SEOUL, South Korea — Americans are at war but don’t realize it.

That was a key takeaway at least from a major security conference held here this week, with students of modern warfare noting that today’s current-generation, cross-domain conflict is — to borrow a phrase from Hollywood — “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Adversarial states and non-state actors such as Islamic State and al Qaeda are deploying asymmetric assets that operate at low risk and low cost across new real and virtual battlefields, assets to which the U.S. and its allies have so far been unable to respond effectively, attendees at the annual Asan Plenum in Seoul heard.

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While strategists in the U.S. and across the West promote the defense of the post-1945 “rules-based world order,” there are few or no rules or laws to govern emerging domains like cyberspace, outer space and “gray zone” tactics that stop short of actual shooting wars. A tradition-bound, high-cost U.S. military has not yet built effective tactical or sustainable technological counters to grey-zone tactics and low-tech, economical weapons, critics argue.

Conflict by computer

The advent of the internet, which straddles military, commercial and public spaces, is now the central battleground for an ongoing, invisible struggle. Big nations and big corporations are struggling to catch up.

“There are three kinds of companies,” said Lee Chung-min, an analyst with the Carnegie Foundation: “Companies that have been hacked by China or North Korea; companies that have been hacked by China or North Korea and don’t know it; and companies that are going to be hacked by China and North Korea.”

Though national security networks are fortified with firewalls, incompetence, malice and corruption offer infiltration routes to hostile players.

“Cyber security depends on everyone,” said Yang Uk of the Asan Institute, warning that PC and smartphone security is the responsibility of the individual. “The South Korean Ministry of National Defense has an intranet that is not connected to the internet. But it was hacked by North Korea.”

Analysts say the old ways of deterrence don’t always apply in modern conflicts. A giant defense budget doesn’t always guarantee security.

“How do you compete in a constant competition/conflict continuum short of all-out war while ensuring deterrence is assured?” asked Diana Myers, an ex-fellow with RAND Corporation. “The things that keep me up are non-kinetic: the ability for malicious nations and non-aligned actors to challenge how we receive and process information.”

There are “Orwellian” solutions to this problem, policing speech and political content, “but we are not that,” she said. “It puts us in a complicated situation.”

This stealthy conflict is unknown to most, but the seeds of mass destruction are built into the threat itself. Damage could be rapidly and massively escalated if a latent cyber intrusion — such as a sleeper agent — is fully activated.

“With cyber, you get inside a network and sit there and nobody knows you’re there,” said Peter Dean, director of foreign policy and defense at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney. “You won’t know until it escalates to a high level.”

Even if cyber aggressors are identified positively, they cannot be countered with force of arms due to issues of legality and proportionality.  Mr. Lee wondered what the response of a democracy would be if its nuclear power grid were hit by a cyber strike. Even if attackers are positively identified, a traditional military strike against the attackers would likely not be feasible.

“What is a conventional military response – a proportional response – to a cyber attack?” asked Mr. Dean. “That is a question we don’t know the answer to.” Nation-states, he suggested, should arm themselves with offensive cyber capabilities, allowing them to retaliate in kind.

“If you launch an offensive cyber attack, you risk a retaliation you do not know about,” Mr. Dean said. For that reason, counteroffensive cyber capabilities could act as deterrents.

From hot zone to gray zone

Even in more traditional domains such as seapower, the U.S. and its allies are finding themselves repeatedly outmaneuvered by creative tactics that play out below the actual combat.

Michael Cunningham, an analyst at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation formerly based in China, stated his “culture shock” upon returning to the U.S.

“The U.S. is hyper-focused on a traditional view of security, in particular numbers – how many warheads, how many ships, what percentage of GDP goes to security,” he told the conference.

Chinese forces, by contrast, are focusing on new technologies, and avoid direct military confrontations by “trying out small-scale, gray-zone tactics, constantly.”

These tactics are “not front and center among [U.S.] strategists,” said Mr. Cunningham, but “they cause you to constantly react: It takes a lot of money and manpower, and you are constantly on the defensive.”

He cited hostile disinformation campaigns designed to misinform voters and widen divisions in societies; use of economic leverage; non-military incursions into disputed territories or regions; and the use of proxies to carry out actual attacks. Such tactics are “very hard to confront,” he stated.

Western or pro-Western forces proved they can compete in the new domains: The 2022 sabotaging of Russia’s Nordstream energy pipeline to Europe undercut the Kremlin’s economic leverage, although the saboteurs remain unidentified.

China is believed to have been behind another such incident: the 2023 cutting of undersea fiber-optic cables carrying internet services to Matsu, a Taiwanese-controlled island off China’s coast.

In both cases, the restraint and lack of fingerprints served the attacker well: “If you respond militarily, you are the one who started the war, and that goes down in history,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“We need developed rules and laws,” he added. “We have hard rules for traditional warfare, like what are war crimes, but we don’t have that for the grey zone.”

The consequences of failing to adjust to the new tactics can be just as effective as a traditional military action.

China is building massive bases across disputed chunks of the South China Sea; inching forces closer to Taiwan and India; and using Coast Guards and fishing fleets to press territorial claims against Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

“The thinking in China is basically, ‘Use whatever means necessary that are safe, smart and risk-averse,’” Mr. Cunningham said. “They know if they get into a conflict with almost anyone in Asia, it will be a U.S. ally and that makes it super-risky. But they see very little downside in these gray-zone tactics.”

So many red lines have been crossed by China that the Indo-Pacific is now a virtual “red carpet,” said Mr. Yang.

Low-cost low-tech

Emerging technologies present another challenge for those clinging to traditional military ideas.

“We are entering the first phase of ‘Iron Man wars’ or ‘Star Wars,’” said Mr. Lee, speaking of both new gear such as armored “exoskeletons” and personal jet-propulsion units,  and the space domain, which is proving vital for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

And many of the new military technologies are proving to be low-tech, affordable systems that enable the weak to level the playing field with the strong. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) proved deadly to expensive Western militaries fighting terrorist forces in Iraq and elsewhere.  Ukraine has used drones to cripple Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet, devastate its armored forces and bypass air defenses to strike targets deep inside Russia.

Currently, in both the Red Sea and across the Indo-Pacific region, U.S. forces face adversaries armed with equipment that is economical to build and tactics that minimize the risk of a major loss.

In Yemen, the use of low-cost drones and missiles by Houthi rebel fighters has forced Western navies to respond with high-cost missiles, while the Houthis’ dug-in positions have proven hard to hit with counterstrikes.

While Western naval “goalkeepers” continue to shoot down drones and missiles, the denial of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to many international shippers is generating massive costs.

Likewise, repeatedly having to scramble advanced fighter jets to shoot down cheap Chinese “weather balloons” on suspected surveillance missions is not economically viable in the long run.

Mr. Dean said some arms in the pipeline, including sophisticated lasers and microwave weapons, may help to restore the balance.

“We have yet to come up with a response, we have to use technology to solve some of these issues,” he said.