The United States recognizes the strategic and economic importance of the cyberspace domain for advancing and securing its national interests. Despite efforts to deter malicious cyberspace activities, the United States continues to face and suffer countless cyberspace attacks from state and nonstate actors at a threshold below the level of armed conflict often referred to as the "gray zone." This research study examines how the United States can build a whole of society approach to leverage interagency, the private sector, local government, academia, and coalition partners' cyberspace capabilities and authorities. The purpose of the whole of society approach is to proactively execute joint operations in order to compete and contest against adversaries in cyberspace across the conflict continuum. A qualitative analysis of existing joint interagency models lends to providing a solution for a cohesive unified action for countering malicious cyberspace activities below the level of armed conflict.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student-authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References to these studies should include the foregoing statement.)