By Selena Lin, Fall 2025 Marcellus Policy Fellow

As the strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies, military interaction increasingly occurs below the threshold of armed conflict through persistent gray-zone activities. Among the most consequential of these activities is the use of electronic warfare (EW) to degrade sensing, navigation, and communication systems. This is particularly important as escalation between the two great powers, the United States, likely occur in the Indo-Pacific Region, where precise automated kill chains are necessary to maintain multi-domain awareness.

To demonstrate this, the report uses a scenario assessment of a gray-zone quarantine of Taiwan. The scenario follows phases of PLA use of ambiguous probing and attribution erosion, to enforce quarantine and sustained non-kinetic pressure on Taiwan. This demonstrates how EW can be integrated into an automated kill chain to determine the information environment and constrain adversary decision-making. The analysis shows that while adaptation and recovery may restore partial functionality, they do not necessarily restore pre-crisis conditions of deliberation and control. Instead, repeated cycles of disruption and response can narrow decision space and heighten escalation over time.

Based on this analysis, the report offers several policy recommendations aimed at preserving U.S. crisis
stability under conditions of persistent interference. Current U.S. initiatives, such as Project Maven and the
Replicator Initiative, emphasize rapid data integration and responsiveness in contested environments
that risk accelerating uncertainty during gray-zone crises if not paired with escalation controls. The
Department of Defense should require automated systems to demonstrate performance under degraded
and ambiguous environments. U.S. operational policy should also formalize human-around-the-loop
escalation controls by clearly specifying which functions may remain automated under contested conditions and which require human validation, particularly when automated outputs could cue cross-domain responses. Resilience planning should move beyond rapid recovery to assess sustained performance across multiple cycles of disruption and adaptation through joint exercises and wargames with Indo-Pacific partners. Finally, U.S. crisis management mechanisms should more directly address persistent electronic warfare by developing dialogue and confidence-building measures focused on managing ambiguity, clarifying interference affecting navigation, sensing, and command-and-control systems, and slowing escalation dynamics during prolonged gray-zone competition.