[Editor’s Note: For today’s submission, we welcome back proclaimed Mad Scientist Colonel (Retired) Stefan Banach with an incisive analysis of Non-Kinetic Warfare (NKW) and its existential implications for the U.S. national security enterprise. Building upon his previous work, Banach contends that the character of modern conflict has shifted into the non-terrestrial domain, where human cognition and machine signatures converge into a single, targetable identity meshnet.
In this piece, Banach details how strategic competitors weaponize everything from algorithmic deception and digital authoritarianism to supply-chain encirclement, executing campaigns below the threshold of traditional armed conflict. To counter these vulnerabilities, he outlines an actionable way ahead: establishing an international Non-Kinetic War Hague Convention, founding dedicated Non-Kinetic War National Training Centers, and instituting rigorous unit-level educational and training regimes to secure human and machine survivability across the modern operational environment.
Check out his previous submission on the topic here — Read on!]
Framing Modern War
Modern war consists of two types of warfare: Non-Kinetic and Kinetic Warfare. There is a relational dialectic between the two warfare typologies. Activities in Non-Kinetic Warfare impact Kinetic Warfare, and the opposite is true. Carl von Clausewitz’s masterpiece, On War (Vom Kriege) states that: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish… the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq beg the question: Did the U.S. political and military leaders understand the types of war that they undertook?
The United States is actively engaged in a global Non-Kinetic War (NKW), which began after WWII, as global powers looked for alternatives to kinetic global wars. Over the past 80 years, non-kinetic war heuristics have matured into powerful forms of digital and physical maneuver – such as ubiquitous algorithmic attacks on U.S. citizens and foreign entity purchases of land adjacent to key national defense infrastructure; and a myriad of other attack vectors. Adversaries employ methods so covert and seemingly benign that targeted populations and organizations often fail to recognize an attack is occurring. This complex adaptive assault system corrupts cognitive acuity, data veracity, and decision-making structures to achieve virtual colonization and social control of populations throughout the world. Pervasive change technologies, attention distraction heuristics, weapons of math deception, algorithmic warfare, reflexive control, relational dialectics, semiotic exploitation is a short list of non-kinetic war playbooks that threaten the continuity and cohesion of the United States every day. The key to winning modern wars and ensuring the survivability of U.S. personnel and their equipment is the ability to obfuscate friendly human and machine identities, while identifying and destroying threat human and machine attacks from an enduring preemptive posture.
Targeting Human & Machine Identity
Within the non-terrestrial domain, adversaries are no longer simply targeting data integrity or software code; they are attacking identity itself. Both human identity (cognition, personal metadata, behavioral profiles) and machine identity (device signatures, system authentications, synthetic avatars) now form a unified, highly vulnerable target. Modern non-kinetic warfare relies on the total entanglement of human and machine systems through the Internet of Things (IoT). Every connected individual, sensor, smart device, and autonomous platform continuously emits an individualized digital signature. In non-terrestrial battlespace, these signatures aggregate into a single targetable asset: an identity meshnet.
There is a psychology to the technology which controls its users. When identity becomes the primary terrain, offensive operations pivot from network destruction to systemic manipulation. Through psychological heuristics and deep behavioral profiling, adversaries target human cognition, using hyper-personalized artificial environments and synthetic envelopment to bypass rational thought. Simultaneously, by co-opting machine identities, the unique hardware signatures, encryption keys, and IP profiles of autonomous platforms, adversaries insert poisoned data into automated decision chains to degrade trust. The boundary between human and machine identity has effectively dissolved; compromising this convergence allows an adversary to achieve digital colonization, controlling operational outcomes from the inside out without firing a kinetic shot.
Reframing 20th Century Warfare
20th century military strategists traditionally treated land, sea, air, and space as the primary realms of conflict. Physical nation-state boundaries were definitive and enforced. When cyber domains were introduced into doctrine, they were largely modeled around protecting physical platforms, satellites, and hard network perimeters. That model is now obsolete. In modern non-kinetic war, the primary battlespace has migrated to the non-terrestrial domain, an environment where physical nation-state geography is irrelevant, and the decisive terrain is the global meshnet of data.
Unrestricted Warfare, published in 1999 and written by Chinese Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui is a direct attack and repudiation of international law for the conduct of war in the 21st Century. Liang and Xiangsui emphatically state that all terrain is battlespace (physical & non-physical), all people are combatants, and everything can be used as a weapon. They further highlight the concept of weapons and weapons concepts, which is tantamount to a tectonic plate shift in the world of war. The concept of weapons enables everything which exists to be used as an instrument of war against civilians and military personnel given everyone is now a combatant. This flies in the face of the Laws of Land Warfare. Of note, there are no laws for Non-Kinetic War even though it has exponentially increased in its heuristics and devastating effects since WWII. The authors’ idea of “Concept Weapons” is attributed to U.S. Army Airland Battle Doctrine from 1982 and 1986 where a discreet number of weapons systems were created based on the concept of Airland Battle. Multi-Domain Operations also falls into the narrow framing rubric for weapons of war for the 21st Century.
The New Paradigm of War
Exporting Digital Authoritarianism & Disintermediation of Global Governing Bodies
China’s export of digital authoritarianism by way of censorship, surveillance, and content-control technology (via companies like Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision) has given authoritarian governments the tools to bypass democratic accountability structures, effectively allowing states to route around the checks, balances, and rule-of-law norms that the U.S. led liberal order tried to embed in global governance and telecommunications standards. The disintermediation effect holds that as more of the world’s digital infrastructure runs on Chinese-designed systems, the norms embedded in that infrastructure (state access to data, centralized content control) increasingly compete with and are sidelining norms the U.S. and its institutions once helped set as the default. These overtures increase U.S. human and machine identity risks on both non-terrestrial and terrestrial battlefields.
Under the Belt and Road Initiative, China financed ports, energy, and transport projects across Latin America and elsewhere with loans that exposed borrowers to default or asset seizure which is commonly known now as the debt-trap. The subsequent “Digital Silk Road” layered telecom networks, smart-city surveillance systems, and satellite ground stations on top of that infrastructure, giving Beijing-linked firms embedded, long-term access to communications and data networks in recipient countries which raised concerns among U.S. and other analysts about both economic dependency and technical surveillance capability. Exporting digital authoritarianism and disintermediation globally, are quintessential examples of modern global non-kinetic war maneuver.
The Way Ahead
The United States government should adapt to the potential existential threat posed by the global non-kinetic war which is dividing the country everyday through digital authoritarian and disintermediation maneuvers. We would do well to lead the global commons in the creation of a Non-Kinetic War Hague Convention international law construct that all nations must abide by. The United States should build Non-Kinetic War – National Training Centers to combat the attacks on civilians and U.S. service members at home and abroad. The U.S. military could incorporate a rigorous unit-level Non-Kinetic War theory and praxis educational and training regime to keep service members attuned to new threat weapons developments to enhance force protection and survivability on overlapping Non-Kinetic and Kinetic battlefields.
Non-Kinetic War Hague Convention
The foundational principles codified in the Hague Conventions that highlights the distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality in the use of force, and the prohibition of unnecessary suffering, were drafted to govern the conduct of armed conflict regardless of the specific means employed, and their object and purpose compel their extension to non-kinetic operations, including cyber-attacks, electronic warfare, and information operations, that produce effects functionally equivalent to those of kinetic force. A state that disables critical infrastructure, corrupts command-and-control systems, or otherwise causes injury, death, or destruction through non-physical means has exercised force within the meaning contemplated by the law of armed conflict, and should be held to the same standards of necessity, discrimination, and accountability as if that harm had been inflicted by conventional weapons. Recognizing non-kinetic warfare within this existing legal architecture, rather than treating it as a lawless gap, is essential to preserving the Hague Conventions’ core purpose: constraining the conduct of war to protect civilians and limit unnecessary suffering, whatever form that war takes.
U.S. Non-Kinetic War – National Training Centers
The United States lacks a dedicated institutional framework to train its personnel to recognize, withstand, and counter Non-Kinetic War threats at scale. Today, the U.S. military maintains five kinetic national training centers positioned around the globe, purpose-built to prepare service members for conventional combat through realistic, large-scale exercises. Yet there is not a single national training center devoted to non-kinetic warfare, despite the fact that adversaries are investing heavily in these domains precisely because they offer plausible deniability and operate below the threshold of armed conflict. Establishing a network of non-kinetic war national training centers, both within the continental United States and at key locations abroad, would close this critical gap by giving military personnel, civilian agencies, and homeland security professionals a dedicated environment to train against realistic cyber, information, and hybrid warfare scenarios. 
Such centers would represent a transformational addition to the nation’s defense infrastructure, meaningfully strengthening the security of American citizens at home and better preparing service members deployed overseas to recognize and respond to threats that increasingly define modern conflict.
Unit-level Non-Kinetic War Education and Training
Unit-level, non-kinetic warfare education and training must be established as a standing requirement for U.S. service members, both CONUS and abroad, to close a critical gap in current force preparedness. Modern adversaries increasingly employ non-kinetic war attacks via cyber, social media, electromagnetic, informational, and space-based effects, that can degrade and disrupt a unit without a single traditional weapon being fired. Without grounding in non-kinetic war theory, units at the tactical level remain unable to recognize these threats and respond effectively, leaving them, and their families in CONUS, exposed at the point of greatest vulnerability. Establishing this training at the unit level, rather than relying solely on schoolhouse or institutional instruction, ensures force protection and survivability are built into daily readiness rather than treated as an afterthought. Practical application of these concepts is essential to prepare service members for emerging non-terrestrial battlespace threats, where the domains of competition and conflict now extend well beyond the traditional kinetic fight and directly target human and machine identity signatures.
Conclusion
Control of the non-terrestrial terrain is the decisive factor in modern conflict. Physical kinetic power is rendered useless if command structures, operator cognition, and machine networks are compromised at the identity level before maneuver even begins. To secure this domain, defense enterprises must formally expand national security frameworks beyond traditional models, establish enterprise coalitions across military and civilian technology sectors, and pioneer advanced AI-driven identity cloaking. Victory in 21st-century conflict belongs to those who protect their identity ecosystem while denying the adversary control over non-terrestrial battlespace and the non-kinetic war weaponry that is growing exponentially and is an existential threat to U.S. sovereignty.
If you enjoyed this post, check out the T2COM G-2’s Operational Environment Enterprise web page, brimming with authoritative information on the Operational Environment and how our adversaries fight.
About the Author: Colonel (Retired) Steve Banach is the Senior Vice President for Strategy and Design Thinking at SOFTwarfare, LLC. in Kansas City, KS. He served with distinction in the U.S. Army from 1983 to 2010. He is a Distinguished Member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and served in that special operations organization for nine years, culminating with command of the 3rd Ranger Battalion from 2001-2003. He led U.S. Army Rangers during a historic night combat parachute assault into Afghanistan on October 19, 2001, as the “spearhead” for the Global War on Terror. Steve subsequently led U.S. Army Rangers in a second combat parachute assault into Al Anbar Province in western Iraq in 2003. He served as the 11th Director of the Department of War’s prestigious School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) and was also a Stryker Brigade Commander. His Non-Kinetic War speaking engagements include numerous DOW, FBI, and private sector executive audiences. He holds a certificate in Leadership in Crisis: Preparation and Performance, from the JFK School of Government at Harvard Universit
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of War, Department of the Army, or the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM).
