Luke Ford

Defeating the exploitation of Western legalism requires a transition from seeing law as a constraint to seeing it as a maneuver space. The thinkers who address this usually fall under the banner of lawfare—the use of law as a weapon of war. While David Kilcullen identifies the problem, the following thinkers provide the framework for a counter-strategy.

Charles Dunlap Jr.: The Architect of Lawfare

Major General Charles Dunlap is the most prominent voice on this topic. He argues that law is not just a set of rules but a functional weapon system. For Dunlap, the deepest way to defeat legalistic exploitation is to embrace it. He suggests that democratic militaries must use law affirmatively to achieve strategic goals. That means integrating legal advisors into the earliest stages of operational planning so that every move is designed to maximize legal legitimacy while putting the adversary in a “legal checkmate.” He views our respect for the law as a center of gravity that enemies attack; therefore, we must defend it by being better at the “legal game” than they are.

Orde Kittrie: Law as a Strategic Tool

Orde Kittrie argues that the United States is currently “unarmed” in the legal battlespace. In his work, he details how China and Iran have made lawfare a core part of their military doctrine. To defeat this, Kittrie recommends Legal Statecraft. This involves using domestic and international courts to strip adversaries of their resources and legitimacy before a single shot is fired. He cites examples like using private litigation to hold state sponsors of terrorism financially liable, which creates a form of “economic deterrence” that functions alongside military power.

Bobby Chesney and the “Defend Forward” Logic

Robert “Bobby” Chesney focuses on how law evolves in the gray zone, particularly in cyber and intelligence operations. He argues that we often lose because our legal frameworks are built for a clear “peace/war” binary that no longer exists. His work with the Lawfare Institute explores how to build a domestic legal architecture that allows the military to “defend forward.” This means engaging adversaries in the gray zone—where they think they are safe—by creating new legal authorities that allow for persistent engagement below the threshold of traditional war.

Key Strategies for Countering Legal Exploitation

Legal Resilience: Building systems that are not easily paralyzed by “frivolous” international legal claims or propaganda.

Aggressive Litigation: Using the Western court system to target the financial and logistical networks of non-state actors like the Houthis or Hezbollah.

Information Integrity: Ensuring that the “legal narrative” of a conflict is won in real-time. This prevents adversaries from using civilian casualties as a way to “de-legitimize” a military operation.

That shift toward a proactive legal strategy is what allows a state to escape the trap of being “handcuffed” by its own values. It moves the conflict from a defensive posture—where we constantly apologize for our actions—to an offensive one where we use the law to delegitimize the enemy.

The 2026 war between the U.S.-Israeli coalition and Iran—which accelerated rapidly following the joint strikes in late February—is forcing a massive strategic pivot. The conflict is moving beyond Kilcullen’s “liminal” phase into what some are calling the “Post-Legal” era of warfare.

The joint operation on February 28, 2026, which reportedly resulted in the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, represents a violent rupture of the legal norms that usually govern Western military action. This war is currently generating three new paths for defeating legalistic exploitation.

1. The “Illegal but Legitimate” Precedent

Legal thinkers at institutes like Just Security are observing a widening gap between international law and state behavior. While UN experts have condemned the 2026 strikes as violations of the UN Charter, many Western and regional states have offered “mild or even supportive” reactions. This suggests a shift toward the “law of self-preservation.”

The New Path: Instead of seeking prior legal authorization, states are acting first and seeking “normative legitimacy” afterward. This treats the law not as a permission slip, but as a secondary arena for narrative management.

2. Deep-Penetration Cyber Lawfare

The recent “Four-Hour Cyber War” on Tehran showcased a new integration of law and technology. Israel used real-time intelligence from deeply penetrated mobile networks and traffic cameras to execute high-value targeting.

The Defeat of Exploitation: In the past, adversaries used civilian infrastructure as a “legal shield.” The 2026 conflict shows the West using that same connectivity to create a “digital glass house.” By mastering the urban littoral’s digital layer, the coalition neutralized the protection traditionally afforded by hiding in dense civilian environments.

3. Financial Lawfare 2.0 (DeFi Compression)

As the Houthi maritime blockade intensified in 2025, the U.S. began using “lawfare coalitions” to target the decentralized finance (DeFi) channels used by Iranian proxies.

The Strategy: Thinkers like Orde Kittrie have long advocated for this, but the 2026 war has pushed it into high gear. By leveraging U.S. terror designations against PMF and Houthi financiers, the coalition is compressing the “Hawala” and crypto-transfer systems that previously allowed these groups to operate outside the reach of traditional sanctions.

4. The “Byzantine” Shift in Proxy Management

A significant development in 2026 is the attempt to “reclaim sovereignty” for states like Iraq and Lebanon.

The Counter-Strategy: Instead of Western troops fighting proxies, the focus has shifted to forcing local governments to issue arrest warrants for Hezbollah and militia members. This uses the local state’s own legal machinery against the “snakes.” It is a direct application of Kilcullen’s Byzantine mindset: use the local political architecture to neutralize the hybrid threat from within.

The 2026 war is essentially proving that the best way to defeat the exploitation of Western legalism is to stop treating the law as a set of static rules and start treating it as a contested geography.

As of early March 2026, the strategy against Houthi “DeFi” (Decentralized Finance) networks has evolved from simple sanctions into a more aggressive form of DeFi Compression.

The Mechanics of DeFi Compression

This new path forward involves moving beyond the “legal shield” that crypto and decentralized networks once provided.

On-Chain Identification: In January 2026, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated UK-registered exchanges like Zedcex and Zedxion. These platforms had reportedly processed tens of billions of dollars for IRGC-linked networks. By including specific Tron addresses in the sanctions, the U.S. effectively “blacklisted” the liquidity itself rather than just the people behind it.

Network-Level Neutralization: The current strategy uses “Legal Statecraft” to force stablecoin issuers and larger exchanges to freeze assets in real-time. Chainalysis reports that since the February 28 strikes on Tehran, crypto markets have seen visible, near-real-time asset movements as these “compression” tactics squeeze the Houthi’s ability to cash out into local currencies or buy dual-use drone components.

The “Byzantine” Aspect: Instead of just attacking the wallets, the coalition is pressuring the regional nodes in the UAE and Oman. By using local legal machinery to target “front companies” and “Hawala” exchange houses in Sana’a, they are trying to break the link between the global digital economy and the local physical one.

The “Illegal but Legitimate” Shift

The assassination of Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, during a joint U.S.-Israeli operation, has created a “Post-Legal” precedent.

The Strategy: The coalition used high-level intelligence to execute a “decapitation strike” that bypassed traditional international legal norms regarding state sovereignty.

The Result: While many international bodies condemned the strike, the lack of a unified global pushback suggests that “legitimacy”—based on the perceived threat of a nuclear Iran—is replacing “legality” as the primary driver of Western action. This is the ultimate “counter-envelopment” of the legal trap Kilcullen warns about.

Liminality to Visibility

By targeting the very “liminal” tools Iran used—such as the IRIS Dena, which was sunk on March 4, 2026—the U.S. and its allies are signaling that the “gray zone” no longer offers protection. The “snakes” are being forced into the open, where their asymmetric advantages disappear.

The 2026 conflict has turned the Houthi “DeFi” network from a hidden asset into a strategic liability. As of March 2026, the blockade in the Bab al-Mandab is undergoing a slow collapse, not because of naval gunfire alone, but because of the aggressive “DeFi Compression” that is starving their procurement system.

The Collapse of the Houthi Procurement Cycle

Kilcullen’s “Theory of Competitive Control” suggests that an actor stays in power by providing a reliable normative system. In 2026, the U.S. and its partners are breaking that system by targeting the Houthi “business model.”

The Russia-China-Yemen Nexus: Recent OFAC actions in March 2026 targeted a network led by Sa’id al-Jamal, which used crypto to buy weapons and sensitive commodities from Russia and the PRC. By sanctioning the specific digital wallets used for these transactions, the U.S. has made it nearly impossible for Houthi operatives in Hong Kong and Turkey to “off-ramp” their funds into the local currencies needed to pay for drone components.

Oil Revenue Sabotage: The Houthis were generating over $2 billion annually through illegal oil sales facilitated by UAE-based front companies like Arkan Mars. The 2026 “DeFi Compression” has targeted the exchange houses in Sana’a that laundered this cash. Without this liquidity, the Houthis can no longer offer the high “hazard pay” that kept their maritime militias active during the 2024–2025 campaign.

The “Squeeze” in the Bab al-Mandab

The impact on the physical blockade is visible. While the Houthis signaled a resumption of attacks after the February 28 strikes on Tehran, the operational tempo has dropped significantly.

The Hodeidah decapitation: Beyond finance, the August 2025 and early 2026 Israeli strikes on the Hodeidah port—specifically targeting the “Judicial Custodian” networks that manage stolen assets—have broken the internal supply chain.

The “Byzantine” Proxy Choice: The Houthi leadership is currently divided. One faction wants to join Iran’s war fully to maintain “Axis of Resistance” credentials, but another faction—feeling the weight of the “DeFi compression”—fears that a renewed blockade will invite a total decapitation of their remaining political structure.

From Asymmetry to Exhaustion

Kilcullen argues that the West usually loses because it plays a high-cost game. In 2026, the tables have turned. By using “Legal Statecraft” to target the Houthi’s digital and financial “littoral,” the coalition has forced the Houthis into the high-cost position.

They are losing their best leaders.

Their digital assets are being frozen in real-time.

Their regional “allies” (the dragons) are finding it too legally risky to facilitate their trades.

That is the essence of defeating legalistic exploitation: you don’t break the law; you use the law to make the enemy’s existence too expensive to maintain.

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.