Astoria on 17th!

Exactly. We too often assume our ‘hybrid’ response has to be equally nefarious - certainly not the case.

What’s this “hedge” concept you speak of it seems too logical to be a real thing

Weird inverse this/maybe not and we're just old:

This research ideally provides a rubric for how future campaigns can disrupt competitors' efforts to win without fighting, particularly when potentially escalatory options rooted in conventional deterrence are ill-suited or infeasible to achieve similar disruptive effects.

SOF’s main contributions are therefore to create time, space, and opportunities for other elements of national power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – to achieve friendly strategic objectives, and not necessarily to deliver strategic effects themselves.

We find that strategic disruption campaigns primarily seek to disrupt an adversary’s preferred approach, forcing them onto suboptimal strategies or activities that create openings for friendly strategic gains.

We explore 50+ historical cases of disruptive campaigns by SOF and similar forces across five pillars of capability for strategic disruption – resist, support, influence, understand, and target.

Much has been written about the need for special operations forces to create dilemmas and impose costs on great power adversaries. Less has been written on how such campaigns actually deliver friendly strategic effects and not just unintended escalation in response.

Finally - the biggest threat to U.S. competitiveness in the next decade of BRI may come from the systemic risks BRI has introduced in developing countries - placing greater demand on U.S. resources to help countries reduce this fragility.

And a big shoutout to AidData at William & Mary for their years of leadership in this space through their canonical China Development Financing dataset. They've single-handedly supported the entire research community on this issue for years, and to great effect.