DEFENCE
Sustained Presence: The Royal New Zealand Navy and the Grey Zone Future maritime conflict will be conducted in the grey zone. It’s a reality that New Zealand cannot ignore, and it has implications for the next generation of naval capability, writes maritime capability specialist and former Royal New Zealand Navy Officer Andrew Watts.
In an over three-decade career in the RNZN, CAPT Watts RNZNR commanded HMNZ Ships Pukaki, Wellington, Resolution and Te Mana, and served as Director, Capability Development and Programme Director Network Enabled Capability, and Captain, Fleet Personnel & Training. He is a Defence Adviser at KPMG based in Riyadh.
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I once tried to explain to a very intelligent person what the Navy was for. I described how it protected our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and Extended Continental Shelf (ECS), and that 90% of our trade by value and 99% by volume travelled in ships and thus needed to be protected, as did the 90% of our information traffic with the wider world that passes along undersea cables. I explained how the Navy helped protect the resources of our Pacific partners, and that it held itself in readiness for disaster relief, search and rescue, and sundry other missions conducive to the public good. Having listened patiently, she asked “Yes, but what do you do every day, like, all the time? Are you just practising?” Well, no, I said, not just practising. Some of the things we do we do all the time, like protecting our EEZ. “What about the frigates?” she asked, “what do they do? Are they protecting the EEZ too, or just getting ready to fight wars?” I replied yes, being ready is a large part of what they do, and our frigates give us the ability to play our part in defending the international rule of law at sea, our ability to exchange information with the wider world, and in the final analysis, protect our borders. I think she accepted this, but “what is the Navy for?” is a question which those of us who believe that an effective navy is essential to our country’s security had better be ready to answer if we expect our people to bear the cost
of the next generation of capability, and there is a field of maritime conflict for which we need to be ready “all the time”. That field of conflict is the grey zone. Gray zone conflict is best understood as activity that is coercive and aggressive in nature, but that is deliberately designed to remain below the threshold of conventional military conflict and open interstate war. Grey zone approaches are mostly the province of revisionist powers—those actors that seek to modify some aspect of the existing international environment— and the goal is to reap gains, whether territorial or otherwise, that are normally associated with victory in war. Yet grey zone approaches are meant to achieve those gains without escalating to overt warfare, without crossing established red-lines, and thus without exposing the practitioner to the penalties and risks that such escalation might bring… Gray zone challenges, in other words, are ambiguous and usually incremental aggression… they eat away at the status quo one nibble at a time. [Paradoxes of the Gray Zone, Hal Brands, Foreign Policy Research Institute, 05 February 2016; Paradoxes of the Gray Zone – Foreign Policy Research Institute (fpri. org)]. There are other, more academic definitions of the grey zone, but the quote above from an article on the Foreign Policy Research Institute website is the most useful I’ve found yet.
Line of Defence
