From White Area to Gray Zone: Why Counterinsurgency Lessons Still Matter

Important Notice: What This Article Does and Doesn’t Do

This article analyzes how below-threshold influence operations work. It does not accuse any specific person or organization of wrongdoing. Where evidence is limited, this article clearly labels hypotheses and emphasizes the need for due process, institutional credibility, and protection against false accusations.

The Core Argument: Why Old Lessons Matter Now

Insurgencies rarely “win” through firepower alone. They win by shaping the environment they operate in—building networks, generating money, constraining what governments can do, and influencing how people interpret the conflict.

The Philippine Army spent decades facing an insurgency that mastered this approach. In counterinsurgency terminology, “white area operations” refers to the non-armed activities that sustained armed struggle: managing finances, conducting political organizing, shaping media narratives, and using legal tactics to slow down or paralyze government responses.¹²

That experience still matters because the same basic logic—shape the environment, exploit ambiguity, stay below the threshold that triggers decisive response—now appears in what security analysts call “gray zone competition.” This is competition for advantage without open war, using tools that are difficult to attribute and often difficult to counter cleanly.³⁴

To be clear: domestic insurgency and state-level competition are not the same thing. The actors are different. The scale is different. The capabilities are vastly different. But the operational logic rhymes: condition the environment, exploit ambiguity, and accumulate advantages incrementally.

**Caption:** *Old war lessons, new competition: reading the gray zone through the civic terrain* (*Image created using generative AI).*

Understanding White Area Operations: How the System Actually Worked

The CPP–NPA–NDF: A Quick Explainer

For readers unfamiliar with Philippine insurgency, the CPP–NPA–NDF operated as an integrated system with three main components:

CPP (Communist Party of the Philippines): The ideological center that sets strategy and direction.

NPA (New People’s Army): The armed wing that carries out violent operations.

NDF (National Democratic Front): The alliance-building function that expands political support and creates legitimacy beyond just the armed struggle.

What “White Area” Actually Means

A RAND Corporation study on the Philippines describes “white areas” as places where government is present but governance doesn’t meet basic needs. These are contested spaces where insurgents can organize, build influence, and expand their reach—often with plausible deniability because they’re operating through civic channels, not military ones.¹

White area operations typically had four overlapping functions:

1. Finance work: Generating and moving money—including through coercive “revolutionary taxation” and protection rackets.

2. Political work: Recruitment, alliance-building, creating front organizations, and embedding influence in local institutions.

3. Media work: Shaping narratives, building legitimacy for the movement, attacking government credibility, and influencing how events are interpreted.

4. Legal work: Using legal processes not for justice, but as a weapon—creating delays, draining resources, and constraining government action. In security literature, this is often called “lawfare.”

The International Crisis Group emphasized that insurgent persistence depends heavily on these non-armed functions. Armed struggle is expensive. The system that feeds it is designed to be renewable and resilient.²

What Counterinsurgency Experience Actually Teaches

The Philippine Army’s decades fighting this system taught specific skills that remain relevant today. This is not nostalgia. It is pattern recognition under pressure—and a reminder that legitimacy, governance, and credibility are not “soft” issues in security contests, but central terrain.

Lesson 1: See the Ecosystem, Not Just the Incidents

Advantage rarely comes from one dramatic event. It comes from building ecosystems: money flows, influence networks, converting grievances into recruitment opportunities, capturing organizations, and controlling narratives. Philippine counterinsurgency repeatedly showed that it was possible to “win” tactical engagements while losing the environment if attention stayed fixed on armed elements alone.

Lesson 2: Legitimacy Is the Decisive Terrain

Internal conflicts revealed a trap: government responses that appear arbitrary, corrupt, or indifferent to due process can win tactically while losing strategically. When the state makes mistakes—especially around consistency and credibility—white area operations thrive because those mistakes become recruitment tools and narrative ammunition. Governance discipline is not background context. It is part of the contest, and it should be treated that way.

Lesson 3: Governance Gaps Are Battlespace

An actor doesn’t always need to defeat armed forces directly. Advantage can accumulate by conditioning how decisions get made—polarizing public discourse, constraining what governments feel they can legally do, and eroding trust in institutions. These effects can build over time without a battlefield exchange.

Gray Zone Competition: The Same Logic at Larger Scale

Gray zone conflict is commonly defined as competition below the threshold of conventional war that exploits ambiguity, deniability, and incrementalism to achieve strategic effects. The U.S. National Intelligence Council cautions that classification depends on context—who the actor is, what effects they’re trying to achieve, and what norms apply—so analysts should avoid jumping to conclusions about intent or attribution.³⁴

The bridge to insurgency experience is straightforward:

White area operations shaped local societies to protect and sustain an armed struggle.

Gray zone campaigns shape societies and decision environments to achieve strategic outcomes without open war.

Different actors. Different scale. But the same basic principle: win by conditioning the environment.

The Modern Playbook: United Front Work and Three Warfares

If counterinsurgency experience trains you to see environment-shaping, certain concepts used in analyzing state-level influence operations become easier to recognize. Two frameworks appear frequently in open-source analysis of China’s approach: “united front work” and the PLA-associated “Three Warfares.”⁵⁶⁷

Important caveat: This section describes analytical frameworks that appear in U.S. government and academic sources. It does not make automatic claims about any specific situation in the Philippines.

United Front Work as Influence Architecture

A U.S. House Select Committee memo summarizes united front work as a networked approach to shaping political environments through influence activities that blend overt and covert methods. The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission describes how this extends overseas to co-opt or neutralize opposition.⁵⁶

The key insight is structural: influence architecture can move through networks that look entirely legitimate on the surface. That is why transparency, due diligence, and institutional resilience matter—especially if a society wants to strengthen security without damaging civic space or sliding into generalized suspicion.

Three Warfares: An Analytical Framework

A Department of Defense study describes the PLA’s “Three Warfares” concept as public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—understood as continuous activities, not confined to wartime. As an analytical lens, the framework suggests that strategic effects can be pursued by stacking small actions across three channels until the environment shifts.⁷

1. Public Opinion Warfare (shaping narratives and legitimacy)

This targets how audiences interpret events: what they believe happened, what seems normal, and what feels legitimate. Tactics can include amplifying preferred narratives, flooding attention with competing explanations, elevating sympathetic voices while marginalizing skeptical ones, and making certain policy choices feel “unthinkable” or “inevitable.”

The goal is often conditioning, not instant persuasion—building a sustained backdrop where decision-makers face higher political costs for resistance and lower costs for accommodation.

Scale matters: Reuters reporting on Meta’s attribution of “Spamouflage” activity to actors linked to Chinese law enforcement shows how influence operations can run across platforms and languages at industrial scale. Insurgent media work aimed to delegitimize local authority. Gray zone influence campaigns may not need mass persuasion; they can aim to confuse, polarize, and exhaust, degrading collective decision-making over time.¹²

2. Psychological Warfare (managing perception and decision pressure)

This focuses on how targets feel and calculate: confidence, risk perception, endurance, and cohesion. Activities aim to create uncertainty, encourage targets to overestimate adversary reach, foster fatalism, and weaken collective resolve—especially by shaping expectations about consequences (“if you resist, you will suffer; if you accommodate, you’ll be spared”).

Over time, the intended effect is to narrow freedom of action by making delay, compromise, or self-deterrence appear to be the “safe” choice.

3. Legal Warfare (law as constraint and legitimacy weapon)

Legal warfare operates through rules, procedures, and legitimacy claims. It seeks advantage by shaping the legal context in which actions are judged—what is portrayed as lawful, provoked, defensive, or escalatory. This can include leveraging legal arguments, selective interpretation, procedural delays, and institutional friction so that responses appear illegitimate, disproportionate, or politically risky.

The objective is not “law as justice,” but law as a tool to constrain response options and legitimize preferred outcomes.

How the three interact: public opinion narratives can normalize a legal claim. Legal framing can justify psychological pressure. Psychological effects can make publics more receptive to preferred narratives. The combined objective is incremental advantage: reducing resistance, increasing hesitation, and shifting what institutions consider feasible—while staying below thresholds that trigger decisive counteraction.

Mapped carefully, this resembles the white-area pillars: media and legitimacy work, perception management, and legal constraint-building. The labels change. The environment-first logic does not.

Economic Strategy and Gray Zone Spillovers

Economic development is not inherently hostile. But economic connectivity can create strategic leverage when projects generate dependency, control points, information access, or dual-use infrastructure.¹³¹⁴

Some analysts discuss parts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Digital Silk Road in these terms—not as a single conspiracy, but as a portfolio that can generate strategic spillovers alongside commercial benefits. The National Bureau of Asian Research discusses how connectivity corridors can intersect with military and enabling functions. The Asia Society Policy Institute cautions that some projects can create leverage and risk exposure depending on governance and transparency.¹³¹⁴

The conceptual parallel to Philippine insurgency is the logic of conditioning choices. The difference is scale. Insurgent finance is localized; state economic statecraft can reshape environments across entire regions.

Finance Work: What We Know and What Remains Contested

Finance is where both counterinsurgency analysis and gray zone analysis hit the same wall: routing and intent are hard to prove from open sources. But that is not a reason to ignore the resource layer. It is a reason to be precise about what is supported and what remains allegation.

What Open Sources Clearly Support

Philippine government advisories from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Anti-Money Laundering Council, and Department of Interior and Local Government cite coercive or illegal fund collection linked to the CPP–NPA–NDF. This includes “revolutionary taxation” and election-related “permit to campaign/permit to win” extortion schemes.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹

These documents do not validate every claim in political discourse, but they establish a defensible baseline: resource generation was treated as a line of effort, and coercive collection was a recurring concern in counterinsurgency practice.

What Must Remain Framed as Contested

Claims that insurgent resources flow through civil society or NGO channels, or through political patronage mechanisms, appear in public discourse and some official statements. Many of these claims are contested and not consistently supported by adjudicated findings in open sources.

Because this area is legally and politically sensitive, the responsible approach is to treat it as a risk hypothesis, not a proven fact: open systems can be exploited by actors seeking cover or access. That is why investigations, due process, and compliance regimes matter—both to deter exploitation and to avoid harming legitimate civic actors.

The strategic point is not “NGOs fund insurgents.” The strategic point is that open systems can be exploited through coercion, co-optation, or ambiguity—so resilience requires precision and credibility, not generalized suspicion.

Why the Philippine Army’s Experience Still Matters

In January 2026, retired Philippine Navy Vice Chief Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong argued that the Army’s decades countering insurgents and terrorists remain relevant for addressing influence operations that extend beyond maritime disputes into politics, public opinion, and institutions.¹⁵

Whether one agrees with every implication, the observation aligns with this article’s thesis: internal security experience builds institutional literacy about environment-shaping.

Critical Differences That Matter

This comparison is useful only if its limits stay in view: a domestic insurgency and a major state are not equivalent actors—they differ fundamentally in scale, resources, technology, and objectives. Insurgencies seek political power through protracted struggle, while state influence activity typically seeks strategic advantage and policy outcomes without kinetic escalation. Gray zone activity lives in ambiguity, and the NIC lexicon warns that classification depends on circumstance and contested norms. The claim here is not equivalence; it’s the transferability of an analytical lens: environment first.³

The New Accelerant: AI-Enabled Influence at Scale

Environment-shaping is getting cheaper and faster. Generative AI lowers the cost of producing content, translating narratives, and iterating message variants at industrial scale.¹⁶¹⁷

OpenAI’s threat intelligence reporting describes disrupted operations involving deception and influence activity enabled by generative AI. Anthropic’s system documentation notes refusals related to scaled deceptive influence techniques like sockpuppet personas and astroturfing.¹⁶¹⁷

This doesn’t mean AI determines outcomes. It means volume, speed, and plausibility can rise—raising the premium on verification discipline and public trust.

Conclusion: Why “Old War” Experience Matters in “New” Competition

The Philippine internal security chapter is often treated as something to close and move past. Strategically, however, it built a competence that remains relevant: seeing conflict as environmental competition over legitimacy, organization, resources, narrative, and law.

Gray zone competition is not “new conflict” so much as political warfare in modern form—scaled by state resources, globalized by connectivity, and accelerated by technology.

The Philippine Army spent decades learning to counter an organization that used environment-first methods at insurgent scale. That experience should not be romanticized—but it should not be discarded. It can be transferred as analytical capital: recognizing and mapping influence activity while protecting civic space and institutional credibility, which democratic societies depend on.

Endnotes

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