The COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly consequential gray zone demonstrate that significant war-like effects can be inflicted well outside the domain of physical combat. Yet, for the US military, much of the focus of modernization is on capabilities and technologies which increase performance in physical combat and large-scale combat operations (LSCO). The US Army Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept is part of this approach. Given historic US dominance in physical combat, it is worth considering what methods competitors and adversaries employ to achieve asymmetric advantages that avoid challenging the United States in this domain, and how the US might best respond. In order to make sense of this, this work explores the historic consequences of pandemics, asymmetries between Chinese and US concepts of war, and advances in biotechnology and synthetic biology. It concludes by synthesizing the findings of these sections into a set of ideas for strategy, technological and materiel approaches, and organizational change, with the goal of operating more effectively in the gray zone and increasing pandemic resilience.

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.)