Decoding Military Historian Antulio Echevarria

Antulio Echevarria occupies a different intellectual niche from David Kilcullen or Frank Hoffman. He is less a practitioner of counterinsurgency and more a Clausewitzian historian of strategy. His work tries to clarify what modern conflict is, rather than inventing new buzzwords for it.
Echevarria provides a necessary corrective to the obsession with novelty in military circles. He argues that the West suffers from a strategic culture that treats war as a light switch, either on or off. This binary view creates a self-imposed paralysis. Where Kilcullen or Hoffman focus on the tactical adaptation of the insurgent, Echevarria focuses on the intellectual rigidity of the state.
He distinguishes between a change in the character of war and a change in its nature. To Echevarria, the nature of war remains the interplay of chance, reason, and passion. Only the tools change. By inventing terms like “hybrid war” or “gray zone,” planners risk treating these as distinct phenomena that require separate doctrines. This compartmentalization plays into the hands of rivals who view the entire spectrum of statecraft as a single, unified struggle.
His analysis of the American way of war runs deeper than most. The United States, he argues, possesses a way of battle but lacks a way of strategy. The American military focuses on the destruction of enemy forces. This leaves a vacuum when the enemy refuses to provide a target for a decisive strike. The obsession with “shaping the environment” often masks a lack of clear political objectives.
His skepticism extends to technology. Where many see cyber warfare as a revolution, Echevarria sees another form of the same coercion states used through blockades or subversion. A cyber attack is only strategic if it achieves a political shift. Most do not. They remain at the level of harassment.
The sharpest part of his argument concerns the “threshold.” Western planners spend years trying to define exactly when an act of aggression becomes an act of war. Rivals use that effort against the West, treating the threshold as a playground. By the time a Western legal team decides a line was crossed, the rival has already moved it.
The remedy, Echevarria argues, is not more technology or better definitions. It is a return to classical strategic thinking, which means accepting that peace is never absolute and that competition is the natural state of international affairs. The struggle is already underway. Waiting for a war to start is itself a strategic failure.
Several threads run through his work with particular force.
On the gray zone, Echevarria pushes back against the idea that gray-zone conflict represents something genuinely new. States have always pursued objectives through pressure, coercion, and limited violence short of full-scale war. The “gray zone” is a new Western label for old strategic behavior, not a new phenomenon.
On legalism, he argues that Western countries conceptualize war through legal categories inherited from international law and diplomatic practice: peace, armed conflict, ceasefire, postwar order. Rival powers are not constrained by that mental framework. They blur those boundaries deliberately. The real vulnerability lies not in Western military weakness but in Western conceptual habits.
On positional competition, he argues that rival powers often aim not to defeat the West militarily but to accumulate small advantages that gradually shift the balance of power. Territorial claims backed by coast guard forces, proxy militias shaping regional politics, cyber operations eroding institutional trust, economic pressure creating political leverage. Each move is limited. Together they alter the strategic landscape. The goal is positional advantage, not decisive victory.
On coercion and deterrence, gray-zone competition blends both tools. Coercion pressures an opponent to change behavior. Deterrence discourages a forceful response. The gray zone sits between them. A rival applies pressure while keeping actions below the threshold that would justify a major military response.
Because Echevarria is a Clausewitz scholar, politics remains the center of gravity in his reading of all this. For Clausewitz, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Echevarria extends that idea outward. In gray-zone conflict, the “other means” simply expand beyond conventional military force to include political warfare, economic pressure, information operations, and proxy violence. All are instruments of strategic competition.
His conclusion is that Western countries need to stop thinking of war as a discrete event and start seeing strategic rivalry as a continuous process. The contest is not decided in a single battle. It is decided by which side gradually shapes the political environment to its advantage.
He applies this Clausewitzian lens to the South China Sea, treating it as a theater of positional competition rather than a series of isolated maritime disputes. Beijing, he argues, is not merely building islands. It executes a long-term strategy of strategic preclusion, shutting out American options before they can be exercised. Coast guard vessels and maritime militia apply coercive pressure to smaller neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam. Advanced anti-access and area-denial systems on the artificial islands deter American intervention. The two work together to move the goalposts without triggering a conventional battle.
The West, he argues, loses ground in that theater because it views it through a legalist prism. The United States focuses on Freedom of Navigation Operations to uphold international law. China focuses on the physical reality of control. From a Clausewitzian perspective, law is one more instrument of politics. If a rival creates a fait accompli on the water, the legal argument becomes a secondary concern.
He also uses the South China Sea to critique the American military’s desire for an end state. There is no end state there. There is only a continuous process of maneuvering for leverage. The United States, he argues, must stop waiting for a decisive moment and learn to compete with its own non-kinetic tools, integrating economic partnerships and persistent maritime presence into a single strategic whole rather than treating them as separate diplomatic and military tracks.
His critique of the Joint Concept for Competing follows the same logic. He argues the document fails because it frames strategic competition as a space between war and peace, which introduces a bias toward softer qualities of statecraft and obscures the violent and governing aspects of rivalry. More than eighty percent of wars since antiquity occurred between established rivals. By treating competition as something distinct from war, the doctrine ignores that competition is often the primary cause of war.
He also rejects what he calls the “competition continuum,” the cooperation-competition-conflict model the military favors. That model encourages planners to think in terms of shifting between states rather than recognizing that rivalries often aim at the total termination of a competitor’s political regime. Carthage ended. The Soviet Union ended. Competition does conclude, and it often concludes through the collapse of one side’s capacity to compete.
For Echevarria, the Army must move from a way of battle to a way of war. That shift requires more than new equipment. It requires overhauling professional military education and doctrinal logic. Military professionals focus on winning battles while policymakers focus on the diplomacy that precedes or follows them. That split creates a vacuum. Victory is not a military event. It is a political outcome, and leaders need to think about the aftermath before the first shot is fired.
He also criticizes the formulaic approach to strategy. The equation Strategy = Ends + Ways + Means encourages leaders to treat strategy as a balancing act of resources rather than an art of outmaneuvering a living opponent. He wants officers to recognize that tactical success can sometimes be politically counterproductive, and he wants theory and concept to become central to War College curricula rather than optional electives.
On artificial intelligence, Echevarria sees a tool that might deepen the very way-of-battle bias he has spent his career critiquing. AI can accelerate the first grammar of war, the mechanics of moving, shooting, and communicating. It does nothing to solve the problem of the logic of war. Military planners often view AI as a tool to eliminate the fog of war. From a Clausewitzian perspective, that is a fallacy. AI might process data faster, but it also increases the pace of interaction with a living opponent, creating new forms of friction that are more complex and less predictable than the old ones.
He also worries about what he calls the “unequal dialogue” between military advisors and civilian leaders. AI-enhanced analytics might make military advice appear more objective and scientific than it is. If a general presents a plan backed by an algorithm, a civilian policymaker finds it harder to question. Echevarria fears this shifts power toward the military, allowing tactical grammar to drive political logic rather than the reverse.
Most AI applications in the military focus on targeting, precision, sensor-to-shooter links, and autonomous platforms for kinetic strikes. Those tools reinforce the belief that war is a series of engineering problems solved through more efficient destruction. They neglect the socio-cultural and political dimensions of conflict. There is a risk of what he calls “high-tech paralysis,” where the West possesses the most efficient killing machine in history but cannot translate that efficiency into a favorable political peace.
Finally, AI relies on historical data to predict future outcomes. In a strategic rivalry, that is dangerous because it assumes the future will resemble the past. It discourages the creative imagination and talent for judgment that Clausewitz considered essential for a great commander. By outsourcing judgment to machines, the Army risks producing leaders who can optimize a battle but cannot conceive a strategy.