Spectrum?

I have reservations about this piece at The Forge on matters of peace and war:

The peace-war spectrum is the current framework used in Australian Defence Force doctrine. It is a polar framework with the level of violence differentiating the two ends. A variation of this appears as the peace-instability-war spectrum in Australian Army doctrine. These frameworks matter as they steer our thinking in a particular way. For example, the peace-war spectrum tends to bias our thinking to the dichotomies of peace and war, binary conditions of loss and victory, and gradual and linear escalation of violence.

Grey zone and hybrid warfare do not sit neatly within the linear peace-war spectrum, suggesting that this doctrine may be inhibiting our thinking rather than enabling it. It is also evident that other state and non-state actors have ignored this spectrum and, in doing so, have found ways to defeat or merely bypass our concepts and strategy by pursuing their goals aggressively, but not violently. General Joseph Dunford warned in 2018 that ‘our adversaries don’t abide by our doctrine, with its clear distinction between war and peace and its tidy phases of escalation’.

I don’t think there’s a spectrum involved at all. I think that when you’re killing people and breaking their stuff it’s war and when you aren’t it isn’t. The present tendency to make it more complicated than that is a desperate attempt at finding reasons to justify going to war when we shouldn’t or, in some cases, not going to war when we should.