding long before any shot is fired. While strategists often fixate on the high-end fight that might erupt after a crisis breaks, the more consequential contest is already underway in the shadows—where irregular warfare campaigns are quietly preempting Joint All‑Domain Operations (JADO) through mechanisms like sustainment contestation, controlled escalation, political reconfiguration, and decision friction. These campaigns are not peripheral distractions; they are deliberate efforts to set the opening conditions of any future conflict, eroding convergence—an outcome created by the concerted employment of capabilities from multiple domains and echelons to generate compounding effects—before it can ever be brought to bear. A Joint Force that waits for crisis to trigger convergence is likely to discover that convergence has already been disarmed in competition.
In November 2025, Philippine forces successfully carried out a supply mission to the grounded BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal. Still, Chinese Coast Guard vessels jammed communications throughout the hours-long operation. No shots were fired, and no state of war was declared, yet the strategic effect was unmistakable: routine maritime sustainment had become contested under peacetime conditions.
Five years earlier, in June 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed in the Galwan Valley. The confrontation was lethal, but firearms were not used, and escalation was tightly controlled. Still, the encounter permanently altered force posture along the Line of Actual Control. Infrastructure accelerated, forward deployments hardened, and the operational geometry of the border changed without a declared war.
This pattern has historical precedent. During the late 1960s, North Korea conducted a sustained irregular campaign against U.S. and allied forces, exploiting American distraction in Vietnam to impose strategic costs without triggering large-scale war. PRC gray-zone activities—from maritime coercion to island-building—mirror this pattern.
These incidents are not isolated provocations. They demonstrate a structural pattern: adversaries are already using irregular warfare to shape the terrain of future crises without triggering war.
In the Indo-Pacific, the Joint Force risks preparing for a high-end ‘battle of metal’ while losing the ongoing ‘battle of wits’ that decides whether convergence can ever be achieved.
Convergence’s Hidden Dependencies
In JADO, convergence is the outcome created when joint forces rapidly synchronize effects across land, maritime, air, cyber, space, and the information environment to impose multiple, simultaneous dilemmas on an adversary. That vision assumes political access, legal authorities, allied alignment, and resilient logistics will be available when a crisis erupts. This capability is not forged in the heat of crisis but depends on these enabling conditions established during competition.
- Reliable access: Distributed forces must move freely through contested sea lanes, operate from forward bases, and sustain via maritime and air lines of communication. Pre-conflict political contestation or physical harassment creates immediate logistical disadvantage for convergence.
- Timely authority: Rapid multidomain synchronization demands pre-coordinated legal permissions, clear escalation thresholds, and interagency alignment. Gray-zone actions that trigger repeated diplomatic negotiation or legal review slow decisions, replacing tempo with deliberation.
- Alliance cohesion: In the Indo-Pacific, U.S. power flows primarily through partnerships where access, basing, and overflight are politically negotiated. Economic coercion, information operations, or political pressure that weakens partner resolve during competition renders these arrangements fragile when needed most.
- Resilient sustainment: Distributed operations assume logistics networks can support dispersed formations at tempo. Peacetime disruptions from maritime harassment, legal ambiguity, or political hesitation signal that sustainment is already contested before crisis begins.
When irregular warfare systematically targets access, authority, alliance cohesion, and sustainment during competition, it does not merely complicate crisis response—it reshapes the environment from which any crisis will unfold.
Why the Indo-Pacific Amplifies the Risk
The Indo-Pacific’s maritime geography, alliance-centric posture, and political sensitivities amplify these vulnerabilities. Here, power projection depends primarily on partners rather than unilateral basing, creating interdependencies adversaries exploit through economic coercion and influence operations below overt military thresholds. This turns the strategic environment itself into a mechanism of competition, magnifying irregular warfare’s effects and constraining post-crisis military responses.
How Irregular Warfare Preempts Convergence in Practice
These are not isolated gray-zone incidents. Four mechanisms illustrate this structural preemption.
Contesting Sustainment Before Crisis
At Second Thomas Shoal, Philippine efforts to resupply the grounded BRP Sierra Madre have become recurring confrontations with the China Coast Guard and affiliated maritime militia vessels. Water cannons, dangerous maneuvers, and deliberate obstruction occur below the threshold of armed conflict. The legal status of the shoal is disputed, escalation is carefully managed, and both sides avoid kinetic engagement.
Yet the operational implication is clear: routine maritime sustainment is contested during peacetime. If basic sustainment of a fixed outpost demands crisis-level attention, distributed joint forces operating across the first island chain will not trigger a conflict from a neutral logistics baseline. Instead, conflict will begin under conditions of friction already normalized by competition.
Irregular maritime coercion does not destroy logistics networks outright, it conditions them. It demonstrates that access and sustainment are negotiable, not assumed. This conditioning preempts convergence long before conflict. By conditioning logistics networks during peacetime, this mechanism ensures JADO convergence begins from degraded sustainment baselines, where distributed forces cannot synchronize effects at required tempo.
Weaponizing Controlled Escalation
The June 2020 Galwan Valley clash illustrates a different mechanism: escalation stayed carefully contained and firearms stayed silent, yet soldiers beating each other with fists, stones, and improvised clubs left strategic consequences that will echo for decades. Both India and China accelerated infrastructure development, reinforced forward deployments, and normalized sustained high-altitude force presence along the Line of Actual Control.
The significance lies not in the violence itself but in its controlled character. Gray-zone confrontation altered long-term force posture without crossing a legal threshold of war. The terrain, infrastructure, and readiness conditions from which any future crisis will unfold were reshaped during competition.
For JADO, this matters because convergence presumes a starting geometry—the arrangement of forces, infrastructure, and access. When that geometry is altered incrementally through managed escalation, it is no longer stable.
Convergence begins from a position already conditioned by prior coercion.
Rewriting Theater Geometry Without Firing a Shot
Irregular warfare reshapes operational space through political agreements rather than military confrontation. The 2022 security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands did not involve invasion or overt coercion. It emerged from sustained political engagement, economic incentives, and security cooperation.
The agreement introduced the possibility of expanded Chinese security presence in a region traditionally considered part of Australia’s strategic depth. Even without permanent basing, the political realignment altered regional perceptions and contingency planning assumptions.
JADO depends on predictable alliance alignment. When political leverage reconfigures access or influence without firing a shot, the operational geometry of the theater changes in advance of conflict. Convergence cannot assume uncontested depth if that depth has already become politically fluid.
Slowing Authority Through Ambiguity and Pressure
Irregular warfare also imposes friction on decision speed. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) expanded U.S. access to Philippine facilities, but those arrangements operate within domestic political debate and under sustained external pressure. Economic coercion and information campaigns aimed at regional partners raise the political cost of cooperation.
Convergence requires rapid activation of access agreements, overflight permissions, and combined command arrangements. Irregular warfare complicates those processes by increasing political sensitivity and escalation risk. Leaders must weigh diplomatic consequences, economic retaliation, and public opinion before authorizing movement or posture changes.
Consider a crisis in the South China Sea in which planners seek to activate EDCA sites to stage stand-in forces and enable space-to-surface targeting networks. Each Chinese maritime provocation, economic penalty, and information campaign against Manila raises the domestic political cost of honoring those commitments. The debate over escalation risk and public opinion delays access activation by days, not hours, forcing commanders to hold back key sensors and shooters. This decision-friction directly erodes JADO convergence’s tempo advantage, as irregular pressure fractures the pre-crisis political-legal pathways essential for rapid multidomain synchronization.
Why JADO Has a Glass Jaw
The Indo-Pacific pattern reveals a fundamental mismatch: JADO convergence assumes stable pre-crisis conditions that irregular warfare actively contests. The Joint Force expects to activate access agreements, deploy from prepared positions, and sustain tempo once crisis hits—but those foundations erode during competition.
Persistent irregular activity exploits interagency responsibilities and multinational seams, blocking coherent military-diplomatic-economic integration beforehand. A campaign designed under competitive constraints cannot simply restart at the onset of conflict, as access, trust, and pre-coordination will already be degraded.
JADO remains valid but incomplete if it presumes neutral starting conditions. Convergence is not a crisis event; it is a competition outcome.
Irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific targets enablers over formations, forcing the Joint Force to first restore basics before synchronizing effects. This restoration consumes the time compression JADO demands, ensuring any conflict begins in a degraded state. The true contest is over the conflict’s starting conditions themselves. Consequently, convergence is not merely threatened. It is being preempted.
Making Convergence Competition-Proof
If convergence is being preempted during competition, then the Joint Force cannot treat irregular warfare as a supporting activity. It must treat it as a primary campaign task.
- Integrate Irregular Warfare Denial into Campaign Design
Campaign plans in the Indo-Pacific should not assume permissive competition environments. They should explicitly identify how adversaries are contesting access, authority, and sustainment below armed conflict—and assign responsibility for countering those mechanisms.
This means incorporating irregular warfare denial as a standing line of effort during competition. Maritime harassment, economic coercion, and political influence campaigns must be treated as operational problems, not background conditions. Campaign design should include measurable indicators tied to gray-zone activity and preplanned responses that protect access and alliance cohesion before crisis emerges.
Convergence cannot begin at escalation. It must be prepared during competition.
- Pre-Delegate Authorities for Gray-Zone Conditions
Irregular warfare exploits ambiguity to slow decision-making. Each contested resupply mission, incremental maritime provocation, and politically sensitive access request creates a moment of deliberation.
To preserve tempo, certain authorities must be clarified and, where appropriate, pre-delegated in advance of a crisis. That includes access activation triggers, sustainment surge authorities, and coordinated public messaging frameworks with partners. Clear thresholds tied to observable gray-zone indicators can reduce the friction imposed by ambiguity.
Convergence requires speed. Speed requires pre-coordination.
- Design Sustainment and Posture for Persistent Harassment
Distributed operations in the Indo-Pacific assume resilient logistics across contested distances. Yet current gray-zone behavior demonstrates that maritime and political harassment are enduring features of the environment, not temporary disruptions.
Sustainment architecture should reflect that reality. Dispersed prepositioning, hardened logistics nodes, diversified sea and air lines of communication, and rehearsed transition plans from competition to crisis are essential. Force posture decisions should account for the likelihood that harassment, legal ambiguity, and political friction will persist at the onset of any conflict.
If sustainment networks are conditioned during competition, they must be designed to absorb friction rather than assume restoration.
- Prepare Leaders for Ethical and Cognitive Contestation
Irregular warfare routinely involves civilian populations, proxy actors, and information manipulation, creating persistent ethical tension between mission accomplishment, restraint, and legitimacy. Adversaries deliberately seek miscalculation, overreaction, or legitimacy loss to erode institutional trust and fracture alliances, often without achieving tactical success.
Leader development and professional military education must therefore treat ethical judgment, escalation control, and information discipline as core competencies for operating under prolonged gray-zone pressure. Ethics and professionalism are not merely constraints on action; they are active lines of effort that adversaries seek to contest.
Irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific is not peripheral to Joint All-Domain Operations. It is shaping the environment in which those operations would occur.
Treating it as episodic or secondary risks entering future crises from a position already strategically conditioned by competition.
Conclusion
In the Indo-Pacific, the decisive contest may be less the war that follows the crisis than the competition that determines the crisis’s starting conditions. Irregular warfare campaigns are already targeting the access, authority, alliance cohesion, and sustainment on which convergence depends, preempting Joint All-Domain Operations before they can be brought to bear. A Joint Force that treats irregular warfare as peripheral will enter any future conflict with its convergence advantage already degraded; only by treating competition itself as the phase in which convergence is won or lost can it avoid starting the next war on terms set by its adversaries.
Author’s note: This article benefited from the insightful feedback of his instructor Dr. Richard A. McConnell.
